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Please take note and pass on the following advice to your young ones ahead of the Festival.

Before they go to the Festival, remove anything from their vehicle that they won’t need. Because their vehicles won’t be very close to where they camp, we urge vehicle owners to leave nothing of value in their vehicles, for obvious reasons.

Visit the Reading Festival website (opens new window) for all the rules in relation to what you can and can’t bring to the Festival, and what you can and can’t do. You can then discuss this with your child.

The Reading Festival site and its surrounding area are treated by Thames Valley Police as a ‘town’. Our style is Neighbourhood Policing and, as such, police will welcome your kids when they get here, giving them crime prevention advice and guidance.

There are good rail and road links to the Festival and managing people into the Festival site is a slick operation.

We will be urging campers to adopt a ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ approach, where groups of tent dwellers get to know and look out for each other.

  • Encourage your kids and their friends to get to know their Neighbourhood Policing team.
  • A good bit of advice is ‘No matter how merry you get, or where you end up sleeping, make sure you sleep with your valuables. Put everything into the sleeping bag with you’ – it’s difficult for a thief to get a wallet out of a sleeping bag if someone is with it. However, it’s very easy to remove a wallet from a pair of jeans lying on the floor without anyone in them.

You may have been reading this wondering what you're letting your loved one into. To put it in perspective, in every town there is a minority of people who will seek to commit crime or ruin it for others.

Over the last few years, we've had between 300 and 500 crimes recorded throughout the whole Festival period – when one considers that last year we had about 90,000 visitors, the chances of being a victim of crime is very low. Of course, we consider that 500 is 500 crimes too many. That is why we've taken time to give you and your child advice to prevent a crime and keep them safe.