What travels faster – good news or bad?
On the morning of January 12, the Government announced that private security would have an approved contractors scheme. In the afternoon, a guarding firm MD rang, calling the SIA affair ‘a joke’. He complained of ringing the SIA and being put through to a recorded message; and of emails going unread. Now if you argue about what you sent, when, to a quango, it can become like a playground squabble, over who did what. And some security companies whose guards or CCTV operators need licences by the Monday, March 20 deadline may say they have tried to apply, or to apply for application packs, when they have not.
But even if that MD does not have his staff licenced by the deadline, if the SIA does not enforce it at once, the MD’s complaints will remain only complaints. As ever with the SIA and any other regulator, it comes down in the end to enforcement.
To repeat, the announcement that there would be an approved contractor scheme came on January 12, nine and a half weeks before the deadline for licences. By comparison, the Government had three months of consultation about the scheme, ending November 17, and has thus taken exactly eight weeks to make the announcement. Even then, the details of the ACS are sadly lacking. That makes planning impossible for guard firms.
Bizarrely, the most detail that Home Office Minister Paul Goggins gave on January 12 was that the ACS would be a mix of two of the four options, options three and four, from last autumn’s consultation. The reason, he reckoned, was that those two options were by far the most popular, which begs the question why this preferred, presumably most suitable option could not have been part of the consultation.
The minister’s statement could not even say what percentage of an approved company’s guards would be allowed to work, while they waited for an SIA licence to come through. The consultation spoke of 15 per cent; clearly the percentage in the end will be similar, because it would be ridiculous to have it at 50 per cent or more, and it would be as ridiculous to have a tiny percentage.
Even if a guard firm fills in and sends back the paperwork the same day as the finished scheme comes out, they would have to wait weeks for a reply from the SIA. At the rate the authorities are taking for each stage of making an ACS, it is difficult to see how a guard firm can become approved before the March 20 deadline.
While the SIA has insisted that the ACS is voluntary, guard firms insist that there is no way they could trade without the leeway that approved status allows. In other words, the ACS is in practice part of the licence.
There is one intriguing side to the ACS. I have taken the view that SIA regulation will lead to the Tescoification of security contract guarding, because regulation will benefit the largest firms, the BSIA members, the firms with the deepest pockets who can weather the uncertainty while licences come in, and squeeze out the small fry. But you could argue that the largest guard firms need the ACS more than the smallest. Say the percentage of guards that don’t need a licence at once to work under the ACS is 15 per cent. For a small guard firm with 75 people, that works out at … I can do this in my head, just go and make a cup of tea for a minute … 75 is three-quarters of 100, and three-quarters of 15 is … 12.75. Let’s say 12 guards and the one you call Shorty. Now if that small guard firm has done the right thing and got all its guards trained and licenced in good time, or the firm has all the documents ready to send to the SIA. Twelve guards is not a large number, it’s a handful. But if you are one of the largest guarding firms, with several thousand guards, and you are banking on having the ACS to give yourself some juggling room, 15 per cent of say 5,000 is 750. And that is a lot of people.
On the other hand, it could be that the largest firms with the deepest pockets are still the ones who can benefit from regulation, because they are the ones who could afford to take on extra staff in the last few months, as insurance until the ACS comes in. To repeat, as always with the SIA, it all comes down to enforcement, and if there is a level playing field, enforced.
