Householders can sleep a little easier in their beds tonight, safe in the knowledge that a ruthless gang of car criminals is safely behind bars.

The Bradford-based group targeted high-value vehicles such as BMWs and Range Rovers parked in the driveways of homes across the district and further afield.

To steal them, they broke into the houses in the dead of night, as the owners slept, to snatch the keys.

As the Judge Paul Hoffman said, this must have been a terrifying ordeal for the victims – finding an intruder in your home is surely one of most people’s worst nightmares.

The fact that police believe vehicles worth £4m were stolen by the gang would suggest that it was a highly-organised and highly-effective enterprise.

That seems to have been the case, with some of those involved being described as professional or career criminals, and the gang employing sophisticated techniques to move on the stolen cars to unsuspecting buyers who were left out of pocket once the identity of the vehicles became known.

That makes the police operation – codenamed Yankee – to catch these criminals all the more impressive.

And the sentences handed out at Leeds Crown Court yesterday – totalling almost 60 years – is just what the public want to see.

It sends out a message that these sort of criminals are far from untouchable and can expect no sympathy from the courts once they are caught.