One minute I was eating a pie in Trevor’s car; the next I was shaking hands with a Cabinet minister. Such is a day with Trevor Barton, writes a forgetful Mark Rowe.
I tried to be clever by walking from Atherton railway station – it’s between Wigan and Manchester – to Trevor’s company offices, Professional Witnesses. I visited in March 2007 before their official opening in May. I recalled Trevor saying that a new supermarket was going up nearby; I found myself next to a Tesco, but no Professional Witnesses. So I had to ring and admit defeat and Trevor diverted from the station. As he drove me to the offices, there was a new supermarket, but I didn’t recognise the area anyway. The building is complete – Trevor tapped the plaques of his company accreditations outside the lift door inside – and outside there is still work to finish, car parking and the like, and installation of a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) so that the control room can look for remote surveillance work. I had assumed that on this last working day of 2007 I would take it easy, lunching with Trevor. Not so. His office was more ordered than last time, during the throes of the move; on the wall now were many framed photos, and a drawing of Trevor in his younger, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) days. Also framed; a Salford City Reds rugby league 2004 shirt; and Trevor’s ASIS certificate of membership. He began talking of the ‘growing pains’ of the move to larger, purpose-built and purposely anonymous, premises. It would be interesting, he thought aloud, how many people similarly moved offices and after 12 months thought: ‘what the hell did we do that for?!’ Trevor laughed and smiled. I asked what he was thinking of – things that he didn’t foresee, or things that he did but turned out differently? A bit of both. We went on to the HM Revenue and Customs lost computer discs affair. Trevor spoke of his building’s security measures and added: "The place where the data is stored needs to be really, really secure, and you really need to look after client’s data exceedingly well." One branch of Professional Witnesses’ work is covert or overt escort of cash in transit vehicles, against the risk of armed robbery. The security company has a duty of care to its staff; hence Professional Witnesses has a lone worker protection system using the new Blackberry 8800 – and Trevor held his. "OK, you say it’s a mobile phone. It is and it isn’t. It’s a mobile computer, but it’s one with a really high quality GPS chip in it. All our staff on the front line have one of these. And because we know where they [staff] are, if they hit the appropriate speed button, they can alert us they are going into a problem area or they are in trouble and we can set the response accordingly. At the same time they are Hoovering up intelligence for clients." Reports can go to mapping software, which verifies where the staff are, and gives integrity to, for instance, witness statements that always start with time and place. <br><br>Trevor took a sip of tea. Looking after the data of clients, as much as their goods, is vital. Hence the accreditations – SIA approved contractor, ISO 9000 – and IT penetration testing, to show that when data is in the contractor’s hands, it’s safe. "Because I think that security companies that can prove that they have got a willingness to comply to standards are the ones that will succeed. That is why we fell out with the SIA on some matters; but the principle of trying to regulate the security industry is right. And it’s right that people should put their faith in it." The prize is that instead of being treated as some third party contractor, you become a partner in a project: "Most people in security will tell you, you can feel the difference." In other words, if the client sits you down, tells you the problem, and asks what is the best way of going about it; that tells you your standing with the client. Trevor asked if I had said to him, if you are in security you have to have a conscience. I couldn’t remember. He said: "I know it sounds a bit yuk-making; but if we are in a service industry, you try and provide a good service." <br><br>I mentioned the privacy impact assessments (see separate article). Trevor described them as helpful. He recalled he came across data protection in the police; it should have been called information sharing, he suggested. That is, ‘data protection’ gives the impression that if you don’t do this, the chief is in trouble. Put that way, data protection is not liked because it stops you (the investigator, for instance) from doing things, or makes it more difficult. The phrase doesn’t get across the need to look after other people’s information; and keep people’s trust. Trevor said: "I now have this very positive stance, where the information we hold, obviously about our own people, and the clients, it’s vital we treat that properly and professionally. I said to a major client a couple of months ago, we have spent £14,000 in the last two years and a lot of time going through this whole accreditation