Still, the tech isn’t necessarily enough, suggests Mr Holland.
“To get them back to work became our mission,” he says, as he explains how in late 2021 ARMD launched an insurance product designed specifically for tradespeople.
The coverage is linked to a special smartphone app.
It is a digital inventory of every valuable bit of equipment a plumber or builder might have and displays the insurance claim value of each tool. For a new tool, this figure starts at 100% of its retail value and reduces each year by 10%, down to a minimum of 50%, says Mr Chawda.
Crucially, ARMD aims to pay out genuine claims as quickly as possible.
The firm has over 3,500 users and over 200 tool insurance customers signed up so far and has settled 7 claims in total. The longest of those took just three days.
There are alternative technologies designed to help combat the effects of tool theft.
A tool inventory app called The Tool Register, available for smartphones, was listed in a research briefing on tool theft, external published by the House of Commons Library last year, for example.
A spokesman for uWatch, which makes the app, says it has about 500 users. uWatch also offers a security device called The Cube, fitted with a camera as well as motion and location sensors among others.
“There are members who are literally putting cages inside their vehicles,” says Darren Crannis, technical manager at the Electrical Contractors’ Assocation (ECA), which represents 3,000 member companies covering a little over 66,000 individual tradespeople.
Some even choose to put fake logos on their vans, obscuring that they are in a building trade, hiding the fact there could be tools in the vehicle, he says.
Tradespeople may also install covert cameras in vans, apply forensic marking products such as microdots to their tools, and label them as protected, for example. And there’s a range of heavy duty locks, vaults and alarm systems to secure equipment whether it is kept in a van or a shed, for instance.
“Have you seen the most recent James Bond where only he can hold his gun and it works?” says Mr Crannis. “That really would be brilliant.”
