If security is one of many services, then it’s part of the problem the UK has with poor service, writes Mark Rowe.
That’s not to blame the individuals, who are not bad people; for one thing, it’s not a new problem. You encounter it whenever something crops up, a security or other incident, or mishap, that upends the processes that service providers work to, whether trespassers or a suicide on the line that disrupts rail services (and Eurostar – it’s not only a British problem), a shop wants to report a crime that’s not in progress via the 101 non-emergency number, or at a hotel whose doors open with contactless plastic cards when the control unit’s battery runs out, or you want to take up with the owner of the flats you live in, something about the facilities management service, or you want to ask someone at HMRC or a utility about something – any number of bodies, and scenarios, and their service either takes an age to answer you in the first place, let alone return to normal service during an outage of service, and meanwhile staff seem unable or unwilling to show human sympathy, or even tell you the least detail about what’s going on.
The villains, if there are any, may be those in charge of the service, or one level above those who have set the contract, who long ago did away with resilience built in, in terms of staff in case of absentees, or accept as normal under-staffing, and under-equipping, and leave it to some charismatic or at least competent duty or shift manager to see the service through another day. Yet even those managers may not be on duty 24-hours, or may lose their enthusiasm to go ‘the extra mile’ and may quit altogether because the job is (to use the technical term I heard a hospital security manager use recently) ‘shit’.
Not only private security has a particular problem about employing staff whose English is not great. The same goes for hotels, and London services generally. Ever since the Security Industry Authority badging regime came in, in the mid-2000s, buyers of contract security have complained that SIA-licenced officers have seemingly passed the four or five days of training required, yet express themselves poorly in English. How are they supposed to direct you to the nearest toilet or car park, or lead people to safety in an emergency evacuation, and pass on details to the 999 responders?
The October print edition of Professional Security Magazine reported some surprising findings from the SIA’s monthly statistics on the Authority’s website. Roughly, the number of people with SIA badges has risen in the last 12 months from about 400,000 to 430,000. That increase broken down by nationality is not due to native Britons, but largely due to sharp rises in the numbers of people of Pakistani and Indian nationality, 55 per cent in each case, besides smaller numerical but other sharp percentage rises among badge-holders of Nigerian and Bangladeshi nationality. Also peculiar is that as of August 40,925 badge-holders were of Pakistani nationality – the second most common nationality after British; twice as many badge-holders were Pakistani as Indian, 19,489, though the world has several times more Indians than Pakistanis.
It’s not new and not confined to Britain that recent immigrants and foreign nationals will look to static security guarding, or driving a taxi or the like, as a first job that requires easily transferable or gatherable skills (driving a car and following a sat-nav, sitting in a gatehouse or at a desk in an empty office block overnight).
If security guarding has a chronic issue with guards who have little command of the English language, that begs the question of how we can possibly expect compliance with the proposed Protect Duty, more popularly known as Martyn’s Law, which may well expect security and non-security staff alike at ‘publicly accessible locations’ to take ACT online counter-terror training.
But even faced with a full command of English, what people on the wrong end of poor service want is not so much a concrete solution – we accept that fires, floods, thefts of railway copper cable happen, causing delays – but an explanation and appreciation of our plight by staff; in a word, some human touch. Again, that’s applies far from only to security officers: in numerous inquiries and scandals about poor hospital care, it’s not only the physical care that’s lacking – drugs get administered, bandages changed, though there are cases enough of people suffering and dying unnecessarily. Rather, there’s a lack of quality in the service, the tone of words as much as what’s said, whether to patients facing death or visitors facing bereavement. Again, there’s a security angle: those relatives who feel mistreated may take out their hurt anger on staff, including security responders. Security personnel at a hospital, then, need double training: in how to protect human and building assets, and some awareness of mental and physical health, and emotional intelligence enough to act on the understanding that the patient lashing out is not a bad person, but not in their right mind.
Another aspect of service is if preferential, better service is given to a few, because they are rich and powerful. In an age when everyone has a mobile phone to hand, it’s easy for preferential treatment to be photographed and spread on social media. Let’s take an example of foreign royals or billionaires when in hotels, or their children at a UK university. They may well have their own bodyguards, that a hotel’s or uni’s security need only liaise with, or leave alone. The university security manager with a foreign royal taking a course at their campus would be foolish not to take more care over the VIP, if only because the repercussions of, say, the theft of the VIP’s bicycle or a sexual assault, would be so much greater (and so would the career-altering threat).
Security does not happen in a vacuum. In May 2022 in her report into gatherings in 10 Downing Street and the Department for Education during the second covid lockdown of November and December 2020, the senior civil servant Sue Gray wrote among her conclusions that she ‘found that some staff had witnessed or been subjected to behaviours at work which they had felt concerned about but at times felt unable to raise properly. I was made aware of multiple examples of a lack of respect and poor treatment of security and cleaning staff’.
Arguably the most telling publication of 2023 was the written evidence submitted by an unidentified, because redacted, 10 Downing Street official, who told the House of Commons Privileges Committee of the ‘Wine Time Fridays’, on online calenders at the end of each working week (at 4pm). Social distancing and mask wearing were not enforced, ‘all part of a wider culture of not adhering to any [pandemic] rules. Number 10 was like an island oasis of normality. Operational notes were sent out from the security team to be mindful of the cameras outside the door, not to go out in groups and to social distance, it was all a pantomime.’ Was the Downing Street security team giving all too good service?
