Program Profile: Secured by Design, West Yorkshire (England)

This program encourages developers to implement crime prevention features in housing designs. The key principles of the program concern physical security, surveillance, access/egress, territoriality, management, and maintenance. The program is rated Promising. The findings reveal statistically significant lower crime rates in the intervention estates, compared with the estates in the comparison group.

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

Program Goals

Secured by Design (SBD) is a program that encourages housing developers to design out crime at the planning stage or concept stage. The concepts and standards can also be used to refurbish estates to bring them up to SBD standards. SBD was started by police forces in England to counter growing burglary rates. Housing developments must meet stated standards to be awarded SBD status.

Program Components

The key principles of SBD concern physical security, surveillance, access/egress, territoriality, and management and maintenance.

• Physical security. Standards are set for the physical security of each property and its boundaries. Often, this takes the form of target hardening (e.g., installing better locks or security lighting).
• Surveillance. While SBD encourages enhancing natural surveillance (e.g., removing shrubbery or high walls), it tries to balance surveillance with the need for privacy. Informal social control is encouraged through a blend of dwellings that will attract a mix of residents (families, retirees, young couples), which can increase the chance that someone will be at home throughout the day and night.
• Access/egress. Entrances/exits to the development are minimized to deter the entry of non-residents who may want to commit a crime.
• Territoriality. The purposes and ownership of spaces are clearly defined so that those who do not belong can be more easily identified by residents.
• Management and maintenance. Properties are maintained to certain standards (e.g., litter and graffiti are removed), which can help reduce visual disorder.

SBD standards have evolved over time. For example, many changes were introduced in 1999, with the introduction of performance-led requirements. These changes were made to ensure that a consistent level of security was being offered by manufacturers. One other important evolution in SBD has been the move toward influencing the preplanning stages, rather than involvement in the planning or postplanning stages.

Program Theory

Armitage (2004) suggests that Newman’s theory of defensible space and new opportunities theories (such as rational choice theory and routine activity theory) may best underpin the foundations of SBD. Newman’s theory states that people’s latent sense of control over spaces in which they live can be affected by the physical design of the environment. By changing elements in the built environment, social control can be encouraged.

New opportunities theories center on the opportunity to commit a criminal offense rather than on the individual criminal. For instance, rational choice theory posits that the decisions of people who may want to commit a crime can be shaped by increasing the perceived costs of committing the crime (e.g., the probability of being apprehended and punished) and decreasing perceived benefits of offending (e.g., through property marking).

Key Personnel

SBD is managed by the Association of Chief Police Officers Crime Reduction Initiatives. However, Architectural Liaison Officers (ALOs) or Crime Prevention Design Advisors (CPDAs) are the people that work with individual police forces. ALO/CPDAs ensure that developments are designed and built to certain specifications. There are currently more than 300 ALO/CPDAs in England and Wales.

Study 1

Armitage (2000) used a quasi-experimental design with a comparison group to evaluate the effectiveness of Secured by Design (SBD) in 25 newly built SBD estates (660 dwellings) and 25 non–SBD estates (522 dwellings) in West Yorkshire, England. The original period for data collection was April through October 1999 but later was expanded to include data from the subsequent 11 months. The evaluation assessed whether crime was lower in SBD estates, compared with control group estates.

The 50 estates were matched according to location, age, housing tenure, and physical/environmental characteristics. The estates selected had scored between 0 and 2 on Winchester and Jackson’s Environmental Index of Risk 1982. Outcomes were measured using official crime reports and a crime survey completed by residents. The researchers used log transformation and paired comparison t-tests to evaluate differences in crime rates between SBD estates and non–SBD estates. The researchers did not conduct subgroup analyses.

Study 2

Armitage and Monchuk (2011) used a quasi-experimental design with three different comparison groups to assess whether SBD developments experience less crime. They also considered whether SBD developments can sustain crime rate reductions over a 10-year period. This evaluation updated the work of Armitage (2000) to include new properties that had been built to slightly different SBD standards, due to the program’s evolving standards.

The researchers selected the most recently built developments, which included 16 SBD developments built in 2006 or 2007 (342 properties). Crime rates for these 16 estates were compared to rates of the whole of West Yorkshire, England. The period of analysis was from August 2007 to July 2008. A second analysis compared crime rates of SBD and non–SBD properties on the same street. Eleven streets were assessed in this analysis, which included a total of 455 properties (101 SBD properties, 354 non–SBD properties). A third analysis looked at 16 matched pairs of development; the only matching criterion used was location (the nearest non–SBD property was selected as the match). However, the CrimeSolutions review of this study focused on the results from the second analysis. The study also considered 2 of the original 25 matched pairs from the Armitage (2000) study to see if crime reductions were sustained in the SBD developments. The study used data from police recorded crime, self-reported crime (through residents’ survey), and visual audits. The researchers did not conduct subgroup analyses.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile: