Gordon Brown to announce plans to boost security measures in buildings

Gordon Brown will today unveil plans to design anti-terror features in buildings.

The proposed measures come in a government review into improving safety in crowded public areas, led by security minister Lord West.

Redesigning road layouts and using specific types of glass in construction are among the architectural measures examined by the report.

Speaking on the Today programme, Lord West said: “There is no doubt there are very real threats, that the design in the past of certain buildings and certain places does not make it easy to counter a terrorist attack on them.

“If a bomb goes off, we have actually built into them the shrapnel that will kill and injure people and we can actually do things to make this better.

“We very clearly, from now on, must always make sure we design in counter terrorism measures as we do counter crime measures.”

The peer, who was asked to conduct the review in July, said he began his review “on the premise that what we mustn’t do is the terrorists’ job for them."