Barbwire to keep people out of garden?

Is it legal in the UK to use barbwire across the top and bottom of your own fence specifically to keep people out/away of the garden?

My younger sister has just had a 5 foot solid wooden fence built around her garden, blackberry brushes planted around the inside of the fence and now she's having a 7 foot tall wire fence being built around the outside of the wooden one that's got barbwire across the top and bottom of the entire fence.

 

This part made me smile:

This can mean that a burglar who scales a fence or wall and injures themselves on barbed wire can make a claim against whoever was responsible for installing the barbed wire.

Total madness IMO.

 

Thank you for the link

 

There is a lot of it around.

 

Another option I once read about, that seemed like a good idea, was to simply add height to the fence with a flimsy trellis.

The idea is that if the trellis is secure enough to not simply fall off, but rickety enough that it's likely to bust off if a person puts their full weight on it, then it becomes a nightmare to climb over, and if it does happen to snap off, causing the intruder to fall, then it wasn't inherently dangerous because anyone can see it was a perfectly normal trellis that wasn't designed to be a security feature, and certainly wasn't designed to be climbed on.

 

Rosa rugosa, living barbed wire and it is planted everywhere, so unlikely to get you into trouble and no-one will get through once it's grown a bit. Gorse would work too, but it gets leggy and unsightly when it gets old.

 

Or, purchase a wifi camera to look over the fence. Get one with infra red and a light that shows that it is on and monitoring. I have a couple of ezviz cameras looking over the front driveway, mainly because it can be days between us driving or even looking out v at the driveway.

 

For some reason I have a lot of spiky/spiny plants and I am more than willing to share details with anyone who wants a decidedly unfriendly border.