Metal Theft

Gavin Williamson Excerpts

Tuesday 7th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate those hon. Members who have managed to secure this debate. It is an incredibly important issue and, as many Members have said, a big scourge throughout the country.

I also voice my gratitude to the Home Secretary for announcing a couple of weeks ago the end of cash payments in scrap metal yards. It is testament to how seriously the Government take the issue that they are doing something fairly constitutionally important, which is to introduce a law that prevents an entire section of society using legal tender. This is a very welcome move, but we should not forget that important point.

Last week I met the Wyre Forest Safety Partnership, which includes the police, and talked about how we can best help them. It is worth bearing in mind that there are plenty of laws available to prevent the scourge; it is just a question of helping the police to gather more evidence in order to implement the law and to effect more prosecutions.

[Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)]

In South Staffordshire my local district council has worked closely with the police to crack down on those who collect scrap metal, and it has found an exceptionally large number of vehicles that are not MOT’d, not insured and should not be allowed on the road at all. Is that something on which other district councils need to follow suit?

[Mark Garnier]

I am grateful for that intervention. Not only are a lot of dealers not insured, but many are not even licensed, and one suggestion from the police in order to deal with the problem is to license those scrap metal merchants who used to be the rag and bone men with whom we will be familiar thanks to “Steptoe and Son”, but who are now more technically minded and have flatbed trucks. So licensing is another measure that could be helpful.

In our talks, the police came up with a number of ideas, and they have been successful locally in Wyre Forest. After seeing 60 offences last March, they managed to get the number down to 17 in November, but I shall give the House a flavour of the anomalies that they mentioned, and discuss some of the ways in which we can help them to gather evidence in order to effect prosecutions.

An anomaly that I found surprising is that the police are allowed to visit licensed scrap metal yards, but need a warrant to visit unlicensed yards. I was not aware that there were unlicensed yards, but apparently there are. That situation favours the unlicensed premises, which is ridiculous. We definitely need to do something about that.

The police would like an absolute offence of possession. One problem is that a scrap yard might have a pile of manhole covers, but the owner can say, “A lorry came in, weighed in, unloaded and weighed out, and I paid them for the scrap difference, not having seen the manhole covers that were hidden at the bottom of the lorry.” That is a reasonable defence, apparently. The police would like the law to be changed so that the possession of stolen goods—clearly, manhole covers will probably be stolen—is an offence in itself. That would put the onus on the scrap metal merchant to explore the contents of the load, rather than just check its weight. That is incredibly important.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Chris Kelly), who I think has slipped off to get a cup of coffee, mentioned the walk-in trade. It is one thing to be able to photograph vans and their licence plates when they come in. It is another thing when youngsters come in, perhaps saying that they are apprentice electricians, with bags of copper wire, because there will be no record. A ban on walk-in trade would be incredibly important.

Finally, there is the concept of specialisation. There are two sides to this argument. The first, which the British Metals Recycling Association pointed out when I met it a couple of weeks ago, is that some large companies that have a lot of scrap metal, such as utility companies and Network Rail, deal with 500 or 600 organisations to dispose of their scrap. If they were to limit that to just a handful of organisations, we would know, if rail track were found in a yard that was not a specialist rail disposal yard, that it was stolen. Similarly, the police suggest that some yards might want to specialise in certain areas, so that people know that they will deal only in cable, for example. That is an idea. I am not sure that it is workable, but I certainly think that it should be considered.

Clearly, this is a big problem and a lot of people are keen to sort it out. The sooner we deal with it, the better.