The next meeting of the UIC Security Platform working group on metal theft will be held in Berlin on 13 May at the invitation of Deutsche Bahn. The meeting should lead to the adoption of a position paper focusing on potential technical measures as well as national and international partnerships to be developed, particularly with police and the judiciary.
It was on this basis that Jacques Colliard took part in the 8th user group of the Pol-PRIMETT project.

Pol PRIMETT is an EU co-funded project tackling metal theft via a transnational public-private sector partnership. It began in September 2010 and will operate for three years. The lead partner is “People United Against Crime (www.people-united.org). It provides a platform for organisations to share good practice, knowledge and intelligence in order to tackle metal theft and reduce the impact on business, communities and individuals (for information: pol-primett at people-united.org)

During this meeting Jacques Colliard highlighted two main themes:

• Techniques to improve the traceability of stolen metal (in addition to tracing financial and administrative transactions using measures such as cashless trade and recording all transactions in a police register).
• The need to assess holistically the damage suffered by the rail sector: cost of repairing and replacing stolen metal (cables, etc.) as well as the economic impact (compensation for delays, etc.), damage to the image of the transport sector (loss of punctuality) and other reasons such as environmental aspects, etc.

Pol PRIMETT will be invited to take part in the meeting in Berlin to better include the railway-specific aspect of metal theft in its further work.