>I used to work for a large British Telecoms company, that shall remain nameless. They regularly suffered from certain mobile sections of the community stealing metal.

I cannot imagine which entities you could possibly be alluding to;)

>Once the law changed to make it a crime to buy scrap metal without a paper trail that cut that down massively.

No, you don't understand, it's free healthcare and housing they really need.

Seriously, I remember it being an epidemic about 13 years ago or so, I wondered what happened. Banning people from buying stolen metal is such an obvious step that I wonder how the UK government ever thought of it.