There are still minimum wage security jobs in Greater London, the MD of a recruitment consultancy confirms, but there’s more to guarding pay and conditions, he stresses.
Officers may earn £12, even £15 an hour, and employers of security guards may genuinely seek to up-skill people, to reward and keep them within the business, and so keep staff churn down, says Peter French, of SSR. He adds: “One of the effects of [SIA] licensing has been to remove the churn but what it hasn’t done is remove those that work at a very, very low rate of pay; and it really hasn’t impacted clients.” In other words, the critical people are in procurement. As a London-based consultancy, Peter speaks not of the national minimum wage but the £7.85 hourly ‘London living rate’ rate, set by the Greater London Authority. That’s not a law, but a wish, championed by London Mayor Boris Johnson. There are people in private security who started as officers, as a temporary job, and found they liked the work – but who probably would not have been attracted by a pay rate of £6 an hour. That said, security is not the only sector like this; there’s postroom, for one. In fact most business services suffer the same.
The last two years as Peter says have been ‘strange – a different situation in the employment market place’, and attrition rates are down – partly because of the SIA regulation, but partly because people do not want to move job. For one thing, they do not have time to go for an interview. They may not have interview skills, Peter says: “The reason why lots of people use agencies is agencies teach people what an interview is like. Part of our job is to tell people what does an interview feel like, what is expected of you, how should you behave. This isn’t prepping them, it’s simply telling them some skills, even at senior level, some people don’t have. That’s one of the reasons employers turn to agencies.”
A security guard may earn £25-30,000 a year, but skills do not necessarily reflect salary. “You get good and bad minimum wage guards as you get good and bad premium rate guards.” Some guarding contractors do mentor, Peter adds; they seek to give staff confidence that they can have aspirations; that staff can learn skills, whether in their approach to work and in mannerisms. To repeat, pay may have nothing to do with the employee’s capabilities, but is simply what value (or lack of it) the client puts in the worker.
“Sometimes we are not good in the security sector at talking about well-being,” says Peter. It’s something he feels needs to be addressed. What should be the minimum, the duty of care, if an officer has an accident (such as when travelling to work), or is assaulted, for example? How many guarding companies have life cover, at four times salary? Peter says: “I would hazard a guess that a majority of security officers don’t have a sick pay scheme which is covered by insurance. All these things, I think, are important, and when you talk to clients, they think it’s important; but do they put it in a contract? No, because maybe somebody in procurement has said, do we need to do it.” That said, Peter adds that judging from people SSR talks with, such measures of well-being are just not thought of by officers. “There’s a seeming acceptance. ‘if I don’t work, I don’t get paid’.”
