UK Faces £700m Annual Cargo Theft Crisis

35,000 pints of stolen Guinness, 950 wheels of pilfered cheese: can the UK’s cargo theft crisis be stopped?

It costs the UK economy £700m a year, and criminal gangs are operating with near impunity. Every time a lorry gets robbed, raided or hijacked, it’s Mike Dawber who investigates In August 2021, Mike Dawber, the UK’s leading detective in cargo crime, got a call from officers in Bradford CID. They were planning to search two warehouses that contained, in their words, an awful lot of suspicious goods. This was a job that required Dawber’s expert eye. He drove an hour from his home, in the unmarke...

By Stuart McGurk