Openreach Offer £20k Reward to Catch Thamesmead Cable Thieves
Openreach (BT) and Crimestoppers have begun offering a reward of £20,000 to help catch the criminals who were responsible for several thefts of their copper broadband and phone cables around the Thamesmead area of South-East London, which caused significant service disruption for locals.
The perpetrators of such crimes never have any regard for the harm they cause to residents and businesses, some of which are dependent upon their home phone service. But sadly, it’s not uncommon to see a spate of attacks like this hit the same area before starting to subside as the gang(s) move on – often as a result of increased public awareness, police activity and security enhancements (e.g. CCTV cameras, drones).
In the most recent example, a live fibre cable was damaged, and copper cables were cut and stolen from the underground communications network. Thieves stole the cables using 4×4 vehicles in the early hours of Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th May, around Leatherbottle Lane, Belverdere.
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Thieves then dragged the cables several miles through Lesnes Abbey Woods, then over the footbridge leading to Southmere Park, before reaching Bazalgette Way, where the cables were then cut. Street furniture and property were also damaged. Another incident occurred in Wolvercote Road (SE2) on Thursday 4th May at around midnight. On this occasion, cables were dragged along Yarnton Way.
Crimes like this have become increasingly common over the past 2-3 years, driven in part by the high price of copper, although a series of arrests toward the end of last year (example) – follow by various convictions – did seem to be having a positive impact. Nevertheless, some gangs remain and are continuing to plague certain parts of the UK.
Emma Sandison, Director of Security Services for Openreach, said:
“These incidents have severely impacted the day-to-day lives of people living in the Thamesmead area of South London. This is due to the loss of connectivity, which is why we have increased the reward on offer. Did you see any suspicious people or vehicles in or around the time and dates of the incidents or in the days leading up to the thefts?
We are working closely with the Metropolitan Police to catch those who are responsible and we continue to deploy additional security enhancements across the region, but we also need your help. Please be vigilant, and if you saw anything suspicious on or around the time of the incidents, please report it. If you prefer not to speak directly to police, contact the charity Crimestoppers anonymously.”
We should point out that Thamesmead seems to have a long history with this sort of activity (here, here and here). The rollout of full fibre (FTTP) broadband services should, eventually, help to mitigate such thefts as fibre has no major value to thieves. However, this won’t completely stop the problem from occurring in the short to medium-term because fibre and copper cables often share some of the same ducts, with copper cable thieves sometimes mistakenly pulling fibre out of the ground too, thinking it’s copper.
Openreach has a partnership with Crimestoppers that offers rewards for information given anonymously to the charity about cable thefts, if it leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible – you can contact them 100% anonymously on 0800 555 111 or use their anonymous online form. You can also contact Openreach’s security team direct, or if you see a crime in progress, then call the police.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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For them to be offering £20,000 makes me think, how much is copper phone cable worth?
Likely a lot when all the paying customers are taking up valuable tech/sales call time.
I’d just stop servicing the area and let a local company take over and deal with the problem if it’s this frequent of a problem.
Its not just the value of the copper but the automatic compensation that has to be paid off the back of it. Imagine 1000 peoples broadband has gone off thats over £9k in auto comp per day.
The met police won’t chase when they have an iphone tracker pointing them to the location where a stolen 1500 quid iphone is. Good luck going to the “minority ethnically diverse” ghetto that is Thamesmead
Thamesmead is a dump. In desperate need of a train station followed by gentrification
Just introduce a new law and call it infrastructure sabotage, then make it a 15 year sentence without parole, with similar sentences for scrap yards that buy from the thieves; That should sort it out.
There is a bill but it seems to only cover acts sponsored by a state
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-security-bill-factsheets/sabotage-national-security-bill-factsheet
You can make all the laws you want, but it won’t have an impact unless the policing resources exist to detect and pursue those responsible. The reason we’ve seen more arrests in the past 6-12 months than the prior year is because such attacks have caught the attention of regional serious organised crime units.
We’re not short on a vast amount of criminal law to use, no new laws are needed.
It’s very popular to propose harsher sentences for anything that we don’t like, and damaging national infrastructure sounds like something that should be more heavily punished. Unfortunately, the current light sentencing regime and huge “discounts” for good behaviour are driven purely by a lack of prison capacity, so there’s no prospect of harsher sentences. Unless government put a lot more resources into building and operating prisons. And whilst a few dog-whistle announcements about law and order might catch some of the public ear, spending on new prisons (eg £174k per inmate for the new Gartree prison) isn’t widely seen as a vote winner, nor is the circa £50k it costs per prisoner each year.
If you believe the government, they have in fact committed to another 20,000 prison places by the mid twenties, although that’s going to merely adjust for the rising population, rather than allowing more serious offences to attract longer sentences. In any event, who believes promises from government, though?
Getting rid of the huge backlog in the criminal justice system would be a plan, too.
Not something most really take much notice of so cut to the bone then a bit more.
these met police are useless, they more worried about someone installed a 4D number plate which is legal than a serious crime like this. there should be completely reform in the police servicing. traffic police should be dealing with traffic matter and other police should be specifically dealing with this matter
Should run metal on the outside with an electric current, they would not steal again. Yeah, I know that is not allowed, sadly
Get a device that will cover them from head to foot in a bright pink dye that need special chemicals to get off skin. It will need a way to be deactivated before any work is done on the cable.