Watching the trail of the stolen vehicle as it bleeped across the satellite tracking system, he thought that it would be only a matter of time before the police ensnared the thieves and retrieved his cargo.

Hours later, when the lorry was still at large, he began to get angry. Closed-circuit television footage had shown the four men, three of them masked, breaking into the premises of L G Events Snowdon, a marquee hire firm in Peterborough, last Sunday. The men, in their late teens or early twenties, ramraided the property and filled one of the lorries with 180 aluminium poles.

When staff discovered the burglary on Monday morning they traced the escape route with software from Cybit Tracking Systems and discovered to their relief that the vehicle was still on the move.

Mr Bishop, 41, the general manager, said: “At first it was a very encouraging feeling because we knew where they were and they obviously hadn’t realised that the vehicle was being tracked.” But although he alerted Cambridgeshire police at 8am, the lorry proceeded, unobstructed, on its illegal journey.

The technology showed that the thieves had driven from the company’s premises via Potter’s Bar, Hertfordshire, where the lorry had stayed overnight, to Romford, East London.

“They drove around what we perceived to be a council estate, presumably dropping people off and returning to the same places the next morning before driving to Essex,” Mr Bishop said. “We were giving the police the exact address of each place the vehicle stopped.

“We expected to get a phone call in a matter of half an hour saying that they had caught them. But nothing happened. It was farcical.”

At about 11am the Metropolitan Police said that it had recovered the lorry, which was empty. The thieves had escaped.

Such was Mr Bishop’s frustration that he and a colleague tried to track down the goods themselves. Their investigation took them to an industrial estate in Romford, where they believed the aluminium, which had a scrap value of about £20,000, had been sold.

No one has been arrested and the aluminium has not been recovered. Mr Bishop accused both police forces of gross inefficiency. “We got the impression that you are talking about the fragmentation of police forces across the country,” he said.

“Cambridgeshire was not speaking to London, London was not speaking to Cambridgeshire.

“There are enough motorcyclists, there are enough plain-clothes officers. Surely they could have caught at least one, if not all, of them?” A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police told The Times that the force could not comment on a robbery that originated beyond its jurisdiction.

Cambridgeshire police declined to comment.

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