Home Office ministers have been to security events before; I seem to remember David Blunkett and his guide dog. The Home Secretary Theresa May was a welcome sight at the Counter Terror Expo (CTX) the other week (page 24). I detect in that the hand of Stephen Phipson, the director of security industry engagement at the Home Office, who was featured in the April issue. As you recall, the Government has made a big deal of the UK exporting more, and security and counter-terror products and services are one of the sectors we can do more to export, because of our good reputation in the field. G4S at the London Olympics, and bomb detectors that don’t detect, notwithstanding. However if Mrs May does not visit IFSEC this month, some will take it that by attending one show and not the other, she is snubbing the other.
While Mrs May was meeting exhibitors, in the CTX conference speakers about designing out crime were regretting that the Coalition Government, in the name of cutting red tape, is doing away with the requirement for builders to build in crime prevention to new property. Some see the hand of the house builders here, who see more secure locks and windows as an extra cost; and the Coalition wants as many houses built as it can, to boost the economy so we feel good before next year’s election. An altogether sad and unnecessary affair, because it was in the 1980s – a previous Tory Government – that designing out crime began, to do something about burglaries.
Good to see people I know, and to meet new people, at the Security TWENTY 14 event at Bristol the other week (from page 41). For those that aren’t local to Bristol, or who couldn’t make it, I would direct you to Bill Butler’s speech on page 44. The SIA chief set out why the business licence for contract guarding, door and CCTV monitoring companies has not taken applications yet, and went on to a convincing defence of the Security Industry Authority’s unfinished work, for instance rooting out ‘endemic’ organised crime. Except that, coming up to ten years of the SIA regime, what is not needed is necessarily more regulations, but the regulations enforced against the wrong-doers, not the majority of law-abiding.
When Bill Butler used the phrase ‘couldn’t be arsed’, a first for Professional Security, I reflected that for much of my working life I might not have printed such words. However, he did say that, and readers might think like him about buyers of security (and other?) services; who choose a firm calling themselves SIA-approved, and cannot take a minute to check the approved list on the SIA website.
