My Blue Badge Has Been Stolen

If your blue badge has been stolen, then you might be wondering what the proper sequence of steps to take are. It is a huge shock when thieves break the side window of your car and steal the badge in broad daylight, and suddenly your mind goes blank and you do not know what to do. If you are elderly, vulnerable, disabled, then you will be afraid of even phoning the police and not know what to do. This happened to me once after returning my dad from the hospital and it was a shock finding a broken side window and the badge gone. I heard the window smashing, however by the time, I ran outside to see, the toe-rags had gotten into their getaway van and made their escape.

If this happens to you, then the first thing to do is to contact the police by calling 999, or your local police station. In my case, I got a friendly police officer at the other end and he recorded the incident in his computer by asking me all the pertinent questions and gave me a Crime Reference Number (CRN). The CRN is vital because you will need this when you request a replacement Blue Badge from the council that issued it, and your insurance company may ask for it too.

For minor crime such as this, the police usually do not come out to see the broken window, but you should of course take photographs of the broken window for your records. I used the camera function on the Smartphone for that. Once I had the CRN, I then contacted the insurance company and they took the details of the incident too including the CRN.

Before my dad’s badge was stolen, I had no idea that this type of crime even occurred, but the police officer told me that it was very common and occurs in the order of thousands every year. These stolen badges are usually sold to other toe-rag buyers who are willing to pay large sums of money for them.

Blue Badge Security Protector

A blue badge security protector is a metal device that encapsulates and affixes the badge to a part of your car in order to make it difficult for the thieves to simply grab and run away with it. Many of these devices usually consist of a metal container into which the badge could be stored, and the container then secured to the steering wheel of the car. There are two possible options to secure the metal container to the steering wheel. One method makes use of a metal jubilee band with lock to affix directly to the steering wheel, and the other is a steel rope with lock that you would have to thread through the steering wheel. I chose a protector design with a steel rope because I wanted to display the badge on the dashboard clearly, and a steel rope was long enough to bring the metal container on the dash. If you are a pensioner, then these solutions on eBay are not cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly saves one the huge inconvenience, as well as the cost of a replacement window. Sometimes it may not even be cost-effective to make an insurance claim because the excess charges may go into the order of hundreds and may be more than the cost of a replacement window.

Future

It is of course always an inconvenience to lock and unlock the badge all the time. I believe that in the future, car manufacturers will make high-security dashboards with special clear windows on the top for storing and displaying items like a Blue Badge, or Driving License, but it is a long way away.