CV One manages Coventry city centre. It’s nearly finished its new control room that should monitor twice the number of cameras the old one has done.
Mark Rowe takes a look – but forgets to try the £600 seats.
Oh yes, that’s a big improvement, I said, when shown inside the new, light grey control room. "A big transformation," Trevor Pepper agreed. As when we last visited in the January 2007 issue, Trevor is operations manager at CV One. He said of the old control room: "We realised we have really outgrown what we could do with it. The city centre is expanding all the time." And the job of CV One is to look after the central business area (the postcode CV1). For one thing, the next generation will see thousands of residents in the city centre, ‘which will bring us a new problem’, in a word, domestic besides trade waste. All this will need CCTV monitoring, just as (as featured last year) the existing cameras help police and CV One’s own uniformed staff to manage the city centre.
To return to the new control room. Trevor said: "We were looking for future-proofing. It was no good moving into another room and five years later we need more monitors. We have gone big and over capacity, to build for the future. We plan to be in here at least ten years." Among the people that CV One talked to beforehand were Bernard Jefferies at Coventry City Council’s CCTV and alarm control room, to the north of the city centre. CV One wanted to stay central because, for one thing, if there is an emergency, and an evacuation of the centre, police commanders and council emergency planning staff have less far to travel. Trevor said that CV One has asked some of the retailers where their evacuation point would be: "And we discovered they have all got the same evacuation point; which would be full. With the CCTV we can start directing people, using the retail radio as well, saying where we would like them to go."
The room is long and – in the view of some – there are a lot of monitors making a video wall, three high. Trevor saw me trying vainly to tot them up, and said there were 62. In any incident, the police and emergency planner can sit at the back and up to six operators at work stations in front of the video wall, including some Panasonic large screens, and Bosch traditional monitors (the majority of the equipment is Bosch). The installers are Optilan, and the control room furniture by Intech, who ironically were sponsors of the internet access at nearby IIPSEC that I used to gen up on CV One beforehand. Trevor praised Intech’s work, for drawing up plans of what the room would look like. It’s self-contained and has a power supply separate from the rest of the building. There’s a gentle hum from the air conditioning. Trevor knows from experience that the police, especially in major incidents, like to take away CCTV footage in big quantities, and when that means taking away your hard drive, that can stop your system working. So Trevor met police and came to an agreement as to what police would take and what they would leave, so that the control room can carry on recording (31 days).
Presently there are seven control room staff (Reliance Security still has the contract); CV One plans to go up to 13. In the new room they will have high-backed £600 each chairs to sit on; Trevor explained the price on the lines that the company wants staff to be comfortable, hence happy, and working well. He described how one end of the room would monitor the city centre, and the other, the city-wide BID. There’s also room for work from say local residential blocks and public transport that the control room hopes to pick up. As Trevor said: "To operate a centre like this, you need a funding stream constantly coming in." Briefly, Business Improvement Districts are in town and city centres from as large as London to fairly small places such as Rugby. Whereas in business crime partnerships in a town centre or a shopping mall, those that don’t pay enjoy the same fall in crime as those public-spirited enough to pay to be a partnership member, if businesses in a BID area vote for the BID, everyone pays. Coventry city centre’s three-year BID has come up for a vote again this spring. It argues its charge is lower than most (under 1pc of rateable value) and it’s brought services including security (‘evening ambassadors’ from Wednesday to Saturday nights, for instance, looking after night-goers).
The city-wide BID began running in October. In January, CV One unveiled the contract security company providing four cars for mobile patrolling: MITIE Security. Mark Nicholls, head of city centre management for CV One, told the local Coventry Telegraph: "Most of the members we have spoken to have said that crime is an ongoing concern so we’ve brought in a local specialist which can give our members peace of mind." If you raised your eyebrows at the description of MITIE as ‘local’, bear in mind that the contract company’s local operations manager Stuart Bleazard and regional MD Chris Tweedy are based in Warwick; it was The Watch Security, acquired by MITIE in 2005. The four vehicles are yellow (to make them different from MITIE’s usual white) and in the livery of MITIE and city-wide BID. They cover 87 sites across the city and some 2500 businesses. Naturally there are big names among the businesses, yet many are small offices and light industrial units, the sort of places that pay their lease and are pretty much left to it. But; they complain of so-called low-level crime and disorder, from graffiti to youths hanging around, to theft. That is where George Want comes in. The former assistant protection manager at the University of Coventry started work at CV One in January, as business crime adviser. He featured in Professional Security in June 2005 when he retired after almost 40 years as a special constable; the chief constable praising the achievement as the equivalent of six years service of a full time regular officer. In a neat twist, George once employed Trevor; now it’s the other way round; there is a moral there somewhere.
Among George’s jobs is to offer crime assessments of premises, of whatever size. Another topic is the recent change in the law about fire risk assessments; the onus is now on businesses to do their own, but many businesses may not know that. Many of these sites within the city-wide BID will get broadband connections and CCTV, managed by CV One. Hence the new control room, because an extra 300 cameras could be added to the current 260 covering the city centre. On a city-wide scale this is novel stuff, and not only about security, just as CV One is about helping business generally. For instance there are ‘business area champions’ to help small and new businesses, whether writing business plans or doing a contingency plan. As Trevor said, only a percentage of businesses suffering from arson ever recover or trade again. That remark took special meaning afterwards, when I climbed the old cathedral tower to take photos of the city centre; below was the roofless cathedral gutted by fire after German bombing on the night of November 14, 1940.
While the MITIE patrollers are not initially there to respond to intruder alarms, as such – but if someone rang to say, the alarm is going off next door, a patroller would be dispatched – Trevor gave an idea of what the officers have dealt with, so far. "Last Saturday they turned out to help a stranded AA man, locked in one of the units by mistake. They [MITIE] found a number of premises insecure out of hours." Usually that is windows left unlocked, though in one case the proprietor managed to leave their only door unlocked. It does happen. Trevor went on: "They dealt with anti-social behaviour in a couple of places, spoken to kids causing a nuisance. I think they detained somebody for graffiti as well. They [the incidents] aren’t what you get normally from buying a patrol man in." It struck me, and I said, that you could imagine police attending (or being asked to attend) all of those cases. Here was a point from last year’s article, about the city centre, that CV One staff attend to for example the driver stuck in a car park entrance, the not earth-shattering things that however may get a 999 call because they do affect and distress people. That said, a low-level anti-social behaviour call may not need a police response, but simply a uniformed person to deter an offence from happening.
One of the reasons for George is that by visiting businesses and simply hearing what they have to say, the patrols can get smarter. They’re also for reassurance – not only of BID payers, but other, unrelated security officers? Certainly you have the regular talk between the Reliance control room operators and the MITIE patrollers, which I am assured is going fine.
So, how the BIDs work out, time will tell. Any BID with the aim of providing a business district with services – including security – has to deliver or else businesses will vote no. You will recall that the naked ride by Lady Godiva was in a protest against tax. Yet at the Godiva statue in the centre of Coventry today there is another story; nearby in 1939 (yes, that is not a typing mistake) the IRA let off a bicycle bomb that killed five and wounded dozens. The recent opening of the IKEA store in Coventry prompted multi-agency meetings between Trevor, police and so on, in case of traffic jams on the scale of the Brent Cross opening of the home furnishing store in north London in 2005.
