The Security Industry Authority has rounded down its predicted numbers of people paying for SIA licence applications, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the regulator’s latest stats, dated July 1 and covering the lockdown months of April to June.
The numbers of ‘awarded qualifications’, that usually run at about 7,000 a month, slumped from March, due to lockdown. The physical intervention training for the door superviser badge – that door badge being by far the largest one taken up by the industry – cannot be carried out due to 2m social distancing rules, although the SIA has worked with exam awarding bodies and some guarding firms to bring through SIA badge training online, as SIA chief Ian Todd told a BSIA seminar on Wednesday.
From 7400 awarded qualifications in March, the totals went down to 1300 in April and a low of 300 in May, though rose to a still low 900 in June. That and other stats may reflect the shuttering of pubs and clubs, taking away demand for door staff and related stewards in the night-time economy and events more generally. Before the pandemic, the SIA was forecasting for itself 12,000 to 14,000 licence applications a month, for the four months of March to June; now, it’s predicting 9000 to 11,000.
Of the three main licensable sectors in terms of numbers, while the number one, doors, saw a fall, the number of CCTV public space operators remained about steady and the number of contract security guards actually rose.
The SIA also classifies some 420,000 badges by ‘travel to work area’ (TTWA). By far the largest is London, where active licences are 114,000 or 27pc of the whole; and to that can be added ‘Slough and Heathrow’, another 17,000, or 4pc, which places that part of western London in fourth by area, greater than Glasgow and Liverpool combined. Second and third are Manchester and Birmingham. As another sign of how manned security is tilted towards the capital and the south east (Luton is another high ranking district, in seventh, with just short of 7000 ‘active licences’), Sheffield have half a million people which makes it the third largest council area, but it comes in 17th by number of ‘active licences’, with some 4566.
Of those 420,000 a majority are door staff licences – 273,000, which works out at 65 per cent. The total of actual licence holders is 362,300, as some people may hold a door or guarding badge and CCTV operator badge at once. Of those 362,300, a bare tenth are women – 10.11pc, according to the SIA.
You can view the stats on the SIA website.
ACS stats
Likewise the SIA has stats on its approved contractor scheme – some 836 companies have ACS status. Most, 785 are doing manned guarding, though some have approvals in other fields such as key-holding.
