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Why you might want a safe

On 12 April 2013 I ran a story on my news pages entitled ‘Your ‘safe place’ could be a safe bet for thieves’.  The data for this report was supplied by Confused.com and at the end of the article I beefed up their press release by adding some of my own data gleaned from our on-line Home Security Survey application.

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Confused.com’s research firmly established the fact that most householders are hiding their valuables (jewellery, cash, important papers, passports etc) around the home rather than using a safe.  Helpfully they even produced a list of the top five favoured hiding places:

  • Sock drawer (13%)
  • Top of the wardrobe (9%)
  • Under the bed (9%)
  • Under the sink (6%)
  • Under the bedside table (no figure supplied)

Having investigated many burglaries during my police career I can add several more, such as the fridge (especially in the salad drawers), behind books on the book shelves, in the shed, in the hostess trolley and at the back of the drinks cabinet.

There’s one thing all these hiding places have in common and that is that the burglar knows about them and will invariably look in these places as a matter of routine.

So how many households are using these hideaways?  I turn to my own collected data to answer that question and from the surveys completed so far it seems that 73% of householders are practicing this hiding practice or not hiding things at all and that only 27% are using a safe of some kind.

Of those who use a safe just 33% describe the safe as being ‘acceptable to their insurers’, which is only 9% of all households who have carried out our Home Security Survey.  Because many of the people who have carried out our survey are security aware (members of Neighbourhood Watch for example) I suspect this figure is artificially high and would suggest that the national figure is probably not greater than 5%.  Whichever figure you accept they are both quite low, which is a shame, because an insurance rated safe can offer a decent level of security that would defeat most burglars and provide you with some piece of mind, especially since we’re often talking about the protection of things that have a great deal of sentimental value, even if they are not intrinsically valuable.

So what safe should you get?  This all depends on what you want to keep in it, the volume of stuff you want to put in it and its overall value.  There are three standards that relate to safes which are discussed below and these are used to test their performance and provide us with resistance grades, which are in turn used by insurers to determine how much cash and jewellery they are willing to cover for a particular safe.

As a rule of thumb, if a safe has a cash rating of £2,000 it can be used to store £20,000 worth of jewellery, ten times the cash rating.  So if the cash rating is £4,000 then it’ll be good for £40,000 worth of jewellery and so on. 

The safe shown in the image below happens to be a Chubbsafes Water Safe and is cash rated to £2,000.  It retails for about £240, perhaps not as much as you might have thought.  However, the installation of a safe is critical to its performance and so insurers invariably require a professional installation before they will offer cover and this will inevitably add to the overall cost.

Chubb Water Safe

Remember, there are very few police reports about cash rated safes getting broken into and this is mainly because the burglars want to be in and out of your place just as soon as they can.  The most commonly stolen property during a burglary is cash, jewellery, credit cards and sometimes the spare car keys (and then the car), the very sort of property that can be kept in a safe and so you’ll greatly reduce your losses should the worst happen.

 

DIY or professionally installed safes?

DIY installed safes

Wall safes, floorboard safes, under floor safes and free-standing safes are all available from DIY stores, but a wider choice (many with cash ratings - see below) will almost certainly be available from an on-line retailer.  However, if you want the contents to be covered by your insurance company and the value of those contents exceeds the levels of the basic home insurance policy, the insurer will probably insist that the safe is both certificated to a specific cash rating and is installed by a professional. 

Professionally installed safes

If you run a cash rich business from home or you have a lot of valuable jewellery this website recommends that you order a safe from a specialist safe retailer or manufacturer who also offers an installation service, or from a locksmith who is a member of the Master Locksmiths Association.  In this way you can be confident that the safe will have the correct cash rating and that your insurer will cover the risk.  Some insurers may give you a list of companies from which to buy your safe. 

Designs of safes

It is very important to know that not all safes will protect the contents in a fire.  If you have valuable documents to store, such as the house deeds, then you’ll need a fire resistant safe.

Deception safes and containers

These are not safes in the traditional sense of the word, but are cheap methods of storing valuables in the hope that the thief will not notice them.  They include portable containers, such as hollowed out books to sit on a bookshelf, tins that look exactly like a can of beans or soup, which you would keep in the tin cupboard in your kitchen and fixed containers, such as a double plug socket, which is actually a drawer with a key lock in one of the slots.  The best ones allow you to plug in something to add to the camouflage!  These things have their uses and you may be lucky, but they’ll be no good if you want insurance cover above the usual limits of the average policy.  That said, a student in digs might well want to keep a hundred pounds somewhere less obvious and these types of containers are OK for that – until someone pinches his beans! 

Wall safes

The common wall safe is usually designed to replace two or three bricks in a wall and so this safe is best installed when you decorate!   It will have a back plate larger than the safe which will sit behind the remaining bricks and concrete back fill.  Mine at home also has a couple holes in the side walls to further connect it into the brickwork.  Once it’s in place I suggest you hang a picture or mirror over it, because they are not the most beautiful of items.  Fix the picture with hinges as this will make it easier to access the safe.  Alternatively you could install it into the wall at the back of a cupboard.  Most wall safes have a low security rating; simply because they can be knocked out of a wall with a sledgehammer (spare the thought).  They are generally only insurable up to about £1,000 cash, which means they are unlikely to have been tested against any standard.  Check with your insurer, before you put one in and this is the same advice for any safe you install, unless you don’t want your insurer to cover the contents of the safe.

