Deliveries – countermeasures

• Avoid ordering anything that will be delivered while you are away.
• If you have to order something for delivery while you are away, ask for it to be delivered to a relation or trustworthy neighbour.
• If you do have something delivered to a relative or neighbour, don’t damage your security by telling the company that you can’t have it delivered to your home address because you will be abroad from the 2nd to the 23rd of the month!
• Make sure that you give the lawn and hedge an extra trim the day before you go on holiday. Pull out the weeds and water the garden thoroughly if you have to. That will delay the onset of an unkempt and unattended appearance that may tell criminals you are away.
• Try to arrange for a relation or trusted neighbour to come to the house each day to check for mail or other items delivered and left on the doorstep or filling the letterbox.

Leaving notes – countermeasures

• Arrange matters so that a note will not be necessary, by making sure that deliveries are all made before you go on holiday.
• If you know and trust the milkman, tell him that you don’t want any milk until the 18th August, but don’t ever leave a note advertising that fact to everyone.
• If you don’t know or trust the milkman, consider NOT cancelling the milk. It will cost you a few pounds but you could arrange for a relative to collect your daily milk delivery and use it while you are away, so the milkman will be none the wiser.
• If possible, arrange for a trusted relative to collect mail, etc. so that notes are not necessary.

Junk mail and circulars – countermeasures

• Try to make sure that your mail is cleared each day while you are away. If a few bulky circulars are forced through your letterbox, they can block future deliveries. The postman should take new deliveries back to the sorting office to await collection when you return, but people delivering free newspapers and junk mail circulars will almost certainly simply dump new deliveries at and around the front door and doorstep.
• A visiting relative can clear the letterbox each day. (Consider removing any mail basket for the duration of your stay, particularly if you receive a lot of mail, then the letterbox will not become jammed with letters!)
• I did see a house that had a special delivery slot for circulars and any free newspapers. Actually it was a large box with a wide access slot, sited near the front door. The owner told me that inside the box was a plastic crate. A couple of times a week he would take the crate out of the ‘circulars mail box’, taking each item out and throwing it into his recycling bin. He only checked it in case some genuine post had been put there in error.
• If you want to try to stop or at least reduce the amount of unsolicited advertising you receive by mail, fax and telephone, visit the following specific sites to register your details. It will take a few months to work and isn’t guaranteed to stop all junk mail, but it helps.

Central heating – countermeasures

• Make sure that your central heating system has been properly serviced and maintained. If it is, you can be pretty sure that it will not cause a fire or leak and flood your house while you are away.
• If going away in winter, you should consider leaving your central heating on at a low level to prevent the pipes from freezing. This will also keep the house dry and fairly warm for your return.
• If the central heating is on, you have another reason to get a trusted relative or very close and trusted friend to check the property daily!

Lights on timers – countermeasures

• Make sure that you only buy safe and approved electrical timers – something that will not cause a fire while they are unattended.
• Use timers sparingly. Don’t make your house look like seaside illuminations with all sorts of things switching on and off at different times.
• Make sure that you have some non-ceiling lights that can be operated by the timers, such as table lamps.
• The timer light will look better if you can get a relative to go to your house and draw the curtains in the evening and open them again in the morning – which is when they come to collect the milk, gather up the post and check that the central heating is behaving itself.
• Use timers strategically, and make sure that you plan their use. I suggest that their use should reflect your lifestyle patterns. For example, if you wake up at six each morning, have a bedroom light that comes on at six. If you sit in the lounge from five until ten each evening then go to bed. use timers to switch the lounge lights on at five and switch them off at ten. At the same time the bedroom timer light comes on at ten to ten and goes off at quarter past ten. This should give the indication of the normal pattern of use, so to a casual observer there is no indication that you are away. Depending on your window dressing you may have to ask the relative or neighbour who is checking for junk mail to make their visit in the early evening when they can close the curtains, then come back in the morning to open them again.

Radio talk stations – countermeasures

• Buy a timer switch to operate the radio.
• Tune the radio to a station that you know will be all talk.
• News and current affairs discussion channels are acceptable, because the participants are usually fairly unknown. A channel with a well-known and recognisable celebrity talking won’t fool the criminals.
• Tune the radio accurately. A crackling, badly tuned, hissing station will not fool anyone.
• Set the volume to a subdued conversational level. Don’t be tempted to turn it up so that the criminals ‘will definitely be able to hear it’. If it is too loud they will know what it is.

