Hinxton Hall in Cambridgeshire was the new venue for the Association of Security Consultants’ (ASC) 31st annual conference, Consec, on Thursday, October 23, Mark Rowe reports.
While Consec was held at the Met Police’s sports and social club around the millennium, this was the ASC’s furthest Consec from its usual home in London. Attendance was at least as good as previously and organisers would have every reason to remain out of London next year. In another new departure for 2025, Consec had two streams of talks over the day instead of one.
ASC vice-chair Simon Crane told the main hall, pictured, that the association had over 450 members and increasing ‘exponentially’: “It shows the trajectory we are on as an organisation.” As seen on the exhibition floor, as Simon added the ASC has just signed a contract with the building research establishment BRE, to take over the Sabre building and site security accreditation scheme from the Security Institute. The ASC board member Ken Graham is putting together a team to develop the accreditation, he added.
The theme of the day was how conflict is driving technology. That was reflected at once by Bob Judson who spoke in each stream. He’s a retired air vice marshal, whose 34 years in the Royal Air Force took in flying, working on the London 2012 Olympics, and the subject of his talk: command of Kandahar International Airport, for nine months in 2008, and his experiences of the ‘on the ground’ security. While (as he mentioned in passing) security tech has come on since, and the site would be secured differently if done so today, the case study was strikingly relevant, because so wide-ranging. As he laid out, security was not only a physical matter (whether when beyond the perimeter driving in convoy, or inside the perimeter which could and did come under fire) but a matter of providing a ‘secure zone’ for those of the 20 nations serving in Afghanistan, who might include soldiers seeking a respite from ‘hard fighting’.
The challenges to ‘force protection’ as he set out were many: logistical (the airport, ‘in the middle of nowhere’, had to bring in its fuel by land); the local inhabitants (he set much store on ‘hearts and minds’ work); even banal (inside the air base were speed limits) and the climate (cold in winter, turning hot including dust storms). If site security can be sensitive, protection of military bases is even more so, making his talk particularly interesting (Bob Judson also does a regular podcast; one recently was about his work while still in the RAF on the London 2012 Olympics). Delivering insight is only what Consec routinely delivers, to its audience not only of consultants but suppliers and installers of security products and services.
As featured in the November edition of Professional Security Magazine, the ASC’s seminar in September covered artificial intelligence (AI). Consec focused on drones; and their land counterparts, ‘unmanned ground vehicles’, such as dog-like quadrupeds, such as robotics manufacturer Boston Dynamics’ Spot. Rosie Richardson, product and strategy director at Createc, was among speakers; Createc works on applications of AI and robotics. She set out how such products have progressed beyond the ‘really?’ stage, and gave examples of how end users are already seeing a return on investment in including quadrupeds in their site safety and security management. While cost will be a factor, one option is to lease the robot rather than buy it outright; and understanding where the quadruped could do things at least as well as a human guard or surveyor or inspector. A possibility she raised was of ‘blended’ robot and human teams, whether the quadruped enters hazardous spaces (such as in nuclear power stations) to read temperature gauges, or to patrol perimeters (uncomplainingly in the rain and at night).
Among the afternoon speakers were Richard Flint, technical and commercial lead for physical security at the building research and product testing body BRE. He touched on the high-profile robbery of jewels from the Louvre in Paris in October 2025, as an example of how sites should consider what risk criminals might be prepared to invest, to make a theft or other forces entry attempt to premises worthwhile. He made the case for the LPS 1175 standard from BRE, for resistance to manual forced entry; and the UK official NPSA (National Protective Security Authority’s) guidance document on forced entry.
In the morning, Noah Price, G4S’ Academy international director, gave further detail about the security contractor’s World Security Report, based on one of the largest surveys of chief security officers (CSOs) around, going through some significant differences in survey results from UK respondents compared with CSOs from other regions.
More in the December 2025 edition of Professional Security Magazine.
