I'm looking for anyone who might help with gauging best practice across the social housing sector with regard to trades tools and management thereof. To provide some background, I work for a largish social landlord (local authority) with an in-house maintenance team of around 260 mixed trades. I have been given a project to undertake a root and branch review of tools provided by the employer and employees currently and to look at options based on best practice. At this time trades staff provide their own hand tools and to a large degree the majority of hand held power tools with the employer providing power tools also and having access to hire outlets. Nothing at this stage is off limits so thoughts are around: Is it beneficial to provide trades staff with all tools including hand tools? Do we want to provide all power tools and let trades provide hand tools only? Do we want to purchase any tools or look for a supplier lease arrangement which removes all service and test from in-house teams to that supplier? What benefits do we get by standardising tools in terms of HAV, Noise , etc? Are any other organisations running or operating an in-house plant store type arrangement, where items are booked in/out, serviced, checked etc, similar to tool hire suppliers? If anyone else is looking at or has dealt with similar issues, I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments. Thanks