Scrap thieves cost Sunderland city centre thousands - Crime

Sponsored by

Scrap thieves cost Sunderland city centre thousands

Local landlords George Winter and Phillip Crossley-Lowes pictured in Sunderland's Frederick Street where they claim CCTV cameras are needed to help crack down on burglaries and other crimes. Phillip commented that during the weekend, Sunniside had been targetted by lead thieves who had been stripping lead off door canopies.

Published on 17/10/2012 12:23

SCRAP metal thieves are costing city centre businesses thousands of pounds.

Two landlords are calling on Sunderland City Council to expand the city’s CCTV system in a bid to combat thieves.

Philip Crossley Lowes and George Winter estimate they have spent thousands on repairing their properties, which are mostly let to businesses.

Rising premiums and hefty excess fees mean claiming on insurance is not an option for the pair.

Mr White, who owns properties in Frederick Street, estimates he has spent £2,000 replacing stolen lead in the past three years.

He said: “We have to put lead back on the listed ones, but we put lead-like fibreglass where we can.

“If we had more CCTV cameras there would be a drop.

“I’m finding that the more burglaries we have, the less people want to come into town.

“Stuff is getting stolen and big investors don’t want to be in Sunderland.”

The latest raid came over the weekend when Sunniside was targeted by thieves stripping lead off door canopies.

Mr Winter, who has been in the property trade for 26 years, criticised the council for what he called a “narrow-minded approach”.

“They are not trying to attract new business into the slight outskirts of the city centre. Footfall is very bad and parking is a problem,” he said.

Both landlord insist their properties are fully secured.

But they believed monitored CCTV cameras would be the best deterrent.

Insurance broker Mr Crossley Lowes paid out £3,400 after raiders targeted garages he owns in Foyle Street.

No one from Sunderland City Council was available for comment.

Twitter: @janethejourno

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Sponsored by
Scrap thieves cost Sunderland city centre thousands

Top stories

News