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The July 2025 edition of Professional Security Magazine has a major feature reviewing the first year of the Labour Government elected with a big majority in July 2024. Here we ask a related question; whatโs the state of the manned guarding sector?
NI โtaxโ
Two guard firm MDs who spoke recently to Professional Security each raised the difficulties due to the rise in National Insurance (NI), that one described as a โdouble whammyโ, as the rate employers pay has gone up, and the threshold before employers start paying has become lower. One MD called it a โbusiness taxโ. What of the fact that at least businesses who are customers of guarding companies are in the same boat, paying extra NI? To that one MD made the point that it may not be the one procuring the guarding service that pays the NI; itโs a matter for payroll. A customer may want to see something in return for paying more; the same as they might if they are paying for (considerable) rises in guard hourly pay in recent years. Thatโs hard, if the guard provided does not even have a good command of English. โItโs a difficult sector to be in,โ so one MD summed it up.
New market?
What guarding firms like any other service providers would like above all is some new market. A senior police officer recently offered the prospect of one; providing cordons for police at crime scenes, using powers under CSAS (community safety accreditation scheme). CSAS has been around for about 20 years; each police forceโs chief constable can accredit guard forces (whether private or in-house by a council) to carry out police-like tasks, such as direct traffic. As the senior cop correctly stated, some forces (such as Essex, and Devon and Cornwall) use CSAS โa lotโ; which implies that some forces, for whatever reason (lack of resources, lack of appetite by the chief) don’t use it much or at all. โIn an ideal world,โ the senior cop said, โyou have a national scheme.โ He reported guard firms are keen to see CSAS as an opportunity: โFinancially, that would work really well for police as well.โ If so, why donโt you see routinely (cheaper) SIA-badged security officers at a โsceneโ, protecting the forensic evidence just as well as a uniformed policeman who has no need of his warranted powers? Quite apart from a lack of will among some police leaders for giving up such public-facing work, this shows the obstacles in the way of thorough-going use by the police of SIA-badged officers to replace the police in some ways. Thatโs despite the fact that where private security is deployed as patrollers of public space, they certainly are doing work remarkably like, and as brave as, the police; such as (to quote from a recent note by the chief of the New West End Company in central London, about a detention of someone armed (with a knife).
Trust
Briefly, to name two reasons for police not employing security officers on tasks: vetting, and radios, which both come back to trust: can police feel as confident in someone with an SIA badge, as someone with a warrant card? One of the drawbacks of CSAS, which arguably has meant itโs not taken off, is that it takes months for officers to go through police vetting; in the meantime, some may reasonably take up other work. Without vetting, however, can police trust a guard with a police radio, which presumably a crime scene protection officer would need (unless theyโre issued with a whistle, as constables were a century ago?!). The painfully delayed process of the Home Office replacing the emergency services’ Airwave radios with the ESN (Emergency Services Network) based on mobile phone networks, shows the sheer complexity of the 999 services taking in calls and talking to one another, let alone related others, such as trusted guard forces.
Photo by Mark Rowe: on street warden, Sheffield city centre.
For part two, click here.
