If an industrial estate is suffering from crime but none of the businesses on that estate has a dedicated security manager, where do you go?
You know you’re in industrial Middle England when you read the names on the map and board at the entrance to the Heanor Gate industrial estate – there are engineers, hauliers, a packaging company, retail suppliers, a printers, a timber products firm. Steve Parker, Regeneration Manager of the Heanor Gate Association (HGA), is based at Roche Vitamins UK, the part of the pharmaceutical giant that provides vitamins for animals and people. Geographically, too, Heanor Gate is in Middle England, just north of Derby, and unlike some industrial parks Heanor Gate is in the middle of things. That is, it’s not self-contained but is on the road to Shipley Country Park, an open space for dog-walkers and the like, and on weekdays at school chucking-out time one end of the estate is choked with children in uniform and school traffic. In a word, Heanor Gate cannot pull up the drawbridge, literally or metaphorically, to shield itself from the outside world, including crime. When Steve Parker demos the estate’s CCTV, he makes a point of showing that the pan and tilt cameras can cover neighbours – a nearby school, the park, and housing – with their permission. It’s one example of how from the start of his job Steve Parker has had to have everyone to do with Heanor Gate on side – neighbours, public bodies, and not least the businesses on the estate. If the companies are listed, it’s alphabetically (as on that map board at the entrance) so as not to offend anybody. Steve recalls that the association started in 1996 with eight companies, and the first question was: how to fund it – same charge for all (but some firms had 500 staff while others had but a few)’ or so much per square foot of space’ The association agreed on so much per employee. At first Steve worked part-time. Amber Valley, the local authority, bid for Single Regeneration Budget funding. That has finished and Steve has to raise funds to make his job sustainable. Membership has risen to more than 40, most of the firms on the estate. As the title regeneration suggests, Steve had to look at all aspects of the estate that might depress property prices, holding back current companies from expanding, and stopping companies from moving into empty premises – the state of the roads, pavements and street lighting, and environmental ‘nuisances’, besides crime. ‘We had drug misuse, drug dealing, arson, assaults,’ Steve recalls. As a former Derbyshire crime prevention officer, Home Office-trained, he carried out a crime audit, which suggested to him that CCTV – properly monitored – could be a solution. ‘I found that 48 per cent of reported crime occurred during daylight hours. I was a great advocate of CCTV anyway, if it is a staffed system.’ Hence Steve looked at what kind of cameras to install. Former police officer turned consultant Mike Perry was brought in – because, as we will see time and again, part of the ethos of the Heanor Gate Association is to keep things within the local economy, for the good of the area, if possible. (Current installer is Link Integrated Systems of Sutton in Ashfield, just across the county border in Nottinghamshire.) So that the colour cameras (see ‘about the system’) could be viewed night and day, where cameras were being installed by companies with poorer lighting, the association asked the company to improve its lights.
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About the system
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The minimum number of cameras so that the system would not have blind spots were 12. The association called public meetings because (though the cameras have privacy zones) the system would have overviews of private homes and sheltered housing. As for money: ‘We went around the businesses inviting them to put in what they could afford. We had a small shortfall and that was made up by the local authority.’ One hiccup has been that the company that originally hosted the association’s CCTV control room down-sized from 500 to 65, and the security set-up down-sized accordingly. In April 2002 Roche Vitamins agreed to host the control room, and HGA monitors Roche’s cameras covering its site. In Steve’s view, the cameras will not reduce crime to zero, but will reduce it, and the ‘shoebox’ style housings on the columns – rather than dome cameras – will deter criminals from outside. Steve quotes cases of intruders spotted making a forced entry through a company’s perimeter being arrested by police before the intruders have even got into the building. Steve says: ‘We work in very close partnership with the police’ – when a HGA operator rings for police assistance, a police officer will be sent, because the police know that the call is for a good reason. And then there was the case of men in a white van spotted trying to interfere with the tow bar of a mobile ‘burger bar’ parked on a Heanor Gate road. The suspects saw the camera panning and tilting towards them, and took off in their car around the estate, trying to avoid the surveillance in vain, eventually driving off, not before putting two fingers up to a camera. While Steve describes himself as a great believer in CCTV, he adds that cameras should be used in conjunction with other measures – such as perimeter fencing, and intruder alarms. If a company on the estate has its alarms monitored by a central station, that station has the HGA control room ‘phone number as a key-holder. If an alarm goes off, the central station will ring the HGA, which can verify if there has been an intrusion, and when the key-holder comes on the scene the HGA cameras can track them while the key-holder is on the premises – which has a value from a health and safety point of view as well. Some firms on the estate have given the HGA control room lists of car registration numbers, so that if a car enters the site out of hours, the HGA operator can check whether it has cause to be there – if not, the key-holder is alerted.
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A joiner Back to Steve. In his district he is a joiner of various crime and disorder and related bodies that are a mix of the public and private sectors. He is a member for example of the Amber Valley Partnership Community Safety Forum. Just as he feeds know-how into such forums, so companies at Heanor Gate feed him with information and complaints. Heanor Gate’s tenants do not have one dedicated security manager between them. Security may be something that a managing director has to juggle with, besides the business of making an honest bob; or security might be part of a health and safety manager’s remit, if a firm has such a person. Steve reports that the HGA CCTV operator, not the police, are often a first point of contact if a business on the estate suffers a crime. Similarly if paper drops off a waste lorry and flies around the perimeter of a Heanor Gate company, that company will ring Steve who will contact the offending firm, who will then remonstrate with the offending carrier. Such co-ordination comes down to personal contacts that are built on trust and over time – over a lunch-time sandwich, to be more exact. For example, say a company on the estate is printing something particularly sensitive, such as exam papers, the printer might ring the control room to ask for extra attention. Equally, Steve might be the co-ordinator of a police or fire service promotion open to all firms on the estate, or the man to turn to for details of how to access funds, or part-funding. Or, the HGA control room will know if a building usually has cleaning staff at a particular time, and whether it is usual for windows to be open after office hours. If a window ought not to be open at 7pm, a ‘phone call to the right person in the evening might prevent a false activation and call-out at midnight.
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Doing the right things
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In little ways the Heanor Gate Association not only does what it set out to do – make the industrial estate a good place to do business – but the HGA does the right thing. It is a holder of the ‘Positive About Disabled People’ symbol, whereby the holder is committed to to good practice in recruiting and employing disabled people. Steve has become vice-chairman of a local group No Limits, whose chairman incidentally is Peter King of Derby-based cash in transit firm Kings Security. Most of the Heanor Gate CCTV operators are disabled; one operator is expecting to go into the Army shortly. If and when he does, Steve says that he would look to JobCentre Plus (the current term for the Employment Service) and the likes of Remploy to place an advert, and be ready to fill the position with a disabled person. Let’s leave aside the fact that in parts of the UK with near full employment, job applicants of any sort for security monitoring can be thin on the ground, so that being ‘Positive About Disabled People’ makes commercial sense. Steve says that a disabled person can monitor CCTV just as well as the able-bodied: ‘Statistics show that disabled people are less likely to have time off than able-bodied people.’ Through the NCFE accreditation body, HGA’s CCTV operators are trained to NVQ level one. Anyone who wants CCTV operator training around Heanor can enrol at South East Derbyshire College (another instance of staying local) for classroom learning and have practical instruction at Heanor Gate.
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What next’
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What next for the association? Now that it has this working control room, the HGA is looking to offer it to others. One taker already has been Ilkeston Community Hospital, for monitoring of a small internal and external CCTV system.
