The winter months are always a problem when it comes to construction site security in the UK. Long, dark nights make vacant building lots a prime target for opportunistic thieves. Reports show that thefts from construction sites have continued to soar following lockdown, with many pointing toward the cost-of-living crisis as a potential catalyst. Some value the cost of these thefts as high as £800 million a year.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at one of the most effective security solutions for mitigating your losses in the event of a site theft: GPS asset trackers. We’ll discuss what they are, how they are used, and how they can help you recover stolen items and help prevent a recurrence of the event.
Most building site thieves know exactly what they’re after when they target your site. They are on the lookout for high-value items that can be sold quickly. This includes white goods like refrigerators and washing machines, household appliances like cookers, and even your own tools and equipment. By far the most commonly targeted assets on a new build site are domestic boilers, since thieves know they will be on-site and that they can get a good price by reselling them or “weighing them in”.
GPS asset trackers are small, discreet devices that attach to your items and are synced up with our custom tracking app. As soon as they are activated both you and our remote monitoring team can pinpoint the location of every asset thanks to precise GPS tracking. Should any item be moved, our Control Room receives an immediate alert and will dispatch our emergency response team and the police to track down the stolen items.
We know that some assets will be moved about the site during the normal construction process and we have taken steps to account for that. You can set up several safety zones on the site where the trackers will not trigger an alert while being moved within that zone. Only once they pass the zone boundary (often the edge of the site, though we can arrange a smaller, more specific area) will our team be informed and our emergency response units notified. We can also set our trackers to alert only during certain times, such as overnight and weekends, to account for the fact that works will naturally be occurring on sites during the day.
This tracking technology is just one element of our asset protection solution. It works as part of a wider security network, one that includes our operations team that fits and primes the tracking devices, our control room that monitors movement and activity from the trackers round the clock, and our mobile patrol units who act as an emergency response team to recover your assets should they be moved off site.
Our control room team can see the movements of your assets on their surveillance screen and instruct our emergency response drivers accordingly. Each tracker automatically updates its location history every 5 seconds, creating a detailed log of its movement. Since the trackers are covert, they often go undetected, giving our team a trail that leads directly to the thieves’ home, storage unit, or place of sale.
This combination of state-of-the-art tracking technology, a 24/7 remote monitoring team, and our mobile patrol units means we have had great success recovering stolen boilers and other assets. Our immediate response helps ensure a rapid resolution to any on-site theft, minimising the chance of the assets being sold on and limiting the risk of financial losses and delays to your project.
Asset tracking devices don’t just help you recover your stolen items; they can also help prevent future occurrences. If your site has been targeted before by a local gang, our trackers allow the authorities to find them and arrest them, helping to break the cycle of thefts. The same applies if the thefts are being conducted by someone known to the site; the detailed movement logs can quickly pinpoint who is responsible.