Few may mourn the end of IFSEC, which if you think about it says much about why it came to an end, writes Mark Rowe.
IFSEC as a thing has no funeral, no kind words said at the graveside. It’s worth placing something on record, as a cautionary tale. First, it’s best to set out quite how big a deal IFSEC was, for a long time. Having begun in London in 1974, by 2000 when I attended my first at the Birmingham NEC, it was the main gathering of the security industry of the year – the show ran alongside sister events covering health and safety, fire safety and facilities management, but the four had little to do with each other. ACPO, that has since become the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), had an annual conference there too, which added to the sense of it being the place you had to be.
Days of the fax
Remember how, looking back, people doing business were without ways to communicate we have since come to take for granted. Then, you had the telephone and fax machine, so that if you were not at your desk or office, you were unreachable. While a security exhibition ran in London each autumn, IFSEC had the field to itself, and if you wanted to meet someone, or renew a connection with someone, that was the obvious and best chance of the year to do it. No wonder the show ran for four days, Monday to Thursday, although day four was quiet – for one thing, because people were exhausted by then. Little work got done on the Friday of IFSEC week.
Move back to London
Looking back, the decision of the owners announced in 2013 to move the show to London in 2014 was the single most decisive reason for its demise, though it took a decade to complete. The decision then and now seems unfathomable. The organisers said they had market research to explain the move, although a minute’s thought is enough to make you ask what part of IFSEC’s market, domestic or international (what the I stood for) would choose to give up the journey to Birmingham, for Excel in Docklands. Imagine the rough rectangle of the trunk of Britain, from Bristol to Manchester to Hull to London. An installer or security manager could get in their car, and bomb on the motorway for two or three hours to reach the NEC, where parking was ample; or, catch the train to Birmingham International. Even if you lived on the west side of London, you would hesitate to prefer to go by public transport, ending in an interminable Docklands Light Railway journey to Excel, before the Elizabeth Line opened (in 2022). No-one in their right mind would go by car from the west side of London to Excel, where parking in any case is at a premium. And the show’s month changed, from May to June (pictured).
NEC opportunity
All that, then, created opportunity for a rival. IFSEC, founded by Victor Green, gradually passed into the hands of ever-larger businesses, meaning that while IFSEC remained tremendously important to the security industry, and was highly profitable, to its owners it became relatively less important. More or less inevitably as in any organisation, people employed to run the show fell out and had grudges or held ambitions to make their own (and make their own fortune). It meant a cadre of people existed with the contacts and skills to set up a rival to IFSEC; and IFSEC leaving the NEC gave the chance to fill the physical space at the time of year that the security industry was habitually used to attending an exhibition.
Pandemic
That chance was duly taken; but pre-covid the rival event, though in place, was more based on health and safety exhibitors. IFSEC got unlucky with the covid pandemic. As you will recall, the first lockdown of two came in March 2020, and scuppered all gatherings. The lifting of all social distancing restrictions came just too late for an IFSEC in May or June 2021 (Professional Security Magazine was about the first to run such a post-covid exhibition, its ST21 Birmingham, at The Belfry golf club in July 2021). The timing of lifting came just right for the rival, NEC event, held in September; midsummer is never any use for a business event anyway, and even once restrictions were lifted, it would have taken some weeks to set up the 101 things necessary. That NEC event was not only packed; it felt, even looked, like an IFSEC of old.
Winner-takes-all
This posed the gravest threat to IFSEC, which when it ran in May 2022 had had a hiatus of three years. Thanks to covid, people had got out of a lot of habits. Exhibitions tend to be a winner-takes-all business (apart from Cruft’s, which dog show would you pay to go to?!). IFSEC would have to go to some effort to reclaim its number one spot; efforts it signally failed to make in 2022 and 2023. The decision then to move the show to December (when few if any exhibitions in the security or any industry run; people have Christmas on their mind) made sense only if it was linked with the Security Excellence Awards (which continued to be held in the West End, although Excel has ample space for such a shindig). To repeat, given the change to routine, IFSEC organisers ought to have made frantic efforts to get as many through the door as they could. Instead, besides setting up a programme of speakers (something they had really last done in 2019), they charged £200 for access to that programme. It was therefore unsurprising that an excellent talk by a corporate security man on the first afternoon of IFSEC in December had an audience of about 16, though chairs were set for about 160. It was embarrassing. The game was up.
End of empire
The moral of the story is that any institution no matter how dominant can decline and fall; opinions will differ whether it falls more because of its own missteps, or reasons out of its control. Perhaps the cause lies in people; IFSEC had too few people who really had its best interests at heart, or understood what those interests were, while too many actively wanted it dead or were indifferent. IFSEC at the NEC in the 2000s had something of the decadence of the Roman Empire about it; a feeling that it would last forever; only, male attenders so inclined went to lapdancing clubs in Birmingham at night rather than to gladiatorial games. The largest exhibitors put up double-decker stands, so as to invite guests upstairs for coffee and snacks, to sit (and therefore be less able to slip away). When sat atop such a double-decker, looking across the field of single-decker booths, on reflection we were like Roman senators gazing upon ancient Rome, only wearing suits and ties not togas.