Floorboard safes

My mate has one of these in his hall.  He moves the umbrella stand and lifts up a small square of carpet and there it is. These safes are designed to fit onto and in between the floor joists.  The fixing holes are obviously inside the safe.  The idea with these is to hide them away and although they are only good for a £1,000 cash rating they’re worth having. 

Under floor safes

Not the same as a floorboard safe, this one can and should be installed into concrete, so if you have a concrete floor then you are part way there.  The installation of these can be a bit expensive and messy, because the installer has to cut out a big hole in your concrete floor and damp proof it, but once in place you’ll get a decent cash rating of up to £6,000 

Floor standing safes

These range from the lowest cash rating of £1,000 right up to £35,000 and possibly higher than that.  People will normally locate one of these under the stairs or in the corner of a room and then cover it with something.  I know somebody who had a wooden cabinet made to sit over the safe to disguise it.  The safe has to be fixed onto the floor and this should be into concrete.  Once again it is important to have a high cash rated safe installed by professionals to get the insurance cover and from a practical point of view the big boys are heavy and need to be installed by people who know what they’re doing. 

Fire safes

A fire safe is designed to protect valuable paper documents in a fire, including bundles of cash, but it’s the sort of container you could use to store things like the house deeds, your will, and the passports and so on.  Apparently paper auto-ignites at about 233°C, a temperature that can easily be reached in a house fire.  You can purchase fire safes with security cash ratings as well.  Most of them look just like a floor standing safe as described above. 

Should you be unfortunate enough to have a house fire and you end up with a charred bundle of banknotes, don’t lose all hope.  The Bank of England do exchange damaged and mutilated notes under certain circumstances.  Follow this link to the specific section on the Bank of England

Data safes

There are specially designed safes that can keep the temperatures in the cabinet to below 52°C in a fire, which is the temperature at which data storage devices start giving up the ghost.  If you run a business from home then it would be wise to get one of these. (See Personal security Computers)    

Security standards for safes

There are two important European standards and a standard published by the Loss Prevention Certification Board, which relate to safes. 

At the entry level there is:

BS EN 14450: 2005 Secure storage units Requirements, classifications and methods of test for resistance to burglary. Secure safe cabinets. 

For higher security ratings we have:

BS EN 1143-1: 2005+A1: 2009 Secure storage units  Requirements, classification and methods of test for resistance to burglary. Safes, ATM safes, strongroom doors and strongrooms. 

In addition there is:

LPS 1183: Issue 4.2  Requirements and testing procedures for the LPCB Approval and Listing of Safe Storage Units. Part One: Safes and Strongrooms. View standard here 

These standards, which are used to test the performance of the safes and thereby provide us with resistance grades, are used by insurers to determine how much cash and jewellery they are willing to cover for a particular safe.

It is very important to discuss the acquisition of a safe with your insurers before you commit as they may have their own limits of cover for certain safes.  I strongly recommend that you purchase safes that have been tested and certificated to these standards.  Testing and certification in this respect is very similar to the arrangements for certificating enhanced security doors and windows.  Be aware that the use of the phrases ‘designed to comply with EN 14450’ or ‘equal to BS 1143’ etc does NOT mean that the products have either been tested or certificated.

If you are going to purchase a reconditioned second-hand safe please make sure that it has been refurbished to BS7582: 2005 Code of practice for reconditioning of used safes. 

Cash ratings and burglary resistance grades for safes 

Safes Standards

Burglary Resistance Grade

Typical cash ratings up to (£)

Typical jewellery rating up to (£k)

EN 14450

S1

2,000

20,000

S2

4,000

40,000

EN 1143-1 + LPS 1183

0

6,000

60,000

 "

I

10,000

100,000

 "

II

17,500

175,000

 "

III

35,000

350,000

 "

IV

60,000

600,000

 "

V

100,000

1,000,000

 "

VI

150,000

1,500,000

 "

VII TO XIII

-

-

 

How much will a safe cost?

The following table gives the 2011 average prices of safes as published by 10 suppliers found on the web.  The prices include VAT, but do not include installation costs, which will vary considerably depending on what type of safe you are purchasing and where you want it installed. 

The cost of a safe

Burglary Resistance Grade

Typical cash ratings up to (£)

Price range without fitting (£)

Deception safes and containers

0

5        20

Lower cash ratings

1,000

50      100

EN 14450                           S1

2,000

170    225

                                            S2

4,000

280    450

EN 1143 and LPS 1183     0

6,000

560    740

                                             I

10,000

330    780

                                             II

17,500

750    1050

                                             III

35,000

1440  1900

 

A very short history of safes

If there is one analogy that could be used to describe the development of the safe it is ‘the arms race’.  It is a fascinating 250 year tale of step by step developments by both the safe makers and the safe breakers. 

It wasn’t until the end of the 18th Century that that the first iron safes became available.  Until then, rich people and businesses would keep their cash and valuables in wooden chests with iron strapping for additional strength.  In the 1830s the first fire resistant cabinets became available and interestingly the term ‘safe’ only started to be used around that time to describe these fire resistant safes.  During the next 100 years there were huge developments in safe construction and the locking mechanisms, but it wasn’t until the introduction of the first steel safes at the end of the 19th century that safe breaking started to reduce.  After the Second World War safes were being designed to resist attacks by cutting torches and explosives and by the end of the last century safe attacks had reached an all time low.

If you would like to read a detailed account about the development of safes I thoroughly recommend the Safeman website.

Thanks

I am very grateful to Thames Valley Police’s Crime Prevention Design Adviser, Dave Stubbs MA PG Cert. Ad. Cert. CP & ED, for reading through this section and providing some interesting information that I forgot to include.