Now landing through letterboxes and into email inboxes is the July 2023 print edition of Professional Security Magazine.
Having featured some aspects of public space CCTV the month before when we attended the CCTV User Group conference in Northamptonshire, we continued a look at how the public sector is continuing to invest in video surveillance by visiting Southend City Council’s control room in the Essex city, courtesy of Barry Davis, surveillance operations manager. We even had a peek inside their new CCTV vehicle (picture by Mark Rowe, Southend centre, CCTV signage).
We bring you as ever the latest news that affects UK private security – the first morning last month of evidence hearings by the Home Affairs Select Committee of MPs as they do ‘pre-legislative scrutiny‘ of the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Draft Bill, which would bring into law the proposed Protect Duty, also known as Martyn’s Law, a legal requirement for venues and ‘premises’ to counter terrorism. Last month also saw a final hearing of evidence by the Manchester Arena Inquiry, to see what various authorities have done about the Inquiry’s ‘Monitored Recommendations’ (MRs). We report that the regulator the Security Industry Authority (SIA) is ‘disappointed’ that the Home Office has decided against compulsory rather than voluntary licensing of security businesses, though it was one of the Inquiry’s many MRs arising from its three volumes of findings.
We were at the annual awards lunch of the ACS Pacesetters group of high-scoring SIA-approved contract guarding companies, always one of the more heartening and moving occasions in the calendar, when ‘security officers of distinction’ are honoured for life-saving and other acts. Also we enjoyed an evening’s hospitality at the House of Lords, when the skills body Skills for Security gathered industry well-wishers to press home the point about the need for more to be done to bring in more young people and more talent generally to the sector; and then to retain those people.
What brings together many of those themes is the launch last month at Canary Wharf in London of an SIA-backed skills board, and the signing of a ‘pledge’ by security company executives; more on that in the months to come, but we bring you the first news of it.
Also covered are workwear; the Security Institute’s annual Wilf Knight Award; sportswear fashion loss prevention; information security; and as aired at IFSEC 2023 at London Excel in May, work by the SSAIB inspectorate and others towards badging of security and fire installers; the regular four pages of new products and services; and four pages of ‘spending the budget’; and magazine MD Roy Cooper’s gossip page for installers, manufacturers and distributors.
You can read the monthly publication at the ‘magazine‘ section of the website.
