An guarding ops manager has complained of inflexibility and unhelpfulness at the SIA contact centre, dealing with a guard’s licence application.
David Lovell, operations manager of Mayflower Control, raised the case of an officer’s licence application. He said: "The applicant missed out a question on his application; a minor details, really, and the SIA could have quite easily overcome it, by phoning us, or him [the applicant] and getting the information. It was a number. So in the process they have sent the application back to him, saying incomplete. He has done what they asked him to do and sent it back to them. He received another letter from the SIA, with the cheque for payment." Meaning: the application form and cheque are in different ends of the country.<br>David Lovell complained to Professional Security after he spoke on the phone to a contract centre superviser, who he termed ‘unhelpful’. "Surely after four years they [the SIA] should be able to pick up a phone and talk to a company or an applicant and say, ‘you have missed out because of this, give us your number’. I can’t use the guy until this is resolved. They are telling me I can issue a licence dispensation notice; well I can, once they have received the application, but if I issue it today, they are going to turn around and say they haven’t got the application; we are playing bat and ball." <br>Mayflower, based in Stafford, is SIA-approved in guarding and key-holding. David Lovell’s complaints were that such problems over individual badging continue after four years of regulation; and of the unaccountability of the regulator and its contracted-out contact centre. He said: "We had this problem when we first had applications. We have had all sorts of problems with the SIA; people could not get through at one point; they have sorted it out, but you have to wait sometimes, depending on what time of day. They don’t care. I have been laughed at on the phone by these [contact centre] guys. They are just unhelpful. The trouble is they [the SIA] are a government agency and they think they are untouchable." <br>As someone who attended the last SIA annual conference, at Leeds in May, he recalled the then chief executive Mike Wilson asking the audience to contact him direct with queries. While Professional Security knows of ops people who took him at his word and did have satisfactory direct contact with Wilson – who left the SIA suddenly in November – David Lovell spoke of writing to the SIA chief exec and nothing coming of it.
The SIA commented:
We can’t process licence applications until we have received a correctly completed application form. This is in line with the clear guidance provided in the ‘SIA Licence Application Form Guidance Notes’, available to all licence applicants. Applicants sign a legal declaration on the form to say that they have read and understood the guidance notes and the information provided on the form is true and complete.
If errors are made on certain sections of the form, our contact centre will call the applicant to obtain further details in order to avoid rejection, as it is in ours and the applicant’s best interests that the application process is not delayed. However, there are some sections where this is not possible and we will have no option but to return the form for amendment.
