While Stockley Park has entered the lexicon, business parks remain little known. Mark Rowe considers the securing of such places.
Fans of Premier League football have learned to get used to the referee drawing a box with his raised hands and ‘going to Stockley Park’. Also known as ‘going to VAR’ – sending a decision to the ‘video assistant referee’, who’s sitting in one of the buildings at that west London business park. The place is anything but secret; a Travelodge hotel has the name to identify it (it’s better placed as Hayes, in the London borough of Hillingdon). Security people may have business there as Canon Europe (owners of Milestone Systems, the video management software developers) and Hikvision UK.
First, some comparisons with what business parks aren’t, to spell out their niche and their required security posture. They are not industrial estates, home to metal-bashing, car repair, recycling and the like; where the security risks may include traveller encampments, fly-tipping on a scale from casual to industrial, and metal theft and theft generally. Nor are we talking about warehouses and data centres, although some of their site names may give the impression, such as Magna Park off the M1 near Lutterworth. The gigantic boxes there are for storage (for example by Iron Mountain) or the supply chain of retailers (wayfair) or parcel carriers (dpd), up the spine of England beside motorways and ringing London. Business parks have more in common, at least geographically and in feel, with the 1960s era of universities, built on the edge of towns and cities such as Warwick (actually on the outskirts of Coventry), UEA (north of Norwich) and Keele (a village outside the Potteries towns of Staffordshire).
Balancing of risks
Talking of geography, that matters in the balancing of risks and allowing business to happen. Milton Park is a tech and business park outside Didcot in Oxfordshire; buses run through it. Stockley Park has buses that go to and from Uxbridge and Heathrow Airport. That serves the workforce; particularly the support services of cleaners, security officers and the like. Even the UK Government signals intelligence agency GCHQ, which once did not acknowledge it existed, has a bus stop on the frequent Gloucester to Cheltenham bus route, though GCHQ does not let buses onto its campus. Buses, then, may let any paying passenger through a business park’s perimeter. Some business parks such as Chesterford Research Park in Cambridgeshire may simply be too remote to be on a commercial bus route (at best, you’ve got a fair walk from the number seven bus from Cambridge to Saffron Walden). If so, one solution can be to run coaches for staff, that at least allow some control of who’s getting on; a method also for big construction projects, to bus in workers from tens of miles around, such as Hinkley Point C in Somerset.
ANPR
Who’s renting properties on these business parks determines the risk, and how much site security is required. Around Cambridge, it’s the medical sciences, such as the Wellcome Genome Campus, not far from that Chesterford park. There, and (again nearby) at Granta Park, any vehicle trying to get in, on coming off the public round-about is met by forbidding looking barriers and a gatehouse, and maybe parked guarding patrol vehicles. You have no possibility of ‘accidentally’ straying onto the park. Let alone at Chesterford, where the drive once you leave the Saffron Walden to Cambridge road is long; the signpost is for the park and nowhere else. Typically at such parks, if you cannot prove your business, you’re not going in: registered vehicles take one lane, to be let in by automatic number plate recognition, while any others take the lane to state their business to the gatehouse officer; if you don’t have reason to enter, you can’t weasel your way in by manoeuvring while pretending to turn back; a small car park for those held short of the park proper is outside the perimeter.
Life sciences
During the covid pandemic, the UK found that life sciences are one of the few things that the country still does excellently and profitably (linked with university research; hence the parks cluster around Oxbridge, and other major research unis). Hence prominent on the UK official NPSA (National Protective Security Authority) website is advice about ‘secure innovation’ (aimed at start-ups, whose founders may be aspiring to be bought so as to make their fortunes, rather than scale up to take a property on a business park; but they may visit parks, and be part of the supply chain of larger businesses) and ‘trusted research’ (to protect intellectual property from those who would want to steal it, whether commercial rivals or hostile nations).
More football and geography
To sum up, it’s a balance; business parks are sui generis; to return to football, you could argue that St George’s Park in Staffordshire, where the England teams gather and train, pictured, is a business park. Irony is that the rural sites for business parks are often former stately homes built by industrialists who made their money from factories, and wanted to enjoy their wealth in quiet; St George’s Park is on the former Rangemore estate of the Bass brewing family; Chesterford Research Park has a ‘mansion house’ that you can rent offices in. Once, business was a matter of inputs and outputs (in, coal, yeast and grain for beer; out, the finished goods), that required being near ports, and railways; now what businesses use is intellectual and human capital. That implies the relatively little discussed insider risk.
More irony
While no-one wants a nuclear power station on their doorstep, and such critical infrastructure needs perimeter fences, business parks may have little obvious or even no fencing, and which government, local or central, does not want tech jobs? The executives and researchers at the likes of AstraZeneca and Pfizer may like the best of both worlds – green surrounds, and a motorway handy. The irony, and the lesson from history (such as the July 20, 1944 bomb that almost killed Hitler inside his East Prussian headquarters) is that for all the perimeter and building security, the greatest threat may come from the insider, let in whether trusted as an employee or someone who’s befriended you on LinkedIn. Hence NPSA guidance on the ‘insider risk’; and their campaign urging researchers, people newly retired from sensitive posts and everyone generally to ‘think before you link’.
Those NPSA links:
https://www.npsa.gov.uk/secure-innovation
https://www.npsa.gov.uk/trusted-research
https://www.npsa.gov.uk/insider-risk
https://www.npsa.gov.uk/security-campaigns/think-you-link-tbyl-0
