An arm of an international facilities management firm is among the recent gainers of approved contractor status (ACS) from the Security Industry Authority. Mark Rowe was invited to hear how and why.
Sodexo Corporate Services is one part of the catering and facilities management firm. Sodexo Defence has been providing support services to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) for more than 20 years, in Cyprus for instance. Andrew Leach, executive director, corporate services, before the official presentation of the ACS by SIA chief executive Mike Wilson admitted that his firm was relatively small in the security business (though the contractor in total has 43,000 staff in the UK), ‘but our clients are asking more in the way of security services, so if we want to do it properly, it’s worth the investment in the process, the time.” He saw it not as a commercial benefit but as a cost of doing business – and like any cost, you have to decide if it is worthwhile or a cost you can ignore. Plainly, the FM firm has chosen and gone for ACS.
Bundled
Kathy Ridgard, central operations manager at Sodexo Corporate Services, has come from the licenced trade and spoke of a similar sort of move to regulation of the liquor licensing trade. She made the point (and one should add that Sodexo are not the only company) that a lot of the firm’s security business comes as part of a bundled service. The FM firm gets a contract for catering, hospitality, or other services, and the client does not want to deal with a number of contractors when it can go with one. So ACS – Sodexo went with Insight Certification, the National Security Inspectorate’s approval body – covers practical matters such as employee vetting; and intangible things, such as showing corporate integrity.
Advice
While this nudged the total of ACS companies nearer to 500, many more are not approved. What advice would Kathy give to a firm still thinking of whether and how to go for approval? Her first suggestion was to make contact with the SIA – Andrew Shepherd – to understand what you need to do. An interesting sign of the benefit of going to the trouble to make a personal contact: Kathy attended the SIA’s second annual conference, at Leeds in May (see reports previous issue). After, she emailed Mike Wilson – who at the event did invite people to contact him direct – about 20 or so staff who had not got licences yet. A month later, they had their licences.
Quality assurance
While Kathy did make the point that last November – like every other guarding company – it had ‘some issues’ with getting licences, now it was ‘pretty much like clockwork’. She added: “One thing that we did do; we appointed our own quality assurance manager, specifically for security,” and to make sure that compliance stays on track. Given the size of the FM firm – it has several segments, such as education, and healthcare, and several layers of management – there’s also been some work to do internally, conference calls, flow chart drawing and the like, to get across to managers what ACS is and why have it. But it’s necessary for those sitting in front of a client and talking about security, the same as those contractor managers are familiar talking about cleaning. Kathy summed up: “It’s just worth it; I cannot stress that enough, because it gives the internal operation a discipline it’s never had before, that everybody understands.”
SIA say
Mike Wilson had come to the Sodexo offices in London NW1 to do the honours with the plaque. He added: “We are determined to make ACS better for business than it currently is; and I would endorse the comment made by Kathy; although there is a lot of helpful advice on our [SIA] website on how you can make the first steps in this direction, I suggest you talk to somebody in the SIA team. Yes, there are a series of hoops to go through, but they are fairly straightforward and we are looking forward to ACS being increasingly attractive to business.”
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