Scrap Metal Dealers Bill

Julie Hilling Excerpts

Friday 13th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hanson]

I support the Bill because it does provide an opportunity to tackle those issues. I am merely saying that I want clarity from the Minister, who has the resources of the Home Office behind him, in considering whether activities may be displaced towards exportation. The involvement of organised crime means that stolen metal being recycled at local institutions could be replaced with its being exported to places such as Africa. Calor Gas has expressed to me the concern that canisters from its business are being stolen and exported for recycling rather than that happening in the United Kingdom. We need to think about how we address that. Can the new National Crime Agency get involved? How do we work with the Environment Agency? Do we need to look at any amendments to strengthen the Bill?

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

Scrap will tend to start off in smaller scrap yards and be moved along a chain, so by the end of the process, when it is ready for export, it is in a huge conglomeration and nobody is looking at the detail as it is done purely by weight. We need to make checks as we go along to ensure that the plaques and other goods are not in there, but the end of the road of export is a difficult place to do that, so we have to make sure that it is done much earlier in the chain.

[Mr Hanson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention. I know that she has taken a great interest in metal theft in her constituency.

This is a very valuable Bill. Policing is very strong in this respect, and the Bill will help, but there are still potential displacements and unintended consequences that we need to monitor downstream. In relation to the comment by the hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), when scrap arrives at Felixstowe it may well be too late to deal with the problem. I want to put the great minds of the Home Office on notice that we would like some consideration of those issues when the Bill arrives in Committee.

We will not oppose the Bill. I want to give it a fair wind and enable it to pass into Committee, where we will scrutinise it very closely. We want swift progress because the level of metal theft is causing irreparable damage to people’s lives and unacceptable disruption to our communities. I thank the hon. Member for Croydon South for producing a Bill that is worthy of support. He has handled himself in an exemplary way in his discussions about the Bill. We will give it a fair wind today, but I give notice that there are certain issues to which we will return in Committee. I hope that in a spirit of cross-party co-operation we can, in September or October, examine those issues for the benefit of our constituents.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson). I welcome the Opposition’s support for the Bill. I am afraid that, like my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), I must apologise that I will have to leave the Chamber shortly after making my comments as I have long-standing engagements in my constituency. No discourtesy is meant. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley said that you, Mr Deputy Speaker, can read him like a book. When we come to read his comments, I think that they will read like a book. However, I know that they were well intentioned and he made some important points on sentencing with which I broadly agree.

I speak as the vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on combating metal theft. I join the Opposition spokesman in welcoming the work of the hon. Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) in introducing his private Member’s Bill, which sadly did not have enough time to be passed. He co-chairs the group with my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Chris Kelly).

I am here to offer my strong support for the strong and proportionate private Member’s Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway) has introduced. I think that I speak for all members of the all-party group, both in the Commons and the Lords, in offering that support. Our group is sponsored by the Energy Networks Association and its meetings have been attended by a huge number of organisations, including the Local Government Association, the Country Land and Business Association, the War Memorials Trust, Network Rail, BT and the Church Commissioners. All of them have talked about the problems of metal theft and the importance of acting on it.

I became involved in this issue because, as a local MP, cases were being brought to me all the time. The most dramatic was the attempted theft of metal from the roof of Worcester cathedral. That is not a minor site in my constituency, but one that is central to it. A bold and daring attempt was made to strip lead from the roof during daylight hours. Fortunately, it was not successful. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley mentioned that brass theft has become more common. All the door furniture in an entire residential square in Worcester was stolen in one go. I am glad to say that the police acted quickly and caught the burglar red-handed with the goods in his bag. My constituents have also suffered from many train delays caused by metal theft.

As other hon. Members have pointed out, lives have been put at risk across the country by metal theft. In Malvern, just outside my constituency, the heating system of a public swimming pool was broken in order to steal copper pipes. Steam was pouring out, which could have endangered the lives of children in the area. It is very important to crack down on this theft.

