The name’s Mickey … Mickey Mouse

A police detective last year told me he once checked a scrapyard’s logs only to find the yard had bought scrap metal from a man giving his name as Mickey Mouse and his address as Disneyland, Paris.

It’s a flippant example, but highlights a huge problem – how easy it is for stolen scrap metal to be sold without much risk of being caught.

Last year, Ecclesiastical Insurance received more than 2,500 claims for metal theft, often from churches, beating its 2008 record of 2,400. While the Association of Chief Police Officers said the problem cost the UK economy £770m every year, the press seemed to run weekly updates on high-profile metal thefts from churches, war memorials, train tracks and businesses.

So it is promising to see that the tide might be turning, if Ecclesiastical’s experience this year has been anything to go by. The insurer said that the first half of 2012 showed far fewer claims for stolen metal, with 650 claims made compared to more than 1,600 in the same period last year.

Ecclesiastical believes its drive to put alarms on church roofs has helped cut the number of claims, but cannot know if there is any other reason for the fall or if other insurers without roof alarm schemes have noted the same trend.

The decline seems even stranger considering that the price of scrap metal remains high, giving an incentive to thieves.

Clearly, the fall in thefts is welcome whatever the reason. But the problem needs resolving and that will only happen when the government legislates to bring in tougher regulation of those scrapyards that are at the heart of the stolen metal trade, through the scrap metal dealers bill.