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by Lib Dem team on 18 November, 2011
At Stockport’s Full Council meeting last night, all the parties were united in supported the need for changes in the law to be considered to tackle the serious problem of scrap metal theft – perhaps with stricter rules to stop “cash in hand, no questions asked” scrap metal merchants, as the scrap is only useful to thieves if they can pass it on.
Last year (2010/11), 1,250 grids were stolen from Stockport’s roads. It cost the Council £250,000 to attend to them, make them safe and then replace with a non-metal grid – that’s £200 per stolen grid.
If current trends this year (2011/12) continue, the situation won’t be quite so bad, but we will still see a cost of £90,000.
That’s a total of £340,000 over the two years that should have been spent on maintaining and improving our roads and pavements across Stockport, but instead we’ve had to spend on replacing stolen grids.
9 Comments
Given that this problem is not restricted to grids, nor stockport alone, surely some heavy handed legilsation can be pushed through rapido to control scrap merchants in a better way. The defacing of war memorials (for the copper)was a step too far. Why hasn’t anything been done?
Hi Richard,
It’s very much the topic of the moment – Government is looking at legislation (e.g. to say scrap metal dealers have to pay by cheque or account transfer, not cash in hand).
We passed a motion at Stockport Council calling for Government action (it has all-party support) and hopefully we’ll get something soon.
With repeated crimes – such as grid thefts – it surprises me that early warning devices are not used. Not every grid would need alarming and the signal only needs to be an alert to a central office. Electronic devices are now so cheap, weatherproof and reliable. This applies to repeated thefts of any kind particularly metal stealing which presumably is time consuming giving law enforcers the opportunity to “feel their collars”.
Hi Iain, would it be cost effective for the council to remove all the metal grids, get the scrap value for themselves and replace with the none metal grids?
Val’s suggestion sounds sensible to me – why not?
Hi Val, Paula,
Unfortunately, the numbers don’t add up for replacing the grids.
It costs £200 to replace a grid, but the scrap value of an old metal grid is just a few pounds, so the cost to taxpayers would be thousands of pounds per road, and millions of pounds across the whole of Stockport.
£200 for reclaimed plastic grid? Your having a laugh, surely, Iain.
I wish I was, Les – as do councils up and down the country suffering as much as we are.
The cost of a plastic grid (and remember it has to be tough enough to withstand lorries driving over it day after day, year after year) plus the manpower cost of fitting it does come to about £200.
Richard raises are good point about war memorials.
The War Memorials Trust and the Royal British Legion are uging local authorities to treat the memorials in their care with “Smartwater” as a deterrent to theft (as it carries an identifying mark which can be seen under UV light).
http://www.inmemoriam2014.org/Home/About