There’s change at The Corps. August saw a name change, to Corps Security. Earlier, the guarding company officially opened its monitoring centre, and held a black-tie dinner at the Royal Yacht Britannia. Mark Rowe took up the invite to go to Scotland.
Ben Gibbs, who had piped the 60 diners aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia docked at Leith, presented the Corps chairman Anthony Leask with the framed written music, composed to mark the day. Leask accepted it with the bearing of the major general that he used to be. The 60 guests and senior staff of the Corps that filled the yacht’s dining room applauded. It was an unscripted and moving part of the evening and summed up the day. The Corps – you don’t have to be that old to remember it as The Corps of Commissionaires – is changing; it has to, to meet commercial demands of the 21st century. But the heartbeat of the Corps remains.
Met at Glasgow Airport, Andy Stevenson the Nottingham-based key accounts sales manager gave me a lift to the Corps monitoring centre (CMC). It’s only a few hundred yards from the airport (think junction 28a, M8). Incidentally I couldn’t see a trace of last summer’s car-bombing of the front of the airport, but vehicles are no longer allowed to drive along the very front of the building.
It was a hot late July day, but in the air-conditioned windowless upstairs, once you entered (via HID contactless card) the two doors of the air-lock, it was cool. In a red-carpeted hall, on the wall were the operators’ level two BTEC training certificates from Edexcel, the training given by WSG Associates. Bill MacGregor the project manager talked us through the reinforced concrete wall and floor; carbon-reinforced inner roof; smoke and carbon monoxide detectors; and vibration sensors and panic alarms in case of intruders. Response would be from police and fire services from the airport. "From an operational point of view we have all the back-up facilities required by BS 5979 and 8418; if we were to lose the National Grid for example we have a generator downstairs, that would automatically power up." Meanwhile, in another room, stand 18 hours’ worth of Yuasa batteries. Looking through the glass at the control room itself, it looked, as Bill said, a ‘nice, quiet, pleasant place to work’, and spacious. "We designed it to take nine desks easily and can get about 14 desks in there."
Inside the monitoring room, four dome cameras are installed. By day, Bill described, operators can dial into sites and if they find anything not working, they can tell the customer and installer, and manage the process for them; engineers will turn up on site and replace equipment, tested end to end by the CMC. At night, the CMC is monitoring whole sites. At an industrial estate, say, the CMC may control gate access, via CCTV and intercom. If an alarm goes off, an audio signal goes off until the alarm is acknowledged and dealt with. A visual signal is on screen. The operator is presented with CCTV images, from just before, during and after the alarm was triggered. The operator can determine whether the alarm was due to wildlife, wind, debris, skateboarders (on a school playing field, say), or someone acting maliciously at 3am. Hence police know if they are responding to a lone intruder or a gang of robbers: "We have a fantastic working relationship with the police," Bill said, because police know that the CMC is giving accurate and live information.
You can still come across new or refurbished control rooms with walls of dozens of monitors. What’s striking about the CMC is that Bill MacGregor has resisted that temptation. On each of the four desks were five flat screens and, behind, a larger flat screen. Operators work a fire service-style pattern of 12-hour shifts, two days, two nights, then off. Control room furniture is from Lund Halsey: "We went to the specialists; they [the long desks] are purpose-built to contain equipment within the desk; we have very little equipment inside the desk because we wanted to move it to the server room, to maintain a nice, pleasant and cool environment." And the server room, with two air-conditioning units, in case one fails, is even cooler than the control room itself. Bill MacGregor was at the Corps’ previous control centre at nearby Renfrew for five years.
I did look through the glass in the door of the staff kitchen, to see the usual sink, fridge, microwave and a round table, and chairs. On the table (it was Scotland, after all) there was a bottle of Irn Bru.
Judging by the name badges of guests, not only strictly security people but facilities managers and commercial property agents such as King Sturge were invited. Such customers may ask for guards, or commissionaires in their full clobber, or some of each. The Corps reports that clients are seeking solutions (to use the current jargon) that involve technology, rather than manpower. Why? Simple: to be more effective, and to reduce costs, whether it’s monitoring alarms and CCTV, or controlling site access. To do that, as Anthony Leask told guests, you need a monitoring centre. Hence the Corps’ board decided a couple of years ago to build one – built on time and within budget, he said. Speaking next, John Sives, Scotland regional director, described it as a momentous day in the history of the Corps. New customers, he added, included The Junction (owners and managers of retail parks) and Insight Property Development. "This is clearly an exciting time for the industry, and the Corps has grasped that with both hands." He, too, spoke of customers seeing cost savings, and more efficient workplaces, through site monitoring, ‘but not at the expense of manned guarding’. Offered in the near future will be intruder and fire alarm monitoring.
