North Wales Police have a new way of putting it. If your vehicle is seen tearing up a protected habitat, they can take it. Not a warning. Not a ticket. The vehicle, on the spot, and you walking back to wherever you came from. PC Eryl Lloyd of the force’s rural crime team said it plainly enough that it stuck with me. It’s a long walk home.
What’s Actually Changed
Under the Crime and Policing Act 2026, officers no longer have to give a warning before seizing a vehicle used for anti social driving. Previously they did. Now they don’t. Four by fours, motorbikes, and increasingly e-bikes too, which PC Lloyd says are causing just as much damage as anything with an engine.
The trigger for the crackdown was a case from the Berwyn range in Denbighshire, an area of moorland and blanket bog that carries Site of Special Scientific Interest status precisely because of how rare and fragile that kind of habitat is. Three men drove there from Liverpool in a seven vehicle convoy and caused what Natural Resources Wales described as irreversible damage to the peat and bog. They filmed themselves doing it and put it on TikTok, which is more or less how they ended up convicted, fined over two thousand pounds each and banned from driving for two months.
Nobody involved seems entirely sure why incidents like this are rising. PC Lloyd’s own guess is social media, people sharing exact locations and daring each other to go further than the last convoy did.
Why This One Landed Differently for Me
I moved to mid Wales twenty five years ago, and for a while after that I drove the kind of vehicle this story is actually about, without ever quite admitting it to myself at the time. A V8 petrol Discovery, the sort of thing built to get through Kensington and Chelsea traffic rather than across a mountain, whatever the badge and the mud flaps suggested otherwise.
I was invited to join a green laning group not long after I arrived. I said no, but I didn’t say no for the reason I actually had. I made some excuse about the wrong tyres. The honest reason was that even then, without being able to argue it properly, it seemed obviously destructive to me. Not thrilling. Not adventurous. Just a heavy vehicle churning up ground that had taken centuries to become what it was, for an afternoon’s entertainment.
I wasn’t confident enough at the time to say that out loud to a group of people who clearly saw it differently. It felt easier to talk about tyres than to say I thought what they were doing was wrong.
What Twenty Five Years Actually Changes
Reading this story now, what strikes me is not really the new legal power itself, though it’s a genuinely useful one. It’s that the instinct I had a quarter of a century ago, awkward and unstated as it was, has finally caught up with the law rather than the other way round. Something that felt obviously wrong to me back then took this long to become something the police can actually act on without a warning first.
The Berwyn convoy weren’t teenagers messing about. They chose that moorland deliberately, drove there in a group, and by all accounts knew exactly what they were doing to it. Peat and bog habitat like that doesn’t recover on any timescale that matters to a person doing the damage. Irreversible was the word Natural Resources Wales used, and it wasn’t an exaggeration.
I don’t feel proud of staying quiet at the time. I do feel glad that a long walk home is now the actual, immediate consequence for anyone tempted to do what I once watched other people set off to do, in vehicles not so different from the one I was driving myself.
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