Insight from Richard Lungmuss
Back in 2010 when I was a Route Director on the old LNE route we began to experience increasing amounts of cable theft on the railway. At that time most of the thefts involved relatively small amounts of cable, cut from signalling cables and then removed, often burnt to remove their cladding, and then “fenced” at various Scrap Metal dealers for paltry sums of money, often barely enough for example, for the next “fix”.
The outcome of the thefts was anything but paltry, often many thousands of delay minutes whilst the theft was located and then dealt with. Trains had to be passed manually between areas without signals and with delay minutes running at £150 a minute in 2010 on the East Coast mainline it is easy to see how costly in time and money the delays were.
The location of these thefts in 2010 was remarkably specific. Indeed when I was confronted by a Transport Minister at one of my regular visits to London to explain the increasing theft situation, and asked what was causing the problem, I rather bluntly laid it at the door of Mrs Margaret Thatcher and the miners strike in the mid-80s. Plotting the incidences of our cable theft showed a direct correlation between areas where mines had been shut across Yorkshire and the North East. Dealing with social deprivation was well outside my scope as Route Director but obviously not what a Minister might want to hear, especially a Conservative one!
To give an idea of the scale of the problem, the UK railway between 2010/11 had 995 incidents of cable theft accounting for 365,265 minutes of delay. Whilst LNE did not experience all of these delays it was certainly a “hot spot”. [Whilst the delays are a severe inconvenience to passengers they also have the invidious effect of diverting scarce resources away from routine maintenance on the railway with the knock on detrimental effect on network performance of late or cancelled maintenance tasks. There is also an associated effect on staff morale.]
Countering the theft in 2010 involved multiple agencies and a variety of methods. Use of “Smart marking” was developed with the Police, remote cameras and sensors proved helpful in alerting us to trespass on the railway, and searches of scrap metal dealers for stolen cables highlighted the scale of the problem. The media was employed extensively and I spent many an evening on cold platforms being filmed asking the public for assistance in stopping this pernicious activity. At the time our most successful initiative was to employ a team of Gurkhas as Security and to ask them to “lurk” both overtly and covertly on the railway in places where theft was a daily occurrence. That proved highly successful! I also started to think about the use of drones, which at that time were much larger and mainly the province of the military. Above all we identified, and started lobbying for, the need for a Scrap Metal Registration scheme which would require Scrap Metal dealers to be licensed, to keep proper records, to demand ID and not give cash to anyone showing up with scrap copper. The Scrap Metal Dealers Act of 2013 was the legislation we had been seeking.
Once the legislation was passed Cable thefts fell dramatically. In 2013 theft in W and N Yorkshire was down 93% and in S Yorkshire by 66%. In the following decade cable theft, whilst continuing, became less intrusive, e.g. 2019/20 55 incidents for 32,167 minutes and in 2020/21 32 incidents for 6,931 minutes of delay. However, a combination of the increasing price of Copper and greater involvement of organised crime in Cable theft has lead to an increase over the past couple of years. In 2024 there were 108 incidents that caused 69,275 minutes of delay and £3.3M of delay costs. In 2025 there were 111 thefts causing 128,252 minutes of delay and costs rose to £6.8M, giving an indication of the scale of the problem.
So what is being done about railway cable theft?, which is costing the UK economy a fortune, undoubtedly adding to maintenance backlogs and generally affecting the passenger experience, satisfaction and staff morale across the industry.
This is a National issue that goes well beyond the rail industry and it would be good to see it being given even more prominence. The presence of organised crime gangs in the UK is making the level of this crime much more serious than it was back in 2010, when we were generally dealing with petty criminals. I believe a co-ordinated National Task Force is required, using both the BTP and the wider UK Police Forces sharing information and intelligence nationally to bring these gangs to account. In practical terms technology is undoubtedly highly useful and I am pleased to see that drones are being used to supplement use of security teams on the railway. Scrap metal dealers are also a link in this chain and whilst an update to the act of 2013 on 1 Oct 2026 now requires them to submit waste tracking digitally, an improved enforcement and inspection regime on the dealers should be implemented. Whilst this might seem resource hungry, the cost of the theft, and its knock on effects on the UK economy in general, surely make this a priority worth pursuing? The theft act of 1968 allows for large fines and up to 7 years imprisonment for cable theft. The fact that signalling is being interfered with surely allows for far more “teeth” to be put into those rather feeble penalties on safety grounds?
I assume that the design of the future railway will phase out the use of copper cables? We have already seen the increased use of fibre optic cables on the railway, with little or no scrap value, and the UK plans to implement ETCS which will presumably remove lineside signalling. Those are changes that will take many years to implement however and for now we need an increased focus on cable theft as a strategic issue, a willingness to embrace a variety of methods to combat it and above all the commitment of the UK government to ensure that legislation is enacted to ensure that those committing this crime are punished accordingly.
