IRRESPONSIBLE owners and legal loopholes are behind dumped and burned out vehicles - not just criminals who want to destroy evidence.

That's according to fire expert Mick Brighton, who is responsible for cutting the impact of arson on residents in North Yorkshire.

He was reacting to a new study which found car thieves intent on leaving no traces of their activities may be responsible for more than half of the vehicles torched on our streets. It revealed the link between car theft and arson is much stronger than previously thought, with many offenders wanting to destroy possible DNA and vehicle identification clues.

But Mr Brighton, of North Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service, said many vehicles are dumped by owners who want to avoid the cost of scrapping them properly.

He said tightening the laws around how vehicles are registered by owners would make a huge difference to the number of dumped cars.

With cars registered more than two years ago, the onus is on the buyer to inform the DVLA of the change of ownership, and this does not always happen, he said.

"Abandoned vehicles are here to stay until we can pin the ownership of cheaply obtained cars on people with proper registration procedures," he said.

"We do not need better partnership working, we need better laws. We need the Government to address this problem straight away."

The problem of abandoned vehicles in York has become so acute that the council has designated 20 secret hot spot streets where they will be removed within 24 hours.

Fire chiefs also point to remote beauty spots in the areas of Harrogate, Scarborough, Selby and Stokesley as problem areas for dumped and burned vehicles.

YORK spends £48,000 removing abandoned cars each year. In 2003-04, 436 vehicles were removed - a drop from the 617 dumped the year before. In 2002-3, 488 cars dumped in the East Riding of Yorkshire, 355 in Harrogate, 132 in Selby, 126 in Hambleton and 53 in Ryedale.

Updated: 10:49 Friday, March 11, 2005