Quite apart from the day to day work of protective security (pictured, fluorescent jacket-wearing security officers at an entrance of the Natural History Museum in west London, winter weekday shortly before closing time), as seen most visibly around the Coronation of King Charles III in 2023, as at the ceremonies around the death and funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, UK private security is forging ahead in many ways – making links with business and police. Yet 2023 saw examples of the security sector – physical-world and cyber – losing ground, which spoke of a chronic lack of influence in the corridors of power, writes Mark Rowe.
As featured in the December print edition of Professional Security Magazine, the Protect Duty, more popularly known as Martyn’s Law, duly made it into the King’s Speech and thus was on the Conservative Government’s to-do list in the final session of Parliament before a likely general election in 2024. Yet the prospect of such a legal responsibility on hundreds of thousands of venues and premises to take steps to counter terrorist attack was placed into practical doubt by a consultation on a part of the proposed law, as drawn up by the Home Office and savaged by the Home Affairs Select Committee in the summer as ‘not fit for purpose’.
This spoke more of a chronically dysfunctional Home Office rather than any shortcoming of the security industry, which will have the job of actually complying with the Duty on behalf of clients. Better to at least be on the Government’s Agenda than not at all.
Rob Dartnall, representative of the CyberUp campaign, rued what he called ‘another missed opportunity to make our cybersecurity laws fit for the 21st century’. He said: “Reform of the Computer Misuse Act [1990] is key for our security and economy and the Treasury had committed to this in the Budget in March. Cybercrime and fraud continue to have huge financial impacts on our national infrastructure, businesses and charities. Time is running out for this Government to achieve effective and necessary progress on its Budget promises. Every day of inaction will continue to leave the UK at further risk from cybercrime.’
In a speech in the House of Lords after the King’s Speech, the Labour working peeress Baroness Henig spoke some home truths, on long waiting times for court cases (which leaves victims and indeed the accused in limbo), prisons (‘full to bursting’) and rehabilitation of offenders (drug and alcohol facilities, and mental health facilities are in short supply).
As the former chair of the Security Industry Authority (SIA), she focused on what she termed a ‘profound disconnect between central government and what is being delivered on the ground’ relating to public security and protection. Her point was that the Home Office had decided against SIA-badging of CCTV in-house operatives, and compulsory licensing of security companies, even though they were two of Manchester Arena Inquiry chair Sir John Anderson’s recommendations. She accused the Government of ‘speaking in headlines but failing to deliver measures on the ground that would actually make a difference’.
Baroness Henig, who has passed ten years as a director of the SIA-approved, Glasgow-based guarding contractor Securigroup, is a reliable and well-informed voice in Parliament making the case for private security. While welcome, it’s about time that private security had the same input as the police, the military and any number of occupational interest groups. Speaking a quarter of an hour before Baroness Henig, the former senior Met Police man Brian, now Lord, Paddick, bemoaned a ‘worrying trend’, whereby ‘polarising issues are being exploited not just by fringe elements but by politicians holding senior positions in government, leaving the police to deal with the fallout’.
Of the ‘trinity’ of police, military and private security, the military is by far ahead in terms of veterans in place in positions of power – as it was when the Duke of Wellington was prime minister. Nor are the police short of parliamentarians able to put the police’s point of view, notably the former Met Police Commissioner Lord Hogan-Howe, who before Lord Paddick spoke of firearms officers and ‘difficult decisions trying to balance the right to protest against the problem of serious disorder’.
To leave the physical world for cyber (although on Paddick’s point, any exploitation of issues may well be on social media), the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy of peers and members of Parliament reported on ransomware. The committee’s chair, the former Labour Cabinet minister Margaret Beckett, noted that the UK has the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s most cyber-attacked nations. “It is clear to the Committee that the Government’s investment in and response to this threat are not equally world-beating,” she tartly added. The framework of laws is ‘irresponsibly outdated’, she said, and ‘Government missed another chance to rectify this in the latest King’s Speech’.
The report itself pointed to how the Home Office leads for central Government on ransomware as a national security risk and policy issue, ‘but the former Home Secretary [Suella Braverman] showed no interest in the topic’. As the report added, some suggested ‘that clear political priority in the Home Office is given instead to other issues, such as illegal migration and small boats’.
To air only briefly two further examples of where private security has lost ground in public policy terms, featured in Professional Security Magazine: the proposed abolishing of the office of Surveillance Camera Commissioner when Prof Fraser Sampson’s term came to an end, which meant all the voluntary work done out of good-will to set up a code of practice, and cyber and other standards would be wasted, as featured in the May edition. That the Home Office announced a new SCC in December, Tony Eastaugh, who came from the Home Office’s work against ‘small boats’, at the same time looked like a welcome reprieve for the SCC, yet left you wondering where it could go from here, given the wider uncertainty over regulation of data in general and artificial intelligence in particular, and regulators and law-makers forever trailing those in business making (and patching) new products and services.
As set out in the January print edition of Professional Security, NHS England told the National Association for Healthcare Security (NAHS) conference in Birmingham in November how the central body overseeing the National health Service wanted NAHS’ help, to set standards in contracts for security services. While welcomed by those hospital security practitioners attending, it only reinforced that hospitals had been without such central direction for security since the central function for security management and counter-fraud cut out security management in 2017, to carry on with counter-fraud only. What NHS England was proposing also sounded some way short in terms of personnel and reach of NHS security at the centre, pre-2017.
