Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the methods of disposal of stolen lead; and of whether such disposal took place in (1) the UK, or (2) elsewhere in Europe.

The Government recognises the distress and disruption that metal theft can cause, not only to businesses but also local communities of which churches are an important part.

The Home Office collects information from police forces on the number of metal theft incidents. These data are published annually by the Office for National Statistics and can be found in the ‘Property Crime tables’ here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/focusonpropertycrimeappendixtables.

The data show whether or not the theft was infrastructure or non-infrastructure related. Data are available for the year ending March 2013 to March 2018, however they are not broken down to show how many incidents were related to theft of lead from church roofs or the method or country of disposal for the metal stolen.