BS 3621

For many years BS 3621 has been a well-established product standard for thief resistant locks in the UK. Insurance companies specify that security locks are tested to BS 3621 to comply with the requirements of insurance cover.

Even though BS3621 follows the same classification and performance testing as BS EN 12209, locks tested to BS 3621 must exceed a minimum level of performance and be subjected to a general vulnerability assessment to enable the product to be Kite marked by BSI.

To help explain the relationship between BS 3621 and BS EN 12209: 2003, the BS 3621 requirements are shown super-imposed on the BS EN12209 requirements (shaded areas) in Table 1. This shows the minimum grade required in each EN 12209 category to ensure that locks will conform to BS 3621 and also shows how the BS 3621 grades relate to the other grades in BS EN 12209.

Since all performance-related requirements in BS 3621:2007 are fixed, the only classification issues that are relevant to these standards are those that relate to the type of lock. Lock types are covered by boxes 8 to 10 of the BS EN 12209: 2003 classification coding.