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Stolen artic crosses borders
Page 12
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Police leave haulier with an inflated recovery bill. Jennifer Ball reports.
A LIVERPOOL operator has been forced to pay a £1,000 police recovery bill following a series of police blunders after his loaded artic was stolen.
Last Tuesday (25 November) TMS Transport had a tractor and a trailer containing £50,000 worth of chocolate stolen from its yard in Liverpool.
The firm later received a call from a company in Widnes. over the county border in Cheshire, saying the tractor was parked in its yard.TMS's managing director Rod Cooper informed Merseyside police but told them not to recover the vehicle as he would do it once the scene of crime investigation had taken place.
However. Merseyside police failed to pass on his request and a Cheshire police contractor took the tractor to Warrington.
The trailer was later found near Skelmersdale, and once again Cooper told Merseyside police that he was only 15 minutes away and would recover it once the investigation was completed.
But when his driver arrived to collect it the trailer had already been moved by a Lancashire police contractor to Leyland.
Cooper says the cost of recovery is astronomical but all three police forces still thought they could spend his money wildly:"1 could understand if the vehicles were in the way but they weren't. I could have recovered the tractor and trailer in 15 minutes but because the police ignored me they ended up being taken twice as far away from my yard as they were originally so the recovery charges have soared.
"I had to pay to get them released from the recovery yard or I would have faced an additional £24-a-day storage charge.
"All three forces are passing the buck because none of them want to pick up the tab. I have now written to Merseyside's police superintendent who promises to look into the incident."
A spokeswoman for Merseyside police says that it is all the responsibility of Cheshire and Lancashire police because the recovery took place in their regions...