Tool theft sentencing bill: where it stands and what to do

ReportedPublished 6 June 20265 min read

An empty work van with its rear doors standing open at the kerb on a wet residential street early in the morning

The tool theft sentencing bill has now been waiting for a proper hearing for the best part of two years while the theft figures have gone in one direction, and the gap between those two facts is the story. If you work out of a van, nothing in Westminster is going to change your week. What can change it is the boring stuff you do to your own kit, and this piece covers both: where the legislation has actually got to, and what the current survey data says about who is being hit.

Where the bill has got to

The Theft of Tools of Trade (Sentencing) Bill is a private member's bill sponsored by Amanda Martin, the MP for Portsmouth North. Its purpose is not to create a new offence but to change how existing theft is sentenced, by recognising that stealing someone's livelihood is not the same as stealing an object of equivalent resale value.

Writing in July 2025, HIP Magazine set out the mechanics: the bill would move tool theft from harm category 3 into harm category 2 even where the value taken is below £10,000, and would standardise how financial loss is calculated so that it includes the cost of repairing the van the tools were taken from, lost earnings and business interruption — not just the replacement cost of the tools themselves.

That is a sensible drafting choice, because the replacement cost has never been the real damage. It is the fortnight of cancelled jobs afterwards.

The progress has been the problem. Registered Gas Engineer reported on 1 June 2026 that the second reading, scheduled for that month, had been delayed. Private members' bills live or die by parliamentary time, and this one has repeatedly not been given any.

What the current data says

Two independent pieces of research from 2026 are worth putting side by side.

The Workers Union, writing on 26 January 2026 from Freedom of Information responses supplied by UK police forces, reported 25,525 tool thefts recorded in the twelve months to the end of 2024 — one every 21 minutes, or roughly seventy tradespeople targeted every day. Of those, 12,414 were taken from vans. The union put the total cost to the sector at around £56 million: about £40 million in equipment and a further £16 million in cancelled work and downtime, working out at an average £1,565 in tools plus £623 in lost income per incident.

Fix Radio presenter Clive Holland, quoted in that report, described it as

a sustained attack on Britain's working trades people.

Separately, a survey of 500 tradespeople by the insurer Markel Direct, reported by Registered Gas Engineer on 1 June 2026, found two thirds — 66% — had experienced tool theft, with the average theft costing more than £1,500 and a third of victims losing one to two days of work. The most commonly stolen items were drills, at 56%, followed by electric screwdrivers at 39% and battery packs at 36%. That same research found 91% of tradespeople backing the sentencing bill.

Two thirds of a trade being victims of one crime type is not a crime wave. It is a norm.

The stance worth taking

Support the bill, and do not wait for it. Both things are true at once.

Tougher sentencing is worth having, but it acts on the small proportion of thefts that end in a charge, and the FOI figures above only count the ones reported at all. Nothing in the bill puts a drill back in a van on a Tuesday morning. It is a signal about seriousness, and signals matter — just not on the timescale of your next job.

What changes the odds this month is the unglamorous layer: don't leave anything in the van overnight, fit decent deadlocks, forensically mark the expensive items, photograph serial numbers, and know within minutes rather than hours when something has gone. That last one is where a tag is genuinely useful, and it is worth being precise about why.

What a tag does and does not do here

It does not recover a stolen van. It has no GPS and no SIM, and a vehicle driven away at speed in the small hours may not pass anything that hears it for a long time. Anybody selling a coin-cell tag as theft recovery for a van is misleading you, and we have written the full honest version of that for the trades.

What it does is compress the time between the theft and your knowing about it, and give police a specific address rather than a description when kit ends up somewhere it is surrounded by phones. It also, on the overwhelming majority of days when nothing is stolen, ends the twenty-minute hunt for a case that is behind a stack of boards.

If a tagged item does turn up on a map, hand the location to the police and stay away from it. People have been badly hurt going to fetch their own property.

How BlueTag is used on site

BlueTag is a plain tool for a narrow job. Physically it is 36.3 mm square, 9 mm deep and around 10 g, which lets it sit beneath a foam insert or inside a bag lining rather than on show — which matters, because a tag visible in a five-second sweep gets binned at the end of the road. It is sealed to IP67, which on a wet van floor is not a marketing line, and the CR2032 runs up to two years and is replaced by hand, so kit that only comes out seasonally is still reporting when you open it.

The link is up to 60 m / 200 ft; past that the Apple Find My network carries it, with every sighting encrypted so only your Apple Account can read it. iPhone and iPad from iOS 14.5, no Android, no Ultra Wideband arrow. Two tags come in a box for under £15 with free UK delivery, which is enough for the spare van key and the one case you would least like to replace. See the specification.

Sources

From the desk of Bluetooth Tracker Last revised 6 June 2026

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