Andrew White, chief executive of the National Security Inspectorate, did the ceremonial opening, presenting to John Sives the NSI gold medal for monitoring centres. In a short speech Andrew White said: "I am well aware the NSI is not the only third party approval body in the UK, but I would argue that we are the lead certification body and we demand more of our customers and clients than anybody else." He reminded the guests that the NSI is the only certification body that the Security Industry Authority has authorised to ‘passport’ companies into the SIA’s approved contractor scheme. He went on to argue for companies putting themselves through the ‘rigours’ of external audit: "It often adds the edge which raises everybody’s performance. I recall when I was a Tornado squadron commander; I genuinely believed I ran the best operational squadron in the RAF, but I didn’t know it until I was tested by an external, independent audit." As he added, in the air force he had no choice over the audit; he admired the Corps for putting themselves through it. Some customers, he said, might argue that such accreditation just puts up the price to the customer: "That is just plain wrong." He gave the example of false alarms, that eight years ago were ‘horrendous’. The false alarm rate has been reduced by work with insurers and others, to raise standards, understanding that quality does not come cheap, and does offer value for money. He ended by mentioning the British Standards, BS 8418 (for the installation and remote monitoring of detector activated CCTV systems); and BS 5979 (for remote centres receiving signals from security systems). He joked that as the last years of his RAF career had been spent in a bunker, he wished it had been in a bunker with such resistance to attack.
Who was there? The Corps’ top brass, naturally: Richard Moule, CEO; directors such as Colin Couch QPM; Race Colyer, HR director; Gary Broad, sales and marketing; and the event organiser Justine Moon, marketing manager. Clients and other guests included: from Cable & Wireless, Joanne Powell, estates manager, and Nicholas Batchelor, head of physical security; BSIA Technical Director, Alex Carmichael; Sean Quiggin, Director Interventions, National Probation Service; Brian Songhurst, UK facilities administration manager, Global Asset Management; Tom Lapage-Norris, regional security manager, McGraw Hill; and Bernard Sprague, national facilities manager, Muller Professional Services.
On the product side, attenders included Chris Berry, Managing Director of network alarm product firm Initsys; and Hamish McKirdy, the Australian (despite the Scottish name!) director of sales security EMEA for Xtralis. And not least, Veronica Stewart, the great-great-granddaughter of the founder of the Corps, Edward Walter. A retired Army officer, he was prompted by the plight of soldiers out of work after the Crimean War. (Some things never change?) The Corps of Commissionaires, offering work for uniformed doormen, began in 1859; so expect Corps Security – as it now is – to mark the 150th anniversary next year.
You can still ask for, and can see particularly at events, commissionaires in full military-style uniform – I saw two at Derby cricket ground in the summer. The Corps prides itself on its tradition, yet, rather like the Army, it has changed with the times. It offers mailroom and other building management services. The re-branding means a new logo, new brochure, that guests went away with, and new uniform, that will roll out to staff in due course. Most of its staff wear corporate suits; recruits can come from anywhere, and don’t need any military background.
The Corps then – or rather Corps Security as we must get used to calling it – has faced a balancing act. Again, to be fair, it’s a dilemma for any business. It is only fair to say that the Corps is not the only security company with history: there is Legion Group, with its charitable parent company, The Royal British Legion Attendants Company Trust; and G4S can point to a prewar UK past via Securicor. Whoever you are, you cherish what you have achieved, what has made you special and what you are, but the changing world threatens to leave any of us behind – and out of a job. In 1859, who could have dreamed that a prime minister would say he listened to music by the Arctic Monkeys?! Or police officers without ties?! Some people may find a commissionaire saluting them at a door not reassuring and impressive, but old-fashioned, or odd. And there’s more value, more margin, in electronic security than manned guarding. If a company turns its back on where it’s come from – loses its soul, in a word – that needn’t affect the bottom line. Yet it matters. If a company isn’t special any longer, why choose its services? There, then, is the balance, between being true to your past, and being up to date. That’s why I found the little ceremony by Ben Gibbs on board Britannia memorable, just as memorable as the harpist, the tour of the vessel, and the view at dusk across the beautifully still Firth of Forth. There was no mention of how much the new monitoring centre – or indeed the hospitality – cost. Whatever the cost, the Corps board decided it was worth it. And for all the medals worn and earned by the men and women of the Corps in the military, that decision to build a monitoring centre, too, took bravery. It is for rival guarding contractors to ponder, and potential clients to consider; and for Corps staff to justify.
– Mark Rowe was a guest of The Corps who paid for his flight from Birmingham to Glasgow, and one night’s stay at the Leith Malmaison.
