Interview: George Dean

After all your hard work raising awareness for tool theft, how rewarding was it to finally be recognised by the Prime Minister?

Obviously, raising the issue of tool theft is a big deal – but whether the government does something or not now is another thing entirely. There’s already a bill in Parliament being debated soon, but all of these things take time – nothing’s done overnight. People expect it to be done straight away, but it doesn’t work like that with Parliament. But on the flip side, the police have started to take action. Just yesterday, they made another arrest. And that happened on the previous three Sundays too, so I’d say they’re being pretty active about car boot raids now.

Do you think the police are taking tool theft more seriously now?

They definitely are. We’ve had three car boot raids, with more than half a million pounds seized from the traders. Vans got seized, and twelve arrests have been made in total – and that’s just across two car boot sales. So you can gauge, there’s hundreds of car boot sales across the UK now, and they’re opening up all the time. And aside from just the police, other people like Wickes and Checkatrade are helping the cause as well. Wickes have done several tool marking events already and the police came along with a thousand marking kits to help. In fact, Tesco are particularly concerned about their products getting stolen and sold in the same way as tools.

How does that relate to what’s happening with tool theft?

So, in my view, this whole issue extends far beyond just tool theft. Basically, retail theft, tool theft, any sort of theft that you can think of, it all just ends up at the car boot sales. So we’ve established the fact that we know where it’s going now. It’s now just a matter of actually raiding these places. There was a raid that happened in a boot sale recently, where Tesco found a lot of their stuff in there that had been stolen previously. There was olive oil, baby milk, everything. It was in the thousands. 

The thing I can never wrap my head around is who do the thieves expect to sell these tools on to? Is it other installers and tradespeople?

Well, a lot of them are not qualified tradespeople, let’s put it that way. But they’re the ones that are buying it are the ones that have got no respect for themselves, for any tools, or anyone’s hard work. They’re usually just general labourers who need tools to get a one-off job done. Actual, qualified tradespeople have got too much respect to ever turn up to a car boot sale and buy tools. They’ll always buy nice stuff and take pride in what they own. 

So you think we should be focusing most of our attention on the car boot sales to stop this?

Yeah, and if you go to one, it’s really obvious what they’re doing, so I’d say this is a problem on an industrial scale. If we want to tackle this, in my opinion, the only way is to make there be some kind of responsibility for the organisers of these events. They really shouldn’t be letting these people sell obviously stolen goods there. There’s a lot of stuff that happens around the car boot sales, which is why they need to be looked at.

Keir Starmer said that in response to rising tool theft, he’s planning on investing more into the police force. Do you think that’s going to do much to help?

When I heard about that, my first thought was “what is the point of putting 13,000 new officers out there, and then spending £1.2 billion on the police force, when you can’t even prosecute these people?”. The government is talking about letting people out of jail because they want space – do you really think they’re going to be putting tool thieves in there? Yeah right. They think they’ve got more serious things to do, so in my eyes, we need to sort the whole prosecution system out first. The justice system needs to understand the bigger picture.

Obviously, this is part of a much bigger issue, but if increased policing won’t fix the problem entirely, what does a solution look like to you?

We know we’re never going to stop theft entirely, but if we reduce the amount of tool theft going on out there by as much as 60% or so, I’d still see that as a win for us. At the end of the day, what the country’s going through with the whole cost of living crisis… there’s so much mess at the moment, and the police are already too busy dealing with things like protests up in London. People don’t understand why tool theft isn’t being considered by the force – It’s not that the police don’t take it seriously. In fact, they wish they could.

With everyone more aware of tool theft than ever before, do you have any plans to hold another van rally at Westminster?

I really hope it doesn’t come to that because we’ve already done two, but if it comes to a point where it becomes necessary to give them one more kick, I’ll do it. But it’d probably cover a much wider area than just London…

And with a new bill on the sentencing of tool theft about to go through parliament, how confident are you that it’ll make much of a dent in the problem?

Look, right now there’s not only Amanda [Martin, MP for Portstmouth North], I’m also speaking a lot with Robert Jeneric [Shadow Secretary of State for Justice] who’s pushing it as well – we’ve actually gone to some of these car boot sales together. The good thing is, we’ve got more and more MPs listening and wanting to do more. We’ve also got more police forces involved, like the MET police, Essex police, Kent and many others. Whatever happens with the bill, that’s only one part of this issue, and it’s important that we’ve got so many people on board already who have become more aware of what’s going on.

What advice have you got for other tradespeople in the industry who want to help out?

Well, I can only push this so far, and I’ve already taken it to the level where the Prime Minister has spoken about it – it doesn’t get any higher than that. But we’ve still got more to do. I would urge people out there to get a little more active. All it takes is five minutes to write to your MP to raise the issue. Because there’s a lot of MPs out there still who don’t have an idea of what is going on. You can also speak to your local police teams as well. If everyone did that, it’d be enough for us to get that vote pushed out. Because MPs have got the powers to change the law. They’re the ones that can pick up the phone and speak to the police commissioner in the area and say, “we need this looked at”, that’s when action happens.