The show is back on the road, SIA chief executive Mike Wilson has said of the regulator’s performance.
Speaking to the ASIS UK quarterly seminar in London in September, Mike Wilson said: "The year has been dominated by this single issue; licence performance." Giving a breakdown of how the SIA is doing – a replacement IT system late last year leading to a backlog and delays as people tried to get through to the SIA call centre on the phone – Mike Wilson said that in September the authority was giving more decisions than there were applications. The backlog had reached more than 14,000 as 500 or 600 applications a day ‘literally piled up on the door’, he said. The system, in a word, died. ‘I know this has been a real source of contention,’ he said. On call waiting time (it had been an average of 20 minutes to get through to an operator), Mike Wilson said it was now within a minute by the start of September, down from six minutes at the start of August.<br><br>One of the problems caused by the licensing ‘difficulties’ was that it distracted attention from some things going very well at the SIA, he went on. The 500-plus approved companies for instance. At the same time it’s acknowledged – and surveys tell the SIA – that people are ‘not entirely happy’ with the scheme, but Mike Wilson spoