Stealing a few copper pipes and flogging them for a few pounds at a scrap merchant was once the preserve of the small time, petty thief. Now it costs the economy £770 million a year. Chris Webber spent a morning with the police to find out how the authorities are fighting back.

SOME of the stories about stealing metal can even sound quirky, until you realise the sheer misery and cost involved. There was the incident in Barnard Castle in May when thieves took all the handles and letter boxes of ten town centre shop fronts so staff couldn’t get in when they turned up for work the next day. In Blackpool they took the tiny lead tiles off the houses in the resort’s model village.

Other examples just sicken.

Thieves have taken the bronze memorial plaques, even iconic signs from former Nazi concentration camps. Six children died in a single year in South Africa due to the theft of manhole covers. Six thieves cutting through electric cables died here in the UK last year.

Iconic statues, including one of the Olympian Steve Ovett and works by famous artists Henry Moore and Peter Blake have been taken to be melted down, lost forever. In Blackpool public artwork has been removed. Most public artworks are now being made with fibreglass.

It’s all down to the rise in the price of copper, lead and other metals in China and in India. The price of copper has tripled in the past three years from what was already a sky high price to well over £5,000 a tonne today and there have been other spectacular increases in bronze, aluminium and lead.

What happens in China’s economy has its effect in the small towns and villages of North-East England as a brief trawl through The Northern Echo’s archives reveals.

One unpleasant little crime after another quickly emerges. Recently we told of the disabled boy in Stanley who had his motorised wheelchair taken, almost certainly for scrap. Then there was the autistic children who use the Daisy Chain in Stockton who arrived one morning to find burglars had smashed the place open to tear copper piping and cables from the walls.

That kind of low-level misery is at the forefront of the mind of Sergeant Darren Cawthorne, of Cleveland Police, who is heading up a new dedicated unit fighting the crime. “They’ll break into houses, maybe uninhabited council houses, and take the pipes and the boilers so no-one can move in.

That means someone who might need a home can’t have one.”

Sgt Cawthorne speaks as his team stops motorists, often van drivers, to check their load just off the A19 between Stockton and Northallerton as part of the on-going Operation Hansel.

Other units are doing the same in Cleveland, Durham and North Yorkshire, and still others are checking scrapyards. It’s all part of a nationwide crackdown, inspired by a new group examining the issue, lead by the Association of Chief Police Officers and involving a number of agencies.

Sgt Crawthorne explains that much of the problem is on such a massive scale it is adversely affecting the economy.

“If you look at the infrastructure of the train and telephone network it is a serious problem,” he says.

“The replacement costs are vastly more than the scrap metal value.”

The statistics are staggering and back up Sgt Cawthorne’s point. Badly affected are the trains. Copper wiring stolen from the railway network’s signalling system caused 6,088 hours of delays last year, according to Network Rail. That was as a result of a 52 per cent increase on what were already sky-rocketing numbers of thefts. Some of those delays lasted up to 17 hours.

Often the thieves make about £50 for the copper but the direct cost to the rail companies is often tens of thousands of pounds, to say nothing of the loss of working hours. With figures like that it becomes easier to understand the comment from a Network Rail spokesman that copper theft is “Our biggest challenge after terrorism.”

The effect on our energy companies is almost equally hard to credit. There were 6,000 thefts of piping just in 2010, in one case leading to a gas explosion that wrecked houses in Castleford, West Yorkshire causing early-hour evacuations.

Then there’s the communication industries. The next time your broadband or telephone connection is cut, it’s also likely you have the metal thieves to blame. Our region comes out particularly badly on that score. Virgin Media have told police that about 40 per cent of all its cable thefts are in the Cleveland area alone.

You should also consider your council tax. Local authorities pay thousands in replacing manhole covers.

Then there’s the Church of England who have claimed £25 million in compensation claims in the past five years after 9,000 metal thefts.

It’s not just the price of metal that is the problem. In fact the criminals often don’t get anything like the true value of the metal they steal.

But there’s other motives for the thieves, including likely court sentences. The maximum penalty for a house burglary is 14 years compared to seven for theft, less for criminal damage. Most burglars are likely to serve only two years for burglary but there is anecdotal evidence that some people caught stripping the lead from churches may not serve time at all.

Others point to the laws relating to the trade in scrap metal. Just this week Nexus, which runs the Metro system in Tyne and Wear, called for new regulation of the scrapyards, although many scrapyard owners, most likely the honest traders who help with an industry worth £5bn a year to the UK, are themselves the direct victims of crime.

However, our police officers aside, there is some evidence the authorities are getting to grips with the crime wave. A spokesman for the Home Office pointed to the recently created Acpo Metal Theft Working Group, adding “We’re also looking at how we can develop metal alternatives so there’s nothing for them to steal.”

The Church of England, which has reported 9,000 crimes of metal theft on its churches in the last five years, making £25m-worth of insurance claims, and English Heritage are taking a more practical approach.

It has this week issued new guidance advocating using alternatives to lead and greater use of alarms.

“Many congregations are frustrated,” said Diana Evans, head of places of worship advice at English Heritage. “They’re struggling in the aftermath of repeated thefts. The guidance aims to give as much pragmatic advice as possible to help prevent the loss.”

All parties talk of multiagency approaches to the fight back. So vicars and policemen, scrap-metal merchants and English Heritage grandees all talk of prevention, alarms, registration, better checks. It’s the hard, grinding work to fight the petty thief that is costing us millions. It’s a constant, daily fight, but it’s happening, at last, in a serious way.

“I have to go now,” says Sgt Cawthorne, his eye on his team, “There’s work to be done.”