The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill stands to bring the biggest shake-up to private security since the last one 20 years ago, and the same organisation will be at the centre of both, writes Mark Rowe.
That the Bill names the Security Industry Authority (SIA) as the body to inspect the hundreds of thousands of premises – from hospitals to churches to colleges and shops – that will fall under this law was a right call. The alternatives were the National Protective Security Authority (NPSA, which does good work, but we don’t know who the people are, so are unable to query them, hardly democratic), a new body, or the Health and Safety Executive (which does not have a background in countering terrorism and which has its hands full anyway since the Grenfell Tower fire).
The SIA, before we even touch on the premises and those paid to protect them, faces the biggest upheaval in its 20-year history. As a result of the Manchester Arena suicide terror attack, which was the driver of the campaign for this Bill, popularly known as Martyn’s Law, the SIA roughly doubled its staff to 400, to do more inspections (which required more staff to handle all that arose from that work). Who can put a number on how many hundreds more staff the SIA will need?! To quote from a recent National Audit Office (NAO) report on ‘tackling tax evasion in high street retail‘, Companies House which handles registering of companies ‘identified that it would need to increase its workforce by 500 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff, and increased it by 331 FTE between 2022-23 and the start of 2023-24’ as it worked on reforms to make business fraud harder, under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency (ECCT) Act 2023, which began coming into force in March.
Managing that influx alone will be some feat. So will the connection (if any) between the inspection work under this new Bill, also called the Protect Duty when the Conservatives worked towards it from 2020; and the SIA’s work of its first 20 years, badging (as of this month) 439,000 people doing ‘licensable activity’ such as door security and contract guarding, and CCTV public space surveillance; and an approved contractors scheme (ACS). The SIA of late has been working on a refresh of the ACS, which also stands to affect the guarding sector greatly. Inevitably, the SIA’s attention will be focused instead on this much greater, indeed career-high for those working on it, programme of work. We will have, in short, an SIA 2.0. No-one can say what it will look like and how it will leave the private security industry. The SIA in its statement duly welcoming the first reading towards Martyn’s Law made the important point that the ‘new work will be separately funded’; as the alternative might be that income from badges and approved contractors was siphoned to the premises inspections, or vice versa. When SIA chair Heather Baily and chief exec Michelle Russell in the statement said that being Martyn’s Law Regulator ‘must not compromise our existing regulatory role’, they aired a possibility that the private security sector will be keenly sensitive to, even if they had not mentioned it.
As for how Martyn’s Law will be applied, the same unknowns occur. No-one appears even very sure about how many hundreds of thousands of premises will fall under the regime. Those responsible for premises, not being counter-terrorism or security specialists, will inevitably want to comply with the law – which, it is important to remember but easy to overlook, is not the same as managing risk of ‘physical harm’ to people on premises, as risk can change over time and compliance is a one-off or at best a yearly sign-off. The Bill and the NPSA after publication of the first reading point out that premises will have to take ‘appropriate’ measures; what’s appropriate can be hard to define – too little will place people at risk of harm (and may fall foul of SIA inspectors), too much will bump up prices for consumers and may introduce delay or inconvenience to customers. The balance will be hard to draw; and who can say which terrorists are carrying out ‘hostile reconnaissance’ where and when, seeking places and times of security weaknesses to strike at.
Those responsible for premises seeking compliance will want to turn to someone, or somewhere. For a few years the police have been saying that we should beware of training courses or ‘experts’ or anyone else offering services to meet Martyn’s Law before it’s made. It’s far from made but helpfully the UK police company PCPI has come out with a course, £15 plus VAT.
Building managers are busy people and may want to pass the work of being the ‘responsible person’ to someone else. Here will be much lucrative work for consultants, just as there was plenty of work in the mid-2000s for security people (and carpet-baggers) to train hundreds of thousands of people for the first SIA licences.
It’s easy to forget how unpopular badging was then – partly because people grumble about any new thing, especially because of the time and cost. Make no mistake, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2024 will be greeted silently by similar grumbling as unnecessary. Figen Murray and fellow campaigners for the law are well aware of the risk of the regime being watered down or even worked around to the point where the regulation becomes meaningless, counter-productive and dangerous, as in building safety, as the Grenfell Tower Inquiry recently forensically examined. No matter that the campaign by Figen Murray has been long and exhausting; when the Bill becomes law, the real work, of making the law stick, begins.
