Scrap Metal Dealers Bill

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Friday 13th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Richard Ottaway]

Absolutely, and those are two points that I shall be coming to. Indeed, as my hon. Friend has illustrated, in some cases half an hour can be too long. Sometimes it takes only minutes from the theft for the metal to become untraceable, it having been processed and converted into cash by thieves.

I have visited many scrap yards in recent weeks—I can assure the House that in this weather it has been a character-forming experience for me. There are more than 2,500 legal scrap yards and hundreds of illegal ones. At the bottom of the industry’s pyramid are the thousands of mobile collectors—sometimes known as “itinerants”—who collect scrap metal from houses, small businesses, plumbers, electricians and factories. We have no idea of the numbers or exactly what they get up to, which is part of the problem. Mobile collectors sell scrap metal to yards, which clean up the product, stripping cable from wires, sorting the different metals—lead, copper, brass: you name it—chopping up large bits of metal into small pieces and packaging it into lots for onward sale. The small yards feed it to the medium-size yards, which continue to process it and sell it to the large yards. The majority of the non-ferrous metal that comes out at the end is packed into 25-tonne containers and exported abroad, or sent to the 20 to 30 furnaces in the UK.

The greatest opportunity for stolen metals to get into the chain arises at the bottom of the pyramid. Some of this is done by organised criminals, and some by young kids trying to make a quick buck. Either way, we have a problem that needs to be addressed. It is the prevalence of cash transactions, together with the anonymity and lack of traceability of the stolen metals, that fosters criminal activity. It is all too easy to convert stolen metal into cash within minutes. With the world price of copper at almost £5,000 per tonne, the temptation is irresistible.

We need new legislation. The existing regulatory regime is the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 1964. Incidentally, that legislation was introduced as a private Member’s Bill following a spike in world commodity prices, so things do not change much. The Act is now out of date and requires wholesale reform. Under its provisions, scrap metal dealers are required to register with local authorities, but the authorities have no power to turn down or revoke a licence. Indeed, the obligation to get a licence is often ignored. There is nothing to compel accurate record keeping or to verify the ID of the seller. False names and addresses are logged with impunity—Mr M. Mouse and Mr D. Duck seem to be regular traders. Under the Act, there is a complete lack of co-ordination between the authorities, which have limited powers of inspection. Scrap metal dealers are also able to trade in cash.

Concerns have been expressed over the proposal in my Bill to outlaw cash payments altogether, and I should like to address that point directly. The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, which received Royal Assent earlier this year, will ban cash payments except for mobile collectors and car breakers. I welcome this move, but it does not go far enough. We are still left with numerous points where stolen metal can be sold for cash and infect the pyramid.

Allowing cash payments for itinerant collectors in house-to-house collections creates a loophole. That is where most of the criminal activity takes place. Before we know where we are, businesses will be run from garages and the back gardens of people’s homes. A complication arises because those collectors also collect from businesses, and the product is mixed up. It then becomes impossible to identify which metal has come from households and which has come from businesses.

No records are kept and no taxes are paid. A mobile dealer who handles, say, three to four tonnes of scrap metal a day—which is not unusual—could earn up to £200,000 a year, which is significantly above the £77,000 VAT threshold. Once business taxes are taken into account, it is estimated that more than £1 billion is being lost to the taxman each year. This practice creates a distorted marketplace, with bona fide registered dealers paying VAT and taxes while the tax avoider gets a competitive advantage. The industry itself is crying out for a level playing field.

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

That is a crucial point. The largest and most legitimate scrap metal dealer in Southampton frequently makes the point not only to me but to the police that there has to be a level playing field, and that there must be a complete ban on cash transactions so that legitimate businesses that pay their taxes are not disadvantaged by those that are using the loopholes that my hon. Friend has identified.

[Richard Ottaway]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s support for this, the most controversial part of my Bill. This is the area in which the most criminality exists, and we need to tackle it head on.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I have a great deal of sympathy for what my hon. Friend says and I think the whole House will have sympathy for what happened and for the distress it must have caused him. Of course, we all want to clamp down on not only the people who steal but on the people who knowingly trade in such metal. I do not think that anybody would deny that, but the proposals in the Bill do not just clamp down on the people involved in the theft or in the trading of stolen metal. The Bill is clamping down on everybody. In effect, it states that everybody involved in the trade is a criminal, that we will treat them all as criminals and that we will clamp down on them all. My point is that it is rather unfair to categorise a whole industry as involved in illegality. In every industry, there are good people and bad people and the Bill imposes extra costs and burdens on the good as well as the bad.

[Caroline Nokes]

I should like to draw on the experience of one of the largest scrap metal dealers, operating on the edge of my constituency. It makes the point that it wants cash to be removed from transactions, so that the business does not have the additional risk of having to carry large amounts of cash daily, and so that customers do not come to it expecting to get cash. Its argument is that that would make its business more secure and more economically efficient.

[Philip Davies]

That may well be the case. Of course, there is no compulsion on anybody to make cash transactions. If a business does not want to trade in cash, it is perfectly at liberty not to do so.

The Government may well have changed their tune slightly on the subject. Their views on reform were recorded in their written evidence to the Transport Committee in November last year, in which they said that

“Against that”—

that is, calls for action on the issue of scrap metal theft through regulation—

“it would be necessary to consider carefully the additional burden which new regulation might put on legitimate businesses, and the extent to which the disposal of stolen metal might still continue on an illegal basis. Given the Government’s general aim to reduce and simplify regulation, there would need to be a strong case made to justify any new regulation.”

The Government were wise to sound a note of caution, as regulation is not always the way forward, yet more regulation is proposed. I am not entirely sure that it is entirely justified. More importantly, I am not entirely convinced that it will stop metal theft. We may end up with a lose-lose situation: the regulation will punish not just the bad scrap metal dealers, but all of them.