BRITISH police raided scrap yards in a nationwide campaign yesterday after steeply climbing prices of metals like copper led to a 26 per cent rise in thefts this year, causing huge economic losses from halted trains and power blackouts.
Authorities are contacting regional police forces, lawmakers, magistrates and scrap merchants in an effort to get the issue made a priority, Deputy Chief Constable Paul Crowther, coordinating the drive on metals for the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), told Reuters.
“As you see the price go up on commodities markets globally, that translates into a higher price on the chalkboard outside a scrap metal dealer. Therefore it’s a quick way for people to make a cash return on stolen property,” Crowther said.
“We’ve seen the problem rising considerably over the last 12 months … it’s a battle we’re not winning at the minute.”
The 26 per cent rise so far this year comes on top of a doubling of theft in 2010. Theft of copper wire from electricity substations has plunged whole communities into darkness.
Such events cost upwards of £770 million a year to the domestic economy, Crowther said.
“The majority of those costs are direct costs. When you consider the impact on UK business of broadband going down, electricity supplies going down, or indeed the railway not running in parts of the country, the knock-on economic impacts are enormous,” he added.
On Thursday night ahead of the operation’s launch, police recovered 17 tonnes of cable, marked as belonging to telecoms provider BT, from a scrap metal dealer in the north of England.
“All BT cabling is marked, but people will go to some lengths to burn off the casing to try to remove those markings,” Crowther said. In backyard operations, a smouldering fire containing acrid lumps of metal is sometimes the giveaway.
Companies such as Network Rail have stepped up measures to combat theft, such as using so called SmartWater to mark property with the company name and cable location.
LONG-TERM SOLUTIONS
The upward trend in metals prices is not expected to change, so police are looking at long-term solutions to make metal more difficult to steal and or to replace it with substitutes, but even this doesn’t always work.
“One of the potential options is to use fibre optic rather than copper (cables). The problem is that the thieves can’t differentiate. They rip out the cables, not knowing it’s fibre optic and cause a lot of damage,” Crowther said.
“Network Rail have been looking in particular areas at burying the cabling in concrete to make it more difficult to steal. That potentially solves the problem in the short term, but these cables need maintenance,” he said.
Copper prices on the London Metal Exchange are less than 4 per cent below February records of $10,190 a tonne, and many analysts predict new all-time highs this year. Zinc, lead and nickel prices are up by a third to two-thirds from 2010 lows.
Around the country there are sporadic problems with theft of manhole covers, which may in future be replaced with plastic.
As well as incidents of lead being stripped from church roofs, there are reports that thieves in high-visibility gear are driving vans into warehouses to retrieve metal, although this is less common, Crowther said.
“One of the challenges we have is to raise awareness across criminal justice partners that if someone appears in front of them having stolen 20 metres of cable, it’s the much wider impact of that needs to be taken into consideration,” he said.
Police are also asking scrap yards to adhere to a voluntary code of conduct that requires photo identification for scrap sellers.
Working with bodies such as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Department of Transport, they hope for new legislation that will require scrap dealers – the vast majority of which are law-abiding – to have a licence.
“A licensing scheme would provide police with the power to close down dealers that flout the law or operate outside of the licensing scheme,” he said.
“There are elements that turn a blind eye,” he said.
“If you can make it much tougher for someone to turn up with a vanload of scrap and walk away with thousands of pounds without having to prove that they’ve got proper ownership or indeed who they are, then that would have a massive impact.”
