Mike Wilson, SIA Chief Executive has written a letter of apology to security company MDs.
The letter:
As I am sure you will be aware, the SIA has been experiencing difficulties recently. The time taken to process licence applications and renewals has been well in excess of the target times. Documents have been held far too long before being returned, with a few being mislaid or even lost. And it has been difficult to get through to our contact centre. This state of affairs is far from ideal, and I apologise to businesses and to individuals for the frustration they must have felt over recent weeks. The purpose of this note is to explain what went wrong, what we have been doing to put it right, and what the prognosis is.
Since November last year there has been increased criticism of the performance of the SIA – in particular with regard to the speed of licensing and to the contact centre. It is not universally known that a substantial part of the licensing process, together with the contact centre and document handling, are contracted out to a Managed Service Provider (MSP). And a decision was taken some time ago to renegotiate the MSP contract, to bring in a new partnership arrangement, and to re-design the IT around new, streamlined processes. Under the new project (MSP2), our document handling and call centres in Bournemouth and Newcastle would close, and be replaced by a single centre in Liverpool.
Although the early implementation of MSP2 looked encouraging, a delay in delivery of some functionality gave rise during November and December to a backlog of cases waiting to be scanned into the new system. Importantly, amongst the capabilities that were delayed were the Application Tracker and the On-Line Application facility.
Two further factors emerged:
Firstly: a postal strike. The national strike was far less of an issue than the local wild-cat strikes that followed in Liverpool, because both the SIA document handling centre and the CRB are based there. Although the industrial action did not last long, it led to a further build up of applications and delays.
Secondly, the Right to Work exercise. As you may be aware, the SIA sent out over 10,000 letters just before Christmas to individuals who did not appear (from checks against the Border and Immigration Agency records) to have the right to work in the UK.
All three factors – the late delivery of MSP2, the postal strike and the right-to-work issue – gave rise to a huge number of calls, letters, fax’s and e-mails to the contact centre, which became overloaded. Needless to say, the foregoing is an explanation of what caused the present difficulties – it is in no sense offered as an excuse.
A number of things have been done to mitigate the situation. There have been further deliveries of MSP2 functionality – such as the Application Tracker. Additional contact centre resources have been deployed with weekend and unsocial hours working to tackle the backlogs. A number of the administrative glitches to do with the redirection of mail between Newcastle and Liverpool have been resolved. And we have introduced a range of manual workarounds to get over some of the problems.
We are still waiting for some deliverables – most importantly the online application facility. And there is a small number of applications made in November and December (perhaps a few hundred) that were particularly badly caught up in the situation outlined above and are only just being decided. There is now however a reasonably robust and efficient process in place, and the backlog of applications waiting to be scanned onto the system has been dealt with. It will be some time before the load on the contact centre eases. But any application (including renewal) now made will be scanned onto the system within a day or two of receipt, will show on the Application Tracker at that point, the supporting documentation will be returned within a few days, and it will move forward.
I apologise again for the frustration and inconvenience that you have experienced in recent weeks. We have made a lot of progress behind the scenes to tackle the problems we have been facing, and I am confident that you will begin to see a marked improvement in the speed of licensing, in our contact centre performance and in our customer care generally.
