Secured by Design support
Secured by Design conditions are discharged on evidence gathered across the whole project.
Secured by Design (SBD) requirements land across your project in pieces: doorsets in one package, glazing in another, access control, lighting and landscaping in others still. If nobody owns the whole picture, the gaps surface at the end, when the police inspect and the condition stands between you and occupation.
Why timing decides cost
Meeting Secured by Design requirements at specification stage
An SBD condition is discharged on evidence the police Designing Out Crime Officer (DOCO) accepts: certified products, installed to standard, with the paperwork to prove it. Writing a certified doorset into the specification costs nothing beyond the doorset. Replacing an installed one that fails the standard costs a second doorset, plus the programme and the argument with the contractor. So we hold the requirements in a tracker from day one, mapped to packages and evidence, and close them as the project moves rather than hunting them at the end.
What handled looks like
Support scaled to what your project needs
Scoping
What SBD actually requires for your building type, established before it is priced or promised: the applicable design guide, the standards behind it, and what they mean for cost and design.
Coordination
Requirement trackers mapped to design packages, DOCO liaison through design development, and review of specifications and drawings so compliance is designed in from the start and confirmed at inspection.
Assurance and discharge
Evidence assembly for condition discharge, inspection support, and resolution of the queries that surface when the DOCO reviews the finished work.
SBD certification is awarded by the police. Our role, led by the SBD Licensed Consultant we employ, is to make sure that when they assess your project, everything they need is already in place.
It is how we support SBD certification across Brent Cross Town Plots 12 to 15 for Related Argent.
Related work
Secured by Design alongside the rest of the workstream
SBD requirements usually arrive with the rest of the security workstream: a Crime Impact Statement that proposed them, a BREEAM Security Needs Assessment that overlaps them, or a security design package that must carry them. We run them together, so you deal with one consultancy and one consistent set of requirements.
FAQs
Questions we're often asked
Is Secured by Design mandatory?
Not by statute. It reaches projects through the planning system, usually as a condition on your consent or a local plan policy. What your consent actually requires is the first thing we check.
Which SBD design guide applies to our project?
SBD publishes separate design guides by development type, each with its own certified product standards. On top of that, each guide allows the DOCO to make their own project-specific requirements a condition of certification. Our scoping establishes the applicable guide and the DOCO's interpretation for your project before anything is priced or promised.
We are close to completion and the condition is still open. Is it too late?
No, but the later you start addressing it the greater the risk of abortive work or failure to discharge. We establish what evidence the DOCO still needs, assemble it, support the inspection, and where installed work falls short of the standard, help agree the proportionate fix rather than the over-engineered one.
Does SBD overlap with the BREEAM security credit work?
Heavily: many SBD requirements and BREEAM Security Needs Assessment (SNA) recommendations touch the same doorsets, glazing and lighting. We run both from one requirement tracker under one appointment, so the contractor is never handed two contradictory versions of the same door.
Getting started
Tell us about your project and where the condition stands, and we will reply quickly with a fixed-fee proposal wherever the scope allows. We will then track the requirements, engage the DOCO and have the evidence ready before anyone asks for it.