Fighting the scourge of metal theft

 HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports on the growing theft of cabling, pipework, and other vital supply infrastructure, from the healthcare estate, and asks senior estates personnel what lessons have been learned that might be useful in combating this lucrative, opportunistic, and also potentially highly dangerous, practice, in the future.

According to figures obtained by The Daily Telegraph for a news story published just after Christmas last year, UK metal thefts – from all potential sources – have doubled in the past five years, largely, it seems, as a consequence of the rising value of copper, lead, and other non-ferrous metals such as aluminium. The Daily Telegraph story, “1,000 metal thefts every week as growing ‘menace’ blights Britain”, added that, in some areas, metal theft was reported by police forces to represent a tenth of all recorded crime, while the British Transport Police now apparently ranks the issue ‘second only to fighting terrorism’ in its overall ‘priorities’. Daily Telegraph reporters said that, in compiling their story, they had contacted every police force in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, plus the British Transport Police (BTP), with 23 forces, plus the BTP, supplying data. The figures showed that 29,132 metal thefts were committed overall in these countries in the 10 months to the end of October, 2011, almost twice the number recorded just four years ago, in 2007. Tony Glover, head of press and public affairs at the Energy Networks Association (ENA), which represents the ‘wires and pipes’ transmission and distribution network operators for gas and electricity in the UK and Ireland, says: “Our members, who control and maintain the critical national infrastructure that delivers these vital services into our homes and businesses, have become increasingly concerned at the level of metal thefts now taking place, and at the sheer brazenness of some of the thieves.”

 700 incidents each month