Ah, well, it's all very interesting.

There is I believe a civil offence under s.60 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 which is worth looking at in relation to taking stuff out of skips, but of course the police wouldn't have anything to do with that - since they're not civil :o) - and, given that no one appeared to have been making a complaint about you looking in the skip here - this is almost certainly a feeble attempt to meet their arrest targets. As anyone who's hired a skip will tell you, the main problem is not people taking stuff out, but putting their own junk in, filling up the waste space that the hirer has paid for.

I know that once a report of alleged theft has been made, the police can use this to continue an investigation even after the complainant has decided that they'd rather not press charges after all. I don't know of any cases where the police have taken it upon themselves to protect the waste 'property' of a skip owner, but there might well be some. After all, they need those arrests, and investigating a skip diver for 'theft' is a whole lot easier than investigating crimes with victims.

Theft is considered a very serious crime, which means that if you do ever get charged with it you can elect for a jury trial if you want. I've been told that there may be some argument to be had over ownership of the stuff in skips, but I haven't checked this out myself. What I do know is that to make a charge of theft stick, there are a number of conditions that have to be met.

The important bit is the basic definition of theft under S. 1 (1) of the 1968 Theft Act:

(1) A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it...

So, the prosecution has to show that what was taken was 'property belonging to another', that the taker 'appropriated' the property, behaved 'dishonestly', and that there was an intention to 'permanently deprive'. The Act goes on to define what these various terms mean, and there's a whole load of case law to look at too.

I would say, with no specialist legal knowledge at all - so hope that anyone who knows better will contradict - that any defence in such a case, once the matter of ownership has been sorted out, would be around the questions of honesty and permanent deprivation. If you honestly believe that what you are doing is not theft, then it probably isn't (have a look at the case law here). Permanent deprivation, of course, doesn't make any sense at all in respect of rubbish which is headed for landfill. And even if what you're taking is theoretically recyclable or reclaimable, you can still argue that it is a basic principle under the 'waste hierarchy' model that re-use should always take priority over recycling, reclamation, energy recovery and disposal. All those things can happen later on, but for now you are re-using, as we all must do if the planet is to be saved.

You can never tell what might happen in a court of law, but I really can't see a jury finding a defendant guilty in these circumstances, plus it's the sort of story that the mainstream media will love and where they will definitely take the side of the defendant, and even sort of understand the issues, so there's an opportunity to raise public awareness about re-use, recycling, the environment and dodgy policing practices along the way.

Happy skipping!

With the poor getting poorer by the day, perhaps they want to starve us.
Mass action mass arerest is what is needed, to show the media what silly little people we have in our society,and who can shop at the local supermarkey with out a thought for there actions,

Yet again the police act like petty foolish twats, throwing their weight around. Keep skipping everyone - I would love to see a case like this brought to court and then laughed right out of it again!

I have been pigged whilst looking in my favourite local food skip. That wasn't enough to discourage me and many others though, so they built a massive fence with spiky bits on top to protect their 'waste'. Strangely enough they did this the exact same week that G. Brown announded that we, the consumers, should stop wasting so much food.....

...was what I have been told the law against skipping was called...no idea of which act or anything, maybe it was a myth...

no it's no myth that there is a law making taking stuff out of skips illegal - came through in the Thatcher years. I remember it happening & reading about it, but never knew the name I'm afraid of the actual law. Perhaps it was just an amendment to the Theft Act but I don't know.

Anyway, though it's daft it is categorically illegal to take from skips, therefore the police can do you for it without reference to anyone else. I think you're right about once it's in skips it belongs to the skip owner not the person chucking stuff in it, even if hired. But that doesn't mean the cops will know this, as you've described, so you could say you've got permission from the skip hirer.

Searches cannot happen just "on suspicion" - it has to be on suspicion of something, ie offensive weapons, drugs, going equipped for burglary, and the suspicion cannot be that you look/where acting dodgily - it has to be that you've got a ripped packet of skins sticking out your pocket or similar. When they search you you do not have to give your name ever, except if you're driving a motor vehicle, they arrest you and take you to the police station (and only at the custody desk), or under some anti-social notifiable offences, where they can send you a summons later (but you could argue with them and say you'll only give your details at the cop shop if they want to arrest you).

I'm not surprised by this at all.

The price of scrap metal has gone through the roof and the police have been alerted to thefts of all sorts of things from manhole covers to railway lines.

If you ever ventured near a dump aka a recycling centre then you'll come across lots of employees who watch over all the people coming to dump stuff. It's all sorted and 'recycled'.

There's big big money in all this, just look at the scrap value of cars now, from 50 quid a couple of years ago to about 200 quid now.

Hope this is a big wakeup call to all the one dimensional environmentalists who can't see the wood for the trees when it comes to big business and capitalism.

I wish it all was sorted and 'recycled', wakeup, but in general that only applies to the stuff that fits into whatever categories of 'recycling' skips are available. Everything else goes in the general waste (i.e. landfill skips) unless there's an informal or, much more rarely, formal re-use scheme in place. The jobsworth skip site operatives who won't let anything go off site are frequently taking stuff themselves to sell on... which is better than landfilling it, but nowhere near as good as proper re-use.

The police shouldn't get involved in civil matters (i.e. where they see people contravening the environmental protection act) and they would be well-advised to concentrate on thefts of iron furniture like manhole covers rather than bothering people who are liberating good stuff from skips, especially stuff that won't otherwise get re-used at all.

Who are those one-dimensional environmentalists you're talking about? All the environmentalists I know have a pretty good grasp of what capitalism's all about.