The Security Industry Authority in style and content impresses: from the editorial of the May print edition of Professional Security magazine.
The Security Industry Authority in style and content impresses, for one reason because it is not the bowler-hatted public sector body of stereotype, telling the private sector what to do. If you want to know about SIA news as it breaks, it will e-mail you. It sets targets for the industry it aims to regulate, and for itself. It seeks to be, and to be seen as, business-friendly. Yet in the manned guarding field you could argue that the need for licences has passed, thanks to the way business needs have changed. The need for licences for door staff and wheel clampers is another matter, but you could say that’s not for a SECURITY Industry Authority. Manned guarding (again, to repeat the out of date stereotype) is no longer old men in gatehouses, waving through lorries. The annual BSIA security officer awards show that officers are called on to resolve violence and aggression, fires, offer first and emergency aid … a facilities management service, in other words. The SIA has much on its plate, but one thing for the medium term future will be security providers claiming, in good faith or deceitfully, that they are facilities officers and are not wholly or solely security staff and do not need licences. How does receptionist in uniform who controls access to a site shade into a security man? If you are paying œ150 or œ190 to apply for a licence, for each officer, you might have a financial incentive to think about that one.
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The point is that companies that make the facilities argument will not be the dreaded ‘cowboys’ but companies with high-profile clients who are meeting needs in the latest, most business-friendly ways. Have you heard of Monteray’ That’s the name of the consortium that won a contract to supply British Telecom with their facilities services for initially five years. Reliance Integrated Services (RIS) has a quarter share in this œ125 million per year project, with partners are Carillion and Haden Facilities Management Services. BT has about 8,000 UK buildings, from London’s BT Tower down to unmanned telephone exchanges, plus 12 data centres that handle vast quantities of Internet traffic. The central ‘Enabling Organisation’ (EO) sets policy, negotiates terms and monitors delivery performance, and service delivery is split into eight regions, known as Regional Service Providers (RSPs). Each RSP is operated rather like a franchise. RIS’s Regional Service Providers cover the Midlands and North Wales and are known as Monteray Central. Peter Jones of RIS and his management team in Stoke on Trent are kept on their toes coordinating the work of his region’s 1000-plus employees who are responsible for moer than 2000 buildings.
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PFI builds
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As for new public builds, PFI contracts are the way things are done. A consortium of Reliance Integrated Services, Kajima and Honeywell – all three partners will take an equity stake in the project – bid successfully for the 30-year provision of a fully serviced headquarters building for the Health and Safety Executive in Bootle, Liverpool.ÿ The total gross area of the building is 29,000 square metres comprising of four floors and a basement. The Health and Safety Executive was particularly impressed with the consortium’s proposed Cartwright Pickard design of the building. During construction between autumn 2003 and spring 2005, RIS is to provide support to the construction project team, and develop the team that will be implementing and managing the facility management services from construction completion.ÿReliance Integrated Services will be providing a range of FM services from cleaning, warehousing and porterage to security and pest control. Will RIS officers need licences’
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It pays sometimes to up-periscope and look at other industries, other lands. In a hospital waiting area I was reading a two-year-old copy of Arena magazine. It said of a fashion shoot at the Pyramids, ‘strangely, the permits weren’t acceptable until the diplomatic wheels were greased with a large quantity of your English pounds’. How casually we assume we are in the right and Johnny Abroad is corrupt! According to the draft Corruption Bill, such a transaction would be ‘obtaining an advantage’ and could land you in court, in the UK (page 119). It took the Swedish (though UK-based) head of Securitas to point out at the Security Industry Authority launch, albeit in a well-mannered way, that Britain is way behind in security staff training and service delivery (page 36). That last month we made so much of the œ100-plus cost of a SIA licence application prompted a call to us from the Authority. Since then the April 2 launch heard the cost will be £150 to £190 (page 20). So maybe last month’s cover should have had £2 coins, not pound coins’ We report from page 30. For the launch speeches in full, you can read them at the SIA website www.the-sia.org.uk and sign up there for a useful e-mail newsletter. It’s one sign of the competent way the SIA is going about its business, and bringing up to date business style to the security industry. Does the SIA’s newsletter put me out of a job’ If only! We keep you informed about technology (networks, from page 52, biometrics from page 112) threats (suicide bombs, page 46, food contamination page 48) and issues (violence against NHS staff, page 70). It did strike me at the launch that security management was going on regardless – had to – across the UK (pages 18, 72, 74). It is for the SIA to appreciate the front-line violence and aggression that door staff and security teams have to put up with, and defuse. Under the SIA regime, staff have the added pressure of knowing they could lose their licence and not only their job, but any security job, if they lose their cool. It was sad, then, to hear the reaction of Richard Childs, SIA board member and Lincolnshire Chief Constable, to a comment by Philip Barber, Group Security Manager at the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre. Mr Barber made the point that security staff, sometimes, cannot avoid fisticuffs (with drunks and those who welcome a fight). Mr Childs voiced an opinion – and not off the cuff, either – that the NEC has ‘licenced thugs’. This from (presumably) the most private security-friendly of chief constables. Perhaps they don’t have fights in Louth’ The SIA in all its doings is putting its stamp on Security UK and the wider world, but other factors out of the SIA’s hands remain. It’s easy and very human to imagine that because you are in Security, everyone else is as bound up with it as you are. Not so buyers of contract guarding and other security services. Buyers of security services, customers, must be won over to ‘upskilling’, higher – maybe double – pay for contract guards, and the rest. Yet customers are used to demanding low prices for a service, whether it’s guards, CCTV, or a drinks machine. Manned guarding is re-inventing itself, or at least some companies are, giving customers whatever services they are after (pages 100, 129). You would expect nothing less in the free market. See you at IFSEC (from page 84).
