On this day 20 years ago, the Security Industry Authority (SIA) held its unveiling conference at the QE2 Centre in central London. Professional Security Magazine editor Mark Rowe was one of the hundreds there. He reflects on the anniversary.
The SIA besides its day to day work of badging (and renewing the badges) of hundreds of thousands of men and women doing licensable activities, and running the (voluntary) approved contract scheme (ACS), fulfils another function; it’s something for the security industry to grumble about, much like the television licence gives a licence for grumbling about the BBC. The stereotypical late-middle-aged bloke who’s a security manager does have much to grumble about besides the SIA – potholes in the roads, much of modern life. Where would the security industry be, without the SIA? Certainly a need for it would have arisen, from the Manchester Arena Inquiry, if the SIA were not around. And the SIA did relatively well under the harsh, with-the-benefit-of-hindsight spotlight of the Inquiry: the SIA at least did not have to make a televised grovelling apology like the police, fire and ambulance, and MI5.
As with any couple married for 20 years, familiarity can bring contempt, and over the years the Authority has had its share of IT and other mishaps (though haven’t we all?). In the early days of the badging regime, for some time if you wanted to check someone’s licence status against the SIA database, that might not take long if you were searching for someone early in the alphabet – Aaron Aardvark, let’s say. But if it was someone with a name like Zak Zebedee, you could not go straight to Z, but had to take half an hour to click all the way through. That sort of experience can make the best-natured person turn to hate. Another way that industry people can become disillusioned with the SIA is if they report wrong-doing – someone without a badge, or an expired badge on a door – and hear nothing back. The SIA is far from the only public or private sector body to be bad at feed-back – take the police (and over its 20 years, key figures at the SIA especially on the enforcement side have come from the police).
A joke on an episode of The Simpsons had the family on an aeroplane and Homer Simpson remark about a magazine article, ‘Indonesia is at a crossroads!’ For much of the 20 years it may feel like the SIA too is at a crossroads, whether due to outside influence (such as the effort by the new Coalition Government in 2010 to give the SIA the chop as part of a ‘bonfire of quangos’, which seems to have gone right out of fashion since) or the SIA’s own round of reviews of its work. It’s more genuinely than usual at a crossroads due to the proposed Protect Duty after the Arena Inquiry cleared the way politically for the Home Office to bring in Martyn’s Law, that if it comes in (and because it is in the hands of the Home Office, nothing can be taken as a certainty) will make the biggest change to the security sector since the SIA. Will the SIA have the task of overseeing the Protect Duty?
So often it’s what those in power and authority are silent about that’s as interesting as what they do talk about. That the SIA is making little of its birthday may suggest a lack of interest, or lack of institutional memory (few at the SIA have been around since the year dot), or that sense that they’re at a crossroads and in for change (and when is change ever for the better?).
Inevitably such change would make the SIA’s bread and butter badging and the ACS seem overnight less important by comparison, and less likely to get attention and reform. That’s another theme of the 20 years, and a cause for grumbles; that the SIA wasn’t set up to do the right things. Some want in-house security licensed like contracted security; some want the ACS done differently. One wise retired veteran who still takes an interest in the industry remarked to me last year how wrong it was that a Labour Government in the 2000s required the individual to pay for the SIA badge (and the training so as to apply for it) and not the business, even though security officers, door staff and CCTV control room operators are typically low-paid.
Why did the SIA do that? Because it’s easily forgotten how resented the SIA was at the outset, whatever it did. For one thing, door staff would not take kindly to being told how to do their job by trainers and to have to take an exam. More dangerously for the SIA, more powerful were guarding company heads, late-middle-aged Thatcherite businessmen of the sort who resent paying taxes for anything beyond the roads, and who did not like any regulation, or anything that a Labour Government did. For the regulator to place the cost on the security officer made less trouble for it in the early days.
In all fields of life as in the SIA’s progress it’s intriguing and impossible to say what effect individuals had – or were they more or less powerless in the face of governmental, societal or economic forces? The chair and chief executive of the SIA do have some power; some influence. The current chair and chief, Heather Baily and Michelle Russell, have sought to do more banging of the drum to bring more women into the sector. They attended the March 8, International Women’s Day event at Tate Modern (pictured, speakers on stage including Michelle Russell).
More telling, and moving, at that event than what Michelle Russell said, was the way she and Heather Baily mingled with the women afterwards – women from all ranks and backgrounds of the security industry. The previous chiefs were all men, though by some quirk all the SIA’s chairs have been female. Now the previous five (not including stopgaps) male SIA chief executives were of varied emotional intelligence, and identified with and were comfortable among security people to varying extents. But I cannot visualise any previous chief exec and chair pairings being so at ease among a security audience – let alone a largely female one – as the current pair.
What is that worth? Over the last 20 years, for all the calls for more women in security, women are still only about one in ten of the workforce. The SIA under Michelle Russell has sensibly been at pains to point out what it can and cannot do, under statute, the Private Security Industry Act 2001. It cannot raise pay rates or tell buyers what to do; it can enforce the PSIA. If the SIA has a scandal waiting to happen – and every organisation does – it is around training. Who’s checking the typically five day courses of new security guards and door staff, the SIA or Ofsted? How else but by corner-cutting or outright fraud are people with broken English still able to hold SIA licences (presumably not fake badges, although that is another problem, though any badge or ID document worth copying is at risk from fraudsters).
In 2003, how impossible it would have been to predict 2023! We can say with confidence that some organisation doing the SIA’s work – maybe with a drastically expanded remit, under another name – will be around in another 20 years. People will still be grumbling, finding faults with it, and it will still be as necessary as ever.