Garden – countermeasures

• Water the hanging baskets and borders so that they don’t wilt and die, drawing attention to the empty house.
• Cut the lawn, trim the hedge and weed the borders.
• Possibly arrange for a relative to enter the house and make it look lived in for a few hours every now and then. My neighbour asks me to go into her house a couple of times a week to tend to the post and house plants, then watch television for a few hours, so that people can see life and activity
• If you have children, you may ask your relation to move things around when they are there. That can be done while watering the garden or mowing the grass to make it look innocent but the idea is to move children’s bikes, toys etc. If the kid’s bikes and toys stay in one place for a week or two it will be noticed. Move things and the house and garden look normal and in use
• Make sure that sheds are locked, cars are in the garage with secondary security devices fitted and that the garage itself is secured.
• Make sure that all ladders, tools and any equipment that could be stolen or used to break into your home are securely locked away.

Dustbin – countermeasures

• If at all possible, make things appear as normal as they can be to passing criminals, including putting the bin out and taking it in as usual.
• You should have arranged for somebody to visit your house every day to take junk mail off the step, look after the garden and generally make the house appear to be in use. They should also put the dustbin out the first week. In subsequent weeks they should put junk mail and rubbish into the bin and put it out for the dustman.
• Ideally they must have time to spend an hour or so at the house, following the normal pattern of the homeowner. The dustbin should be put out and taken in following the same pattern as normal. If it is usually put out the night before, then do the same while the homeowner is away. If the bin is usually emptied and taken in about mid-afternoon, then as far as is possible that should be kept up. You are trying to maintain a normal appearance! If a harassed relative races up in his car and screeches to a halt minutes before the dustman arrives, waits for the dustman, then races off back to work in a cloud of tyre smoke when the bin has been emptied, it will have totally the opposite effect to the one you are planning. That sort of behaviour will draw attention to your house. Just like milk piled up on a doorstep, or mail overflowing from a letterbox, a dustbin left out overnight is a clear sign that nobody is home. A burglar will soon notice that and take action to investigate further.

House sitter – countermeasures

• If you are wealthy and have a lot of valuable possessions, your house will be a lot more secure when you are away on holiday or business trips if somebody is living in your house.
• It is possible to hire somebody as a house sitter, but you will have to be very sure of their credentials before you hand over the keys. More often a homeowner will arrange for a relative to stay in the house and look after it. A relative is a known quantity so should be easier to select, easier to arrange and more trustworthy than a stranger.
• If the homeowners have any pets, bringing in a house sitter could make sound financial sense. Apart from saving hundreds of pounds in pet boarding fees, you get the extra security of somebody living in the house. (An additional benefit is that the pets are happier because they get to stay at home.)
• If you do organise a house sitter, you must be very certain that the sitter is honest and trustworthy, and that they are as careful with home security as you would be.

Illusion of activity – countermeasures

• Depending on your relationship with your neighbour, you could invite them to occasionally park a car in your drive or outside your house to increase the illusion that there is activity in, around and associated with your empty house.
• If sate and appropriate, you could ask a neighbour to allow their children to play in your garden occasionally. You might wish to ask a visiting gardener, or the relative who is collecting your milk and checking for unwanted mail and circulars, to bring their children with them to boost the illusion of occupancy.
• Remember that carefully rationed acting will help as well! When the man who looks after your garden is leaving, he could stand at the gate and pretend to be holding a short conversation with ‘you’. For example, he could pretend to be answering a question and call something like ‘OK, I’ll check to see if I can get a couple of those roses, see you next week’ towards the back of the house. If the acting is low key and only tried once a week it should help.

Long holidays and business trips – countermeasures

If you are going to be away for a long time, remember the lessons that can be learned from the case above. Spend some time identifying the new vulnerabilities to which you are exposed by being absent from your home for more than a couple of weeks. When you have identified them, define and introduce countermeasures to them. For example:

