More is being asked of door staff – to be aware of child sexual exploitation and vulnerable women, and to respond to terrorism as in the recent London Bridge attack – yet door staff are harder to reach, as the work is casualised, a Security Industry Authority (SIA) speaker admitted at the latest Security TWENTY 17 conference, in Harrogate on July 4.
Ed Bateman, the SIA’s deputy director, partnerships and interventions, pictured, admitted it was a conundrum: “I don’t know what the answer is.” He said he had set targets for the authority’s 45 investigators: “I want them to talk about safeguarding, about not just regulation, but all these key messages.”
On violence reduction in the night-time economy of pubs and clubs, and in day-time retail, he admitted that there was ‘massive under-reporting’, both because guards might not want to admit they were assaulted, and because venues did not want to report in case they got a bad name; which made it difficult for the authorities to build a profile of violence, to to know where to reduce it. He said that the SIA was developing a good practice register online, of what worked in reducing violence.
As the opening speaker at the ST17 North conference at the Majestic Hotel in the Yorkshire spa town, Ed Bateman did point to ‘lots of good initiatives out there’, whether in terms of the equipping of door and other security staff – wearing body cameras, and requiring alcohol testing of pub and club-goers on entry – or of a ‘jigsaw of agencies’ working to make the night-time economy safe, whether street pastors, safe havens, and business crime reduction partnership radio networks, and the ‘Ask for Angela’ idea whereby women or anyone feeling unsafe can ask at a venue and be aided.
His talk also ranged over the authority’s enforcement against organised crime groups inside the security sector, like others (‘tiny, but they are there’); and some issues not thought of when the SIA was set up in the mid-2000s, such as modern slavery (contracted guards might be at sites where workers were not allowed to leave, and paid wages well below minimum, and Ed Bateman urged reporting of such cases), and child sexual exploitation (CSE) and the safeguarding of the vulnerable, such as women on nights out. Drunks can also be vulnerable, he pointed out. He asked businesses to consider attending Project Griffin, and Argus, training sessions, on spotting hostile reconnaissance, and preparing for acts of terrorism, respectively.
But he did admit that the door sector, where staff might be taken off a door at 11pm and asked to return at 1am or 2am, made it difficult for awareness messages to get through to the front line.
At the next ST17 conference, at another new venue, the Glasgow Hilton, on Tuesday, September 5, the speakers invited include the SIA chair, Liz France. ST17 events are free to attend, whether you’re a consultant, specifier, security manager or installer; we ask only that you register online beforehand, to help gauge numbers to cater for, as there’s a free hot buffet lunch after the conference.
A charity fund-raising dinner the night before the Harrogate conference and exhibition raised £2050 for the SANDS Stillbirth & Neonatal Charity. For a full report see the August 2017 print issue of Professional Security magazine. For a gallery of pictures from Harrogate, click here.
