A contrast between Brexit (the UK Government being unable to meet a near three-year deadline to leave the European Union) and NSI-approved companies (that proved well able to meet the deadline to meet the new version of the ISO 9001 standard, ISO 9001:2015) was raised by NSI chief executive Richard Jenkins at the start of the inspectorate’s sixth annual Summit for its installer, guarding and CCTV monitoring certified companies.
Jenkins reminded the event at the Vox centre, on the Birmingham NEC campus – which is seeing building work on a new hotel – that the vote to leave the European Union came just after the IFSEC 2016 exhibition, in June 2016. He made the neat point that in certification body terms, ‘limited extension’ (as sought in Brussels by UK PM Theresa May) is a thing of the past. The irony would not be lost on the audience, he said, that the Government and Parliament had shown themselves unable to work to a deadline; whereas NSI Gold companies had demonstrated clearly that with due planning they were more than able to do so, ‘by virtue of their success in meeting the September 2018 deadline for ISO 9001’.
As background; to gain NSI certification, among others in fire protection, electronic security, manned guarding or – the latest – kitchen protection systems, a company has to show they meet the standard in that field, and the ISO 9001 management standard. Jenkins ended his introduction to the Summit be recalling a recent visit to a small company that had just gone for NSI approval. As Jenkins related, the firm had argued internally for ten years about going for approval, and eventually decided because customers kept saying that it was not serious about security because it did not have approval. The firm gave Jenkins three reasons: now it doesn’t have clients say that about it; secondly, operations are now run more smoothly – ‘the discipline has been good for the company’ – and ‘the NSI auditor never gives up’. As Jenkins concluded: “That’s the double [UKAS] tick and crown for you.”
Jenkins is pictured speaking; in silhouette is the speaker after him, Tony Porter, the Surveillance Camera Commissioner, who reviewed his work and the two-year-old surveillance camera strategy. The NSI is among inspectorates that can audit CCTV users to the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice.
Simon Banks of CSL, NSI board member and chairman of the BSIA, spoke on apprenticeships; and Jonathan O’Neill, of the trade association the Fire Protection Association (FPA) spoke on ‘what next?’ for the sector. He presented the first two NSI certifications to early adopters of the kitchen protection systems standard: Buckingham-based Abbott Fire Group; and Nobel Fire Systems, of Heywood, Lancashire.
Later Richard Jenkins gave framed certifications to Chelmsford-based Fisk Group, accepted by director Mark Fisk, and compliance manager Greg Linehan; and Coventry-based IP Security Systems, collected by office administrator Sharon Taylor.
More words and pictures in the May 2019 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
