HATS off to the growing army of users of The Oldham Times Facebook page for helping elite instructor Jonathan Waterhouse retrieve the £19,000 which was stolen from outside his house.

The 26-year-old had only bought the Nissan Qashqai car five days previously when it was loaded on to a flatbed truck at 5.30am last Thursday morning in just two minutes and stolen

Images of the car being stolen were filmed on CCTV from the nearby garage in St John’s Street.

When we published news of the theft last week, Jonathan was inundated with messages advising him where to look for his car – in a one square mile radius of streets in Ashton. And lo and behold, he found himself by driving round for six hours.

But it appears that he is not the first person to suffer this kind of theft.

The criminals who stole his car left it there as a way of making sure they haven’t go trackers before they are sold on.

So the message must be – if you value your car, get a tracker fitted to it, because no matter how good the security is on your vehicle, there’s little anyone can do to prevent one being stolen in this way.

What is heart-warming, however, is the willingness of the Oldham public at large, via social media, to assist in helping Jonathan recover his vehicle.

And it underlines an important point, that no matter how divided society is by issues like Brexit et al, fundamentally, the vast majority of us hate it when criminals get away with this kind of act.

And, how frustrating it must be to be in a police force which is so under-resourced they seem powerless to prevent this type of thing happening, or, more importantly, catch the perpetrators.