• If you are going away for more than three weeks, you MUST have somebody trustworthy looking after your house.
• Check your house insurance. Some policies are void if the house is empty for more than a specified number of weeks. You could find on return from an extended absence that your house has been destroyed and the insurance company refuses to pay out because the house has been left empty.
• Plan ahead and think of the seasons. Take time to consider the things that will happen while you are away and take steps to overcome any problems. For example:
  • In spring. Remember that plants put on a spurt of growth. In winter nothing much will happen in your garden, but during a three-week absence in a good spring, your garden can become a jungle. Hedges, ivy, lawns, even weeds suddenly appear and demonstrate the lack of a controlling presence. Make sure that somebody is keeping an eye on the garden and trimming back energetic plants where needed.
  • In summer. Many plants put on a growth spurt, drought kills them, wasps and other pests build nests and take properties over. Whoever is looking after the house and garden should take whatever steps are necessary to keep everything in order. That may mean watering the lawn, or arranging for a wasp nest to be removed from the porch!
  • In autumn. Falling leaves are the main problem. In itself this is not a major disaster, unless your garden is usually immaculate, then rafts of decaying leaves can display your absence. Add a little wind and the leaves can blow together to collect in sheltered corners which gives two problems. A stray bonfire night rocket can set fire to leaves collected against your shed or garage and put it at risk from fire. The same leaves can blow up against the back door, or collect on the front step, another clear sign that there is nobody home. Whoever is watching your house should rake them up, and put them on the compost pile. They should certainly be looking for anything that is a clear sign of the absence of residents, such as making sure leaves don’t collect on the front door step.
  • In winter. Frost and snow clearly shows that there is no activity in a house. Activity leaves clearly visible tracks in heavy frost or snow, for example footprints, garage doors and gates being opened or closed, and car tyre tracks.
• If your house is the only one with none of these signs, it will be noticed. If you are going on an extended holiday or business trip, you may have left your car in the garage. If the person checking your house is insured for it they could use your car to leave appropriate tracks and turn the engine over now and then.
• Alternatively, you could ask a neighbour to park their car in your drive so that there are signs of activity. After fresh snow, they could walk up and down the path a few times, break a path to the shed, make tracks out to the greenhouse, consider sweeping or shovelling snow off the drive and definitely clear any off the front door step.
• Make sure that somebody opens and closes the gates, shed and garage doors. The opening action sweeps leaves and snow off the path, showing that the doors and gates are in use.
• The person looking after the house should consider sweeping the path and drive. It will take some time but will show activity and occupation in a number of ways.
• The person looking after the house should keep an eye on the condition of windows and the front door and door step. They need to be swept, dusted and occasionally washed. Dirty doors and windows make the premises look vacant. Remember that there is no crime in walking up to a front door to ring the bell. A passing criminal could see a house that doesn’t seem to be occupied, and all they have to do to check is to walk up and ring the front door bell. If nobody answers, they make a note to come back when it is dark. If somebody answers, they make their excuses and leave.
• In the summer and autumn, the person looking after your house should be asked to check any fruit or vegetables growing in the garden. Ripening and uncollected fruit could be noticed. Tell them to collect and take tomatoes, fruit and vegetables growing in the garden.
• At Christmas if you are away, you might ask them to put up a few decorations that are visible through the front window. Nothing elaborate is needed. Just enough to show to anyone who looks that the phantom occupants are there and getting into the festive spirit by putting decorations up. Just as importantly, they must be taken down at the right time too!
• Increasingly properties need protection on Halloween. The once innocent American child’s pastime of ‘trick or treating’ has been increasingly used by louts to demand money or goods under threat of retribution. Their approach is more akin to blackmail and threats than childish fun. Any householder who does not answer their door and give food, money, drinks, etc. is likely to suffer from blatant criminal acts. I have seen windows broken, cars vandalised, expensive shrubs broken off, paint thrown over a front door and fireworks pushed through letterboxes. If you plan to be away during Halloween it may be prudent to ask somebody to stay in the house and distribute a few pounds worth of chocolate and fizzy drink cans to avoid trouble.
• You should also plan to avoid known local problems. Many areas suffer annual problems from a variety of large gatherings, be they pop festivals, race meetings or other events that attract large numbers of people. If there is such an event in your area, if you can’t plan your absence to be at home to protect your property at that time, you should certainly arrange for somebody to stay in the property over that period to protect it.

Locking up – countermeasures

• Pay particular attention to securing the house when you are leaving for more than a few hours, particularly when going on holiday.
• If a relation will be visiting the house and they will actually have access to the building, make sure that they know how to secure the house properly. Show them how to lock up, especially if there is a knack to locking the patio door!
• Be careful with your cases and bags, especially any bag that has your tickets, passports and money in it. It is not unusual for travellers to arrive at the airport and only notice that a bag is missing when they go to check in for the flight. Only then do they realise that they left that bag on the bus, on the train or maybe it was stolen when that group of people started fighting at the bus station!
• When you get to the airport, for a fee some airports will shrink-wrap your luggage in clear plastic. This helps protect your luggage from damage, water and theft!