Now on desks and freely available to read online is the January 2023 print edition of Professional Security Magazine, your premiere guide to the UK private security industry, whatever your interest, background or sector.
The turn of the year is a time to refresh yourself and take stock, and that’s reflected in our interviews, notably with one of the forecasters at Control Risks. We also bring you comment from other risk forecast consultancies, for example from the launch of Sibylline’s 2023 forecast, on the evening after the authorities in Germany swooped to make arrests to counter a far-right conspiracy.
It’s a difficult to understand and predict a world, where such figures as Prince Heinrich XIII can credibly be regarded as plotters to attack the Berlin Reichstag, and former President Donald Trump is accused by a House Select Committee ‘to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol’ of summoning a mob to Washington DC, part of a ‘multistep effort devised and driven by Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election and block the transfer of power’, in the words of that committee’s chairman, Bennie Thompson (for a digest of that committee’s exhaustive 800-page report, in terms of the US Capitol’s security posture and the human story of guarding the politicians from angry ‘stop the steal’ protesters, see the February print edition of Professional Security Magazine).
The argument of risk consultancies to corporate security is that an intelligence function, whether outsourced or in-house, is required to make sense of threats so as to prepare for them in good time, whether in the physical world or cyber.
Plus we were there at the end of year industry events in London: such as the evening get-together arranged by IFPO UK man Mike Hurst; the AGM of the UK chapter of ASIS UK (which hosted among other awards the second giving of the annual awards in memory of the late industry stalwart Dave Clark); and the AGM of the Institute of Hotel Security Management.
Among the topics covered this month: remote monitoring (we were at the recent open morning of ARC Monitoring in Bristol, and hear from Ian Paton, pictured left at Corps Monitoring, on the metal recycling company Sims’ use of Corps Monitoring in Glasgow), student safety, loss prevention, data protection; how police are dealing with the healthcare sector on mental health cases; and, courtesy of former Hinkley Point C nuclear power station security man Frank Cannon now a consultant in that field of mega-construction site security, some advice on what end users do and don’t want to hear from a sales person, pulled from his highly impressive hour-long talk online to a Security Institute audience.
On the guarding side, we held a Zoom meeting with the MD of the facilities management and security contract company ABM UK, who among other things had some interesting things to say about the Apprenticeship Levy – is your FM or security workforce making enough use of it?!
If you’d like to see a print copy of the magazine with a view to subscribing email your name and postal address to [email protected]. You can read previous editions of the magazine at https://professionalsecurity.co.uk/magazine/.
