What is ND 
googled it, all I can find is something about fishing 
I'm guessing it's Next door a social media platform for people to post about local issues and events, normally full of posts from people complaining about dog walkers not picking their shit up in XYZ park or road
Anyway car insurance does seem to have shot up a lot in the last year or so however i'm not aware of that being down to an increase in car thefts but more down to basic inflation and the increase in the cost of parts and labour, I believe theft of catalytic converters may be a specific problem.
I remember back in the 80's when car theft did seem to be of epidemic proportions and security measures were basically crap, remember the talk about how 1 ford key would open any other ford
It wasn't quite that bad but not far off, my mate asked me to get something out of his car once and said the keys are on the side, I picked up the 1st set of ford keys I saw which were actually his Dads and did after a fair bit of faffing around and wiggling the key in the lock manage to open the door.
I said his car was fucking hard to get in and he looked at me as if I was crazy then asked what set of keys i'd used so I showed him and he fell about laughing, when we then compared the keys his Dads transit key was about twice the size of his little Fiesta key

I did have a couple of high performance cars around 15 - 20 years ago and they both needed trackers otherwise they weren't insured for theft
Not sure if Blackpool was considered a worse area than wherever the previous owner was based but i'd have thought the Manchester / Rochdale area wasn't much better but I had to have one fitted to the 1st car.
The guy who turned up to fit it basically said it had limited use as some smack head wouldn't try to steal the car as it was a given that it stood out and would almost certainly have a tracker so they'd go for a £500 Escort etc instead
He said they are mainly stolen to order by people with connections to the motor / garage trade and they would know what the tracker units look like, there are only about 5 or 6 places you can hide the units and they basically steal the car then drive it around the corner and start unbolting the various panels and taking out the back seats etc to remove the unit then drive off, when the police turn up they find a tracker unit on a grass verge

I'm just looking for insurance quotes and the renewal has gone up by about 50% from last year

I always shop around and use comparison sites to get a better quote but this year i'm being quoted 20% more on the comparison site than the renewal for the same policy which seems strange