The Home Office has released a guidance document outlining the details of the new offence regarding cash payments for scrap metal.

Published on the Home Office website on Tuesday (23 October), the document ‘provides details of the new offence of purchasing scrap metal for cash’ and outlines how the law will be implemented.

Under the new law, scrap metal dealers will have to keep transaction records for every purchase made and will only be allowed to pay for scrap metal by electronic payment or cheque, in order to ‘provide an effective audit trail’.

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act received Royal Assent on 1 May 2012 and the amended changes to the Scrap Metal Dealers 1964 – which will make paying for scrap metal with cash a legal offence – will come into effect from 3 December 2012.

According to the Home Office, the changes aim to ‘remove the rewards that make metal theft such a low risk criminal enterprise for metal thieves and unscrupulous dealers’.

Other changes to the act include increasing ‘significantly’ the fines available for key offences under the existing Scrap Metal Dealers Act 1964 and ‘revising’ police powers of entry into scrap metal yards, allowing the police ‘to enter, by warrant, any place to which admission is reasonably required to ascertain whether the prohibition on cash payments is being complied with’.

If anyone is caught paying cash for scrap metal, the scrap metal dealer, person who makes the payment on behalf of the dealer or any manager who ‘fails to take reasonable steps to prevent the payment being made’ could be found guilty of illegal trade.

The guidance warns that this law will be applied to all scrap metal dealers, regardless of whether or not they have registered with their local authority (as required by the Scrap Metal Dealers Act). However, it does exempt itinerant collectors registered under the act.

The Home Office also outlines that though the cash payment offence is a step in the right direction, more needs to be done to tackle metal theft crime. The guidance document reads: ‘There remains an urgent need for wider reform and modernisation of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act through a more robust regime to regulate the scrap metal industry.

‘That is why government fully supports Richard Ottaway’s (MP for Croydon South) Scrap Metal Dealers Bill which… would introduce a rigorous new, local authority administered licensing regime with the local authority able to refuse and revoke trading licences; to require those selling metal to provide proof of identity; to include the LASPO cash prohibition and to widen the definition of a scrap metal dealer to include motor salvage operators.

‘It will also create a central public register, hosted by the Environment Agency, of all individuals and businesses licensed as scrap metal dealers.’

The Home Office goes on to say that new legislation would also be needed to ‘remove the existing record-keeping exemption which relates to some itinerant collectors who, until this legislation comes into force, will be excluded from the cashless provision’.

Read the 'Home Office Guidance on the Offence of Buying Scrap Metal for Cash’.