Now that IFSEC is no more, The Security Event at the NEC each April is the premier exhibition for UK private security. The one has replaced the other; in fact, one exhibitor told me that a visitor called the show IFSEC by mistake. How, then, is the show a barometer of the health and direction of the security industry?
First, let’s admit that those exhibiting all three days inside the NEC are not what you might call the ‘real’ security industry, or what the French call ‘la France profonde’, the towns and villages that aren’t Paris. The real security industry was outside the NEC halls, staffing the detection arches at the entrances, driving liveried cars on traffic patrol. Those doing protective site security nationwide maybe didn’t have the time or permission to take a day off to swan around a show for no obvious return on investment (to their employer).
State of security
‘It’s a tough world out there,’ one old contact of mine and an exhibitor told me, gesturing from the edge of the hall to the mass of exhibitor booths. ‘They’re all doing the same things, a different colour.’ He had raised the age-old point about how to differentiate your product or service. Numerous exhibitors do specialise as alarm monitoring stations; particularly eye-catching were the CCTV towers to cover void property. Otherwise, besides the familiar trinity of alarms (fire and intruder), access control and video surveillance, the drive (and where the higher margin is) is towards integrating it all with software. The hitch is that (as another old contact described to me) the devices on a site, or multiple sites, that you can integrate don’t only belong to Security, but Estates and any number of departments. That are jealous of their own budgets that are there to be cut ten per cent by a chief finance officer (CFO) whose bonus depends on doing that. For the integrator or software or AI developer seeing the opportunity in linking devices together, where do they go to exhibit and meet? Next door to the security event were halls for fire safety, and health and safety; but does the exhibiting future for vendors lie at least partly in shows by vertical market? Some security vendors I speak to are indeed trying shows for farming, the railways, utilities and so on.
State of the nation
For years I have done my best not to mention President Donald Trump, but another old contact, besides talking about AI – how he wants to get to understand it, before he sets the direction of his business, whether in what he offers, or acquiring other businesses – did go off at a tangent, clearly unable to resist the spectacle of Trump as ruler, as an adult may watch punch-ups on a school playground. Does Trump matter to UK private security? One exhibitor who routinely used to see a spike in spend by local government at the end of a financial year, as council departments spent up their budgets, reported that he had not seen it this year; or last. He had noticed lately, he added, presumably due to the global political uncertainty, a holding back on spends.
What’s news
In a normal decade, that Martyn’s Law has actually become law – the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 – would be consequential enough. The successful campaigner for Martyn’s Law, Figen Murray, spoke on day three at the show to the warmest reception; earlier in the week she was down the road at the University of Warwick, for the annual conference of the association for university security managers, Aucso, that she’s a patron of. Among the themes there were protests (a fact of life is that as the weather gets warmer and drier, so protest becomes more appealing for some students), and the shift in recent years from security management to community safety. One I spoke to at the Aucso gathering the evening before the conference proper, reflected that his title was now head of community safety and security (it started as head of security services). He said he was glad he’d kept ‘security’ – the Met Police (if they ring or inquire) understand that word. And the job of security, locking and unlocking doors and buildings, protecting assets, remains; what’s become added is the welfare of students, their well-being. While a positive – security departments can attract more varied, rounded people than the burly types jangling bunches of keys – it does suggest an uncertainty over the definition of private security. Someone with the stamina to attend both shows was Paul Evans, the chief of the security and related services contractor Carlisle Support Services; he and others are at work on ‘integrated policing’, police and uniformed security dove-tailing times and places they operate, sharing intelligence; not a subject particularly taken up at the NEC event (although the contract security at the NEC, by OCS, is a fine example of looking after a campus, including as a first responder to incidents).
Talking of definitions
A tech person related his advice to a security manager, for internally asking for new surveillance cameras: ‘Don’t call them cameras, call them sensors.’ As I said to him at that moment, that was the most important thing I’d heard for quite a while. The positive there is that a camera can do more than security; it can measure temperature, do heat-mapping, trigger an alert for someone entering an area or loitering, detect dangerous gases. The tech person meant that the CFO wouldn’t sign off some cameras, but would if they were ‘sensors’. The technical part of private security industry, then, faces the same prospect as it has for nigh 20 years, the same danger as security practitioners face; of becoming submerged in something else; in the case of security tech, IT.
Photo by Mark Rowe: The Security Event 2025 show floor.
Next year’s show is slightly later in the year, still a Tuesday to Thursday, April 28 to 30, 2026.
