Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of making training on the theft of heritage metal a mandatory requirement for acquiring a scrap metal dealer licence.

This Government recognises the distress and disruption that heritage theft can cause to local communities.

The Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013 was introduced to reduce metal theft by strengthening regulation of the scrap metal industry. The Act requires scrap metal dealers to obtain a licence from their local authority and to verify the identity of those selling the scrap metal.

We do not currently plan to introduce a mandatory requirement for training. However, our supplementary guidance makes clear that scrap metal dealers must understand the legal obligations of holding a scrap metal dealer’s licence, and may wish to undertake training to ensure they understand the requirements they must comply with under the Act. The licensing authority may take training into account when considering whether an applicant is a suitable person to hold a licence.

More broadly, we have supported the work of Historic England which leads on a number of initiatives to tackle heritage crime, particularly theft of metal from church roofs and other buildings primarily in rural locations. Historic England also works with the National Infrastructure Crime Reduction Partnership to provide training to scrap metal dealers on how to identify heritage metal which may have potentially been stolen, and provides guidance to assist in the identification of specialist metals.