About Thatcham Insurance Accreditations

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We provide an installation certificate for your insurers once an installation is complete but, in case you were wondering about the different levels of insurance approved tracking, here's a little bit of information about it all. 

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The first insurance approval category was for an alarm and was introduced back in the early nineties. It was called the Norwich Union 1 and essentially, those initial alarm requirements haven't changed much since then. 

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However, there are now a few more levels of Thatcham accreditation, these are broken down and graded into categories depending on the product and it's use. These categories depend on a host of different factors and are often stipulated by insurers before providing theft cover, insurers will frequently refer to these as 'Cat' rather than ‘category’ and, as an example, an approved alarm and immobiliser would be a Category 1 (or Cat 1), an immobiliser is a Category 2, and then there is something called a Cat 2 > 1 alarm upgrade. The Cat 2 >1 is an alarm fitted to a vehicle with a Cat 2 immobiliser already fitted thereby enhancing the system and turning the combination of the two into a category 1 alarm. 

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Insurance approved tracking systems, on the other hand, are rated either Cat S7 or Cat S5.  However, not all alarms, immobilisers and GPS tracking systems and tracker products are rated by Thatcham and would therefore, not necessarily be accepted by your insurers.  In other words, you could install a tracker offering a wide array of features, all mandatory to a Thatcham rating but, if it hasn't been through the Thatcham tracking accreditation process the system will not be accepted by insurers if they have specified an accredited car tracker system as part of an insurance policy.

Confusingly, Thatcham Category S5 is the highest level of GPS tracker accreditation and a Category S7 tracker is the entry level. However, whichever one you are asked to have you can rest assured that by having a Thatcham approved tracker product installed you do have a unit that, along with its manufacturing process, will have been rigorously tested by Thatcham (the Motor Research Centre based in Thatcham funnily enough) before being issued with a Thatcham Cat S7 or S5 vehicle tracking rating. 

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Many people opt for Cat S5 insurance approved trackers simply because they have an irreplaceable vehicle, or because they are concerned with issues like OBD or key theft.  A Cat S5 tracker type product will have a driver recognition tag which would need to be carried on every journey, without this card present the tracker would trigger as a potential theft and would prompt a call from the secure monitoring station. The Cat S5 level is further split into three in that you can add immobilisation to it and you can further add OBD protection

     

A Thatcham Cat S7 Tracker, on the other hand, does not have driver tags and would trigger as stolen under more basic circumstances; if the vehicle were towed or put on to an open top trailer or if the vehicle battery was disconnected (both of these situations also apply to the Cat. 5 tracker insurance approved tracking product as well).

Listed below is a very brief outline of what to expect from the two main GPS tracking accreditations.