Last week, the Smoke Screen team travelled north to the Scottish Police College at Tulliallan Castle for the Secured by Design Products Event, a showcase organised by Police Scotland and Police CPI (Police Crime Prevention Initiatives) that brings together the country’s leading physical security manufacturers with the people who specify, install, and rely on their products. We brought our fog van with us, set up outside the Assembly Hall, and spent the day giving police officers, and facilities professionals a first-hand look at what security fog actually does the moment it’s triggered.
What Is Secured by Design?
Secured by Design is the UK police-backed initiative that promotes crime prevention through good design, working with manufacturers, architects, and housing developers to raise the standard of physical security across new and existing buildings. Events like the one at Tulliallan bring together exhibitors from across the industry with an audience that genuinely shapes how security gets specified, from Designing Out Crime officers to council Heads of Service, housing associations, and estates teams. Being invited to exhibit alongside this group, in a venue run by Police Scotland itself, says a lot about where security fog now sits in that conversation.
What We Did on the Day
The Assembly Hall filled with well over 300 delegates across the day, drawn from Police Scotland, Scottish Fire & Rescue Service, contractors, and local authority teams from as far afield as Glasgow, Edinburgh, Fife, Lothians and Borders, Stirling and Falkirk, and Lanarkshire. Rather than just talk about how security fog works, we showed it. Our fog van gave attendees a live demonstration, watching a space fill with dense, disorientating fog in seconds is a very different experience to reading about it in a spec sheet, and it’s usually the moment sceptics stop being sceptical.
Alongside the demonstrations, the day was as much about conversation as it was about kit. We spent it talking with officers and specifiers about where fog fits into their designing-out-crime toolkit, what questions come up most often on-site, and how a fog installation sits alongside the other layers, alarms, access control, CCTV, that make up a properly designed security scheme.
Why Security Fog Matters
Security fog isn’t a novelty item any more. It’s recognised in government security policy as a five-star deterrent against anti-terrorism, sitting in the loss prevention devices category alongside the more familiar tools of the trade. That recognition matters because it changes the conversation with specifiers and procurement teams from “what does this do” to “why isn’t this already on the list.”
It’s also a conversation that’s moving. Martyn’s Law, the emerging legislation shaped by the Manchester Arena Inquiry, is bringing venue and premises security into sharper focus across the UK, and the security industry is actively working out what that means in practice. The British Security Industry Association (BSIA) has a working group meeting scheduled for September to discuss exactly this, and Smoke Screen will be in the room. It’s early days for what Martyn’s Law will mean for physical security requirements, but it’s a space we’re watching closely and one we expect to say a lot more about in the months ahead.
Working With the Police
Standing in a Police Scotland training college, demonstrating our product to serving officers and the specifiers who design out crime for a living, is not something we take lightly. Events like this aren’t really about selling on the day, they’re about credibility that gets built over years of turning up, engaging honestly, and letting the product speak for itself in front of an audience that knows exactly what good security looks like. Being trusted enough to be invited back to this kind of event is, in a lot of ways, the whole point.
Days like this also build on partnerships we’ve already put real work into, like Fight Back Against Retail Crime, the community-driven initiative we support alongside the BSIA that brings retailers, police, Business Improvement Districts, and Business Crime Reduction Partnerships together to tackle retail crime at a local level. It was a natural thing to talk about with officers at Tulliallan, since it’s built on exactly the same principle as the day itself: security works best when manufacturers and police are in the same room, not working in isolation. We’re keen to bring more of that collaboration north. Scotland hasn’t hosted a Fight Back Against Retail Crime event yet, and after the conversations we had at the Secured by Design Products Event, that’s somewhere we’d like to change.
Get in Touch
If you missed us at Tulliallan, or you want to see what a fog van demonstration looks like on your own site, we’d like to hear from you. Learn more about our security fog systems, find out about Fight Back Against Retail Crime, or get in touch to talk through a demonstration.
