As businesses take security more seriously, those firms seeking security advice and products are increasingly able to turn to a service offered by their local authority or chamber of commerce.
As businesses take security more seriously, those firms seeking security advice and products are increasingly able to turn to a service offered by their local authority or chamber of commerce. Largely staffed by former police officers, these services have sprung up in response to the Crime and Disorder Act, whereby police, councils and businesses are encouraged to co-operate. Liverpool Chamber of Commerce?s security advice service for small and medium firms launched in April. The North-East Chamber of Commerce has set up the Crime Free Zone, whose County Durham-based co-ordinator, is Steve Brown, an ex-police crime prevention officer. He?s funded by the police; his new beat covers three police forces. He told Professional Security: ?We offer support, advice, training help to businesses who may be victims of crime, but also who want to prevent themselves becoming victims of crime.? Steve has done crime awareness training with retail shopfloor staff. In the Washington branch of Savacentre, for example, Steve worked with loss prevention manager Gary Wilson on credit card fraud and identifying shoplifters. Steve isn?t restricted to chamber members, and he says the service extends to taking a look at an alarm quote (say) if an unsure business faxes it.
In Bolton, the Business Security Initiative is part of the Economic and Physical Development Unit at the Metropolitan Council. The project manager Alan Simpson served 13 years in the police then at a UK government atomic site; Business Security Advisor Vincent Glover was 22 years in RAF security, and more recently a fraud investigator with Trafford Council; project officer Joanne Beaumont, also ex-police, is a criminal intelligence analyst. The initiative chases European grants towards securing premises, from mills to industrial estates, shops and shopfronts. The staff offer confidential security audits. An October conference is to cover IT security and business continuity. Where industrial estates are hit by crime, the initiative is looking to set up a collective whereby the estate buys in a security service, at a better rate than if the individual firms tried to buy. Such security might be manned guarding, or landscaping the part of an estate claimed by nobody and used as a dumping ground, breeding other crime. The initiative put in a Home Office bid for a CCTV grant for cameras to cover a district shopping centre. Such a set-up is really making the Crime and Disorder Act a tool for action – and exceeding what the Act sets out, they argue.