process, which now involves IT and data a great deal. I am not so sure it’s worth it. He said, you may be looking at this the wrong way. You are now stepping on to playing fields you would not be allowed on to if you didn’t [have accreditations]." The gains from going through accreditation processes, then, are hard to measure, but they allow you, the contractor, to talk to serious people. It’s not to say that Trevor does everything right, or thinks he does. He doesn’t. Everybody trips up; but it’s about principles and aspiring to do things right. He added, it’s a bit like trying to quantify crime prevention. You can quantify how much a crime has cost, but it’s very difficult to say as a result of doing x, crime y was prevented, and hence money saved. Similarly, it is hard for the Information Commissioner or the SIA to show that compliance improves profitability. <br><br>I replied that an online questionnaire on the SIA website was for buyers, trying to tease just that out, about the approved contractor scheme. Trevor said that as someone who attended the SIA’s approved contractor seminars, the question raised more often than any other is; are buyers being guided towards not treating with non-ACS companies? The SIA says, no, it’s for the individual buyer. Approved companies will say that local education authorities for example employ, well, villains. It’s the old story of some saying accreditations are an expensive waste of time, and others pointing to signs that some buyers are coming round to saying ‘what do you do?’ and not ‘how much?’. <br><br>Trevor asked my opinion. I told the story of a guarding contractor (SIA-approved) that said it avoided local authority work because a council wanted a Rolls-Royce service for Skoda money; and so that contractor concentrates on shopping centre work. Trevor replied with the example of M&S food; sold at a premium, but selling well. How to get over to security buyers, Trevor asked, that if you employ only a man in a hut on a construction site, you might as well throw money away? <br><br>Our lunch of soup and a pie was here, but we had to take it with us to make Trevor’s meeting with Andy Burnham, the local MP. We parked at the back of Leigh town hall and walked round the corner to the Labour constituency office. Trevor and a consultant were updating Andy Burnham – absurdly young-looking, wearing blue jeans and jumper and open-neck shirt. Prime Minister Gordon Brown made him chief secretary to the Treasury in June 2007. The update: on the Leigh Sports Village project, which Trevor has worked voluntarily on. When Trevor drove me around the site last spring, I got the impression that despite Trevor’s career change from a senior police man to a businessman (now a member of Ex-Police in Commerce), building his own company, his heart was in this other work, putting something back into his part of the north west. As Trevor drove me around the site again after the meeting with Andy Burnham, that impression remained. The 10,000-seater stadium is up and nearly done, and there’s an indoor sports centre and other buildings, and housing. <br><br>In Trevor’s car later, I raised something that has struck me for years and that the Sports Village project reminded me of. In life, you have policies and procedures to follow – the Data Protection Act and so on – but to make a difference takes more than procedures; it needs individuals to get things done. Otherwise, in a crime and disorder reduction partnership (or any of all the partnerships out there) or in say a shopping centre, it’s just a talking shop. Trevor replied that you need both – things such as policies to be accountable to, and ‘champions’ to get things done.
Olympics training
Again with Andy Burnham’s political support, Leigh Sports Village is looking to draw a medium-sized nation for the weeks before the 2012 Olympics, to use the town as a training base. As I reported last year, it’s an example of how the Olympic Games need not only mean prizes for London. Indeed, my day with Trevor had begun by Trevor wondering aloud about branding. While in GMP, Trevor had been part of Manchester’s efforts to host the Olympics, in the 1990s. He recalled being in Monaco when the 2000 Games went to Sydney. In Trevor’s car at the end of the day I returned to this theme. What damage if any had this affair of the illegals with SIA licences done to the SIA or the private security ‘brand’? Among the security industry, and the public at large – does the public even give a damn? We only had time for Trevor to answer that for police, like security, you are doing your job when you aren’t noticed. An answer came to me on the journey home, walking from Wigan Wallgate station to Wigan North Western over the road. Passing a pub, I overheard a man on the door, wearing his SIA badge as doormen do on the upper arm. He said to a woman: "One man army, me." Brand, then, is what people in security – short-staffed, maybe, doing a difficult job the best they can – make it. It was only about then that I recalled in my pocket still was Trevor’s fork I’d eaten the pie with.
