“Organised crime groups are behind a surge in metal theft that cost the UK economy half a billion pounds last year… cases have been rising annually since 2019, and incidents have cost £4.3bn over the past decade.”
The biggest form of metal theft is of catalytic converters (which contain palladium, rhodium and platinum) which rose by 170 percent between 2013 and 2025. Nor is this just a problem for individual car owners as the impact on insurers drives everyone’s insurance premiums up accordingly.
Railway and telecommunications infrastructure is also a prime target for cable theft, costing far more than the price of replacement cables. As recycling company Blancomet explain:
“Every time someone steals copper from Britain’s railways, thousands of passengers pay the price. Trains grind to a halt. Commuters miss meetings, job interviews, and hospital appointments. The signalling systems that keep our rail network moving safely depend on copper cabling – and criminals know exactly how valuable that metal has become.“Accor
ding to Network Rail’s latest figures, cable theft incidents jumped by 48% in 2024 compared to the previous year. These 108 incidents caused 69,275 minutes of train delays and cost taxpayers £3.3 million in repairs and disruption…
“Cable theft costs the UK economy approximately £500 million annually when factoring in repairs, delays, and business disruption. A 2024 report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Metal, Stone and Heritage Crime revealed that metal theft has cost Britain £4.3 billion over the past decade, with railway infrastructure remaining a primary target.
“The financial impact extends far beyond replacement costs. When signalling cables get cut, the railway network’s fail-safe systems automatically stop trains. This safety feature protects passengers but creates cascading delays across the entire network. A single cable theft in West Yorkshire once delayed over 100 trains for 17 hours, costing £80,000 in infrastructure damage – yet the stolen copper fetched thieves roughly £50.”
Even the net zero policy is opening up new targets for metal theft, as Detertech report:
“DeterTech crime analysts, who monitor metal theft on behalf of critical infrastructure companies and the police, have already logged 27 reported incidents in 2025, compared to a typical historical annual figure of just four to five. This year’s losses through theft of copper and associated downtime for turbines has now surpassed £2 million.”
Metal theft was supposed to be rooted out with the implementation of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013, which introduced a licencing scheme and new regulation. But this, of course, is a practical example of the politicians’ fallacy that passing new laws will solve problems. While the 2013 Act was followed by a sharp drop in metal theft – owing as much to the slightly improved economic conditions as to the regulation itself – it has been trending up since 2017, with big increases after the lockdowns ended in 2021. And while a proportion of the theft is opportunist, there has been a growth in organised gangs who are able to route stolen metals into the legitimate recycling stream. As Insight Security explain:
“Infrastructure metals, such as copper cable, are attractive to criminals because they are high purity, not marked or labelled with serial numbers, often easily accessible and currently disproportionally valuable relative to the theft risk. Crime gangs will often use stolen vehicles to target carefully selected sites. They utilise portable, battery operated tools to gain access to storage premises and will often engage in systematic harvesting operations, spreading the risk by stealing from multiple locations.
“Stolen copper cable will typically be stripped of insulation, by burning or mechanical stripping. This is a critical stage in processing that makes it almost impossible to identify the stolen cable. The copper might then be cut into manageable, anonymous lengths and possibly mixed with other, legitimate scrap. Multiple theft gangs will often sell their stolen metal to aggregators who consolidate loads into commercially attractive quantities. Metal ‘laundering’ is often carried out through legitimate metal waste processing streams. Large aggregators might export copper scrap to Asia, Turkey or Eastern Europe with loads marked as ‘mixed metal’ or ‘recyclable waste’. The cargo can sometimes be shipped to busy sea ports where inspection rates are known to be very low.”
Nor is the UK’s fast-failing criminal justice system in a position to cope with organised crime of this kind. Even if the police catch one organised gang, another will move in to take its place. And that is assuming metal theft is given any kind of priority in the first place. Moreover, even if the police do catch the gangs, the courts and the prisons are in no position to cope with them. The entire system has been described as ‘a precarious balance of incompetence’:
“If the police increase the number of people charged, which is necessary to restore public confidence and deter repeat re-offenders, then that will overwhelm a court system that already has a massive backlog, and a prison system that already doesn’t have enough places. Likewise significantly reducing the existing court backlog, which would increase convictions and give certainty to victims, would overwhelm the prison system.”
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2026/02/05/more-thermodynamic-drag/