My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South said that there is a chain of supply in the metal recycling industry. The all-party group has discussed metal laundering and the ease with which stolen metal can slip into the supply stream and disappear. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley suggested that we should prosecute and act more seriously against scrap metal dealers who handle stolen goods. However, he has to recognise that it is all too easy for goods to be anonymised and stripped of their identity very quickly at the early stages of the process. Metal laundering is of concern to all legitimate scrap metal dealers, because they can be implicated in crimes when people drive into their yards with large amounts of scrap metal that are difficult to break down and identify. That is why some of the actions in the Bill, such as introducing proper licensing, are important and proportionate, and will be welcomed by the vast majority of the industry.

It is vital that we act quickly to replace the 1964 Act, which is clearly no longer fit for purpose. The cash ban is extremely welcome. As I have warned in previous debates, however, without a comprehensive licensing regime and a crackdown on illegal and unlicensed scrap metal dealers, a cash ban risks driving people into the hands of the black market and towards smaller scrap metal dealers who are less likely to obey the law and do things properly. It is important that the two things come together.

[Julie Hilling]

It seems to me that attitudinal change is also needed. A metal thief who gave an interview to a journalist said:

“What’s good about nicking copper is that you don’t see the person who owns it. It’s only the insurance companies and the fat-cat train companies that suffer, so I don’t feel any guilt about what I am doing.”

It is a real problem that it is seen as an anonymous crime, whereas in fact it deeply affects all our communities.

[Mr Walker]

I strongly agree with the hon. Lady. It is far from a victimless crime. The victims of this crime are all of our constituents who suffer long delays on the railways and whose lives can be put in danger by metal theft. We have to hammer home in this debate that this crime has many victims. My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South has pointed out the huge disparity between the small amount of money that is gained by selling stolen metal and the enormous economic and social costs that it causes.

We had some interesting exchanges earlier about the support of the police in this area. I commend the work of the West Mercia police in Worcester, who have cracked down on metal theft. I have had a lot of conversations with them. One thing that made me eager to attend this debate was the neighbourhood watch meeting in St John’s in Worcester that I attended. Metal theft was by far the most significant issue on the agenda. I recently received an e-mail from the local policing sergeant in St John’s to update me on the police’s progress in combating metal theft. He started with the welcome news that such crimes were down in Worcester in the first six months of the year compared with the previous year’s figures, although only slightly. They were down from 165 reported offences in January to June 2011 to 103 reported offences in the same period this year. That is a drop of a third, and the credit has to go to West Mercia police. He went on to say:

“I work closely with colleagues from the Environment Agency, VOSA and Smartwater. Our consensus is that the licensing is the best point of attack.”

That is why this Bill is so welcome and important, and why it deserves the support of this House.

The sergeant had other suggestions, some of which are reflected in the Bill:

“Compulsory photo ID for Scrap carriers would be a good start. Another issue”,

as we have discussed,

“is sentencing. One of our rogue yards was successfully prosecuted last year for failing to operate with a valid license. He was fined a rather pathetic £200.”

I agree with him that, given that that yard can take several thousand pounds a day, that seems ridiculous.

The sergeant made another suggestion that I am not sure my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley and others would support:

“Finally, what about scrap carriers being licensed to a specific local authority. I stopped a van…a few weeks ago. The occupants had convictions for burglary, assault and a host of other offences. They were in the process of applying for a licence from Sandwell, where they lived. Present legislation allows travelling criminals to move across our Force border under the pretence of collecting scrap. Make the scrap carrier stay on his own area. It would make this easier to police, and might prevent a few burglaries in Worcestershire!”

There would be practical difficulties with doing that, but it is perhaps something to consider in Committee.

We had a brief debate about technology. Technology has an important part to play, but it is not something that we can legislate for. Alongside the legislation, it is welcome that we can use new technologies such as SmartWater. Yesterday at the Farnborough air show, I met QinetiQ, which has an exciting new technology called OptaSense, which effectively turns telephone wires into sensors. It is possible to tell where down the length of a telephone wire it is broken or whether digging is happening nearby. That might be very useful in protecting the railways and telecommunications systems in this country. However, technology alone will not deal with the issue. There is a need for greater licensing.

This is a good Bill, it is well thought through and it is much needed. This is an example of Parliament working in the way that it should to respond to the concerns of our constituents and the issues that are raised with us.