'Bargains' blamed for fueling North East tool thefts

Tool thieves targeting building sites across Aberdeen are threatening the livelihoods of tradesmen and women as well as their families.

Workers are counting the cost of £10,000 worth of tools taken from Hazlehead and Grandholm.

Mike Green owns MRG Electrical which has suffered three raids over the last four months as recently as last Tuesday.

He told Northsound News: "The money's irrelevant, the tools can be replaced, but it's quite disheartening when you come into work in the morning and the guys are standing quite upset, some of them close to tears.

"The tools are the guys' livelihoods, it's what they feed their families with.

"If you have a grown man with a wife and kids and he's using these tools to get him a wage at the end of the week to take the kids out and put food on the table, and these tools are gone in a matter of minutes, and he gets his wages the Friday, he has to go out and replace the tools, and that week's kind of dead in the water - it's disheartening to see that.

"We had a young apprentice, he's 18-years of age, he's been saving for about three months £20/£30 a week to buy this drill. He's not on great money, obviously he's an apprentice. He got the drill two weeks ago, it's taken him three months to save for that. We watched the CCTV back and it was taken in less than five minutes.

"A standard drill, a standard combi set is sometimes in excess of £300. When these guys go to a car boot sale or they see it on Gumtree at £50/£60 obviously there's a temptation to buy it, and they're not aware of the consequences of taking the tool and who's suffering in the background.

"If nobody is buying these stolen tools there'd be no market for them, so in return there'd be no need to steal them. It's quite easy to say: 'don't buy this, and don't buy that,' but it's quite difficult when you see a tool 10/20/30-per-cent off the retail that you need or you want to keep in your garage as a backup."