Combine deglazed back doors with a full-height steel bulkhead and you've gone a good way towards creating a reasonably secure cargo area. Specifying that your new van should be fitted with an alarm and remote central locking — pick a system that allows you to lock the cab and load area doors separately — if they're not included in the price and paying the extra charge will take you even further.

Forced Entry

Unfortunately you may not have gone far enough. That's because many van doors are vulnerable to being opened illicitly by having the area around the lock attacked rather than the lock itself.

“Pursue this approach and you can get into some brand new vans in less than 30 seconds,” reckons Armaplate operations director, Tom McQuiggan.

Even if the thief is disturbed and flees before he can enter the vehicle, he's likely to have done a lot of damage to the bodywork.

One way of defending your van against such an assault is to protect the vulnerable area with a heavy-duty steel plate that surrounds the lock and possibly the door handle too.

Armaplate offers one made from stainless steel that features threaded studs on the reverse side that go through the door skin and through a steel backing plate on the other side. The three layers of steel are secured by 10mm locking nuts. “As well as being an effective defence the plate has the advantage of acting as a visual deterrent,” McQuiggan says.

It's an approach that has the great virtue of simplicity, he contends. “There are no moving parts and it's not going to stop working in the middle of the night,” he observes. “It's fit and forget.”

The plate also doubles as a heftily constructed repair patch if the door concerned has already sustained some damage from an earlier attack.

Extra Locks

Why not fit additional locks instead? Because such a step leaves you with yet another key to worry about, argues McQuiggan — a key that could snap off in one of the locks, creating all sorts of operational problems — and drivers have to remember to lock the supplementary locks as well as the main ones. They may not always do so. By contrast, a reinforcing plate is always going to be effective.

Reinforcing plates of various types are on offer from other manufacturers. Locks 4 Vans, for instance, markets one called the Defender alongside a range of locks plus a guard to protect the central locking system's loom from interference.

Slam Locks

Despite the advantages of products like Defender, some operators prefer to fit extra deadlocks or slam locks — Expresslock (0121 328 2700) is another well-known van lock supplier — instead.

Slam locks have the advantage that, as their name suggests, they lock a door automatically whenever it is closed. That makes them ideal for multi-drop parcel delivery work because drivers are under such time constraints that they simply do not have the time to physically lock the doors themselves.

Locks 4 Vans points out that there is no reason why slam locks and deadlocks cannot be fitted to the same vehicle, with the same key used to operate all of them for the sake of convenience.

The former can be fitted to the load area doors, the latter to the cab doors. Even if a thief smashes a cab door window, the deadlock should ensure that he cannot get the door open.

Another supplementary lock worth looking at is Diablock from Locks 4 Vans. It's electronically-operated, employs electro-magnetic bolts and can be triggered using a remote.

Ticking Over

Leaving the driver's door open and the keys in the ignition is a mistake all too many van drivers make. Sometimes it cannot be avoided — the engine may be required to power onboard equipment — but that doesn't make the practice any the less risky from a security viewpoint.

“We can supply a device that lets the engine tick over without the keys having to be in the ignition,” says Bellan managing director, Mike McGarrigle. “If any unauthorised attempt is made to move the vehicle, then the engine will immediately stall.”

Without the keys, whoever has jumped up behind the wheel won't be able to restart it.

“We also offer a security device that prevents the vehicle from being driven away even if the keys are in it,” he adds. It can only be released by the presence of a transponder on the authorised driver's belt or on a lanyard round his neck.

Maple Fleet Services provides a system that works along the same lines called Drivelock.

Other products in the Bellan range include an externally mounted two-part limpet lock called the Armadillo, and the Mimic lock. “It prevents access by an intruder popping open the vehicle's own door handles,” McGarrigle says.

Bellan has also come up with a lockable clamp to prevent spare wheel theft.