Keyless car theft UK: the new law on relay devices

Keyless car theft UK law finally caught up with the technology in 2026, and the change is bigger than the headlines made it look. Owning the box is now the crime. More usefully for anyone who has ever hidden a tracker in a vehicle, the same Act gives officers a specific power to go into the address your app is pointing at. That second part is the one nobody talked about, and it is the one that matters.

What actually changed

The Crime and Policing Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026. Two provisions are relevant to anyone who owns a vehicle.

The first criminalises the tools. Making, importing, adapting, possessing, supplying or offering to supply an electronic device for use in stealing a vehicle — or stealing anything from inside one — is now an offence carrying an unlimited fine, up to five years in prison, or both. Auto Express reported on the day of Royal Assent that the list covers signal relay, repeater and amplifier devices, signal jammers and CAN bus injection kit.

The burden has moved, which is the clever bit. Previously a device in a rucksack was worthless as evidence unless it could be tied to a particular theft. Now the person carrying it has to show a legitimate reason for having it. There are real legitimate reasons — signal boosting, vehicle recovery, locksmithing — and the Act leaves room for them, but the default has flipped.

The part that concerns anyone with a tracker

The second provision is in the Home Office police powers factsheet published on 19 May 2026. Amending the Theft Act 1968, it lets officers enter and search premises where stolen property has been electronically geolocation tracked, without first obtaining a warrant where getting one is not reasonably practicable.

The safeguards are specific. An officer of at least inspector rank has to be satisfied that the property was genuinely tracked to those premises. There must be reasonable grounds to believe the goods are stolen and are there. PACE Code B still applies, and legally privileged or journalistic material cannot be seized. The factsheet describes the point of it as acting inside the investigative "golden hour".

Read that alongside the tracking method and the significance is obvious. A tag in a car boot is not a live feed; it produces a position when somebody's phone passes near it. Until this year, handing that position to a force often achieved nothing, because the paperwork to act on it outlived the usefulness of the information. A power designed to be used quickly changes the value of the screenshot you send at 4am.

The scale of the problem it is aimed at

The numbers behind the legislation are not small. Auto Express, citing the figures put before Parliament, reported nearly 122,000 vehicle thefts in England and Wales between April 2024 and March 2025, with no suspect identified in more than 92,000 of them. The Metropolitan Police estimate quoted in the same piece is that electronic devices are involved in around 60% of vehicle theft in London.

That is a crime type where, on the published outcomes, the overwhelming majority of cases end with nobody charged. Anything that shortens the distance between "I know where my car is" and "someone has gone and looked" is worth having.

What this does not change

Three things, and the stance here is that they matter more than the law does.

A tracker is still not a security device. It does not stop a car being taken. Keep the fob in a lined pouch or a metal tin away from the front door, use a steering lock, and fit a Thatcham-rated alarm or immobiliser if the car warrants one. Layers first, electronics second.

You still do not go yourself. A new police power is precisely the argument for reporting rather than driving to a lock-up alone at midnight. The stories where an owner recovers their own car circulate because they are unusual; they are also how a vehicle theft becomes an assault. We covered one of the better-known London cases and the advice has not moved.

A Bluetooth tag has limits that no statute removes. No SIM, no GPS, no live tracking, nothing at all inside a shipping container or an underground car park. It gives you a chain of sightings in populated places, which against the common pattern — a car taken and parked a few miles away while the gang decides what to do with it — is remarkably good value, and against a professional sweep may last minutes.

How Beacon Tag is used in a vehicle

Concealment is the whole game, and 9 mm of thickness is what makes it possible. A Beacon Tag is 36.3 mm to a side and weighs about 10 g, so it slides under a boot floor, behind a door card, into the spare wheel well or inside a seat-back pocket lining without rattling or bulging. The IP67 seal deals with a damp boot and a wet spare wheel bay.

Everything reports into Apple Find My, which is Apple hardware only, from iOS 14.5 upwards, with no Android app anywhere — and each position is encrypted so that nothing but your own Apple Account can read where the car has been seen. The CR2032 cell lasts up to two years, which is the difference between a tag you fit and forget and one you have to service.

Two tags come in a box at under £15, and in a car that is the right number: two hiding places means one can be found without ending the trail.

Order a pair and hide both this weekend.

There is more on the fob itself and the spare set in the drawer, and on where a tag survives a search.

Sources

• Keyless car theft devices outlawed at last, as police get new powers to track stolen vehicles, Auto Express, 29 April 2026
• Police powers factsheet for the new Act, Home Office, published 19 May 2026
• GOV.UK collection page for the Act
• Crime and Policing Act 2026, legislation.gov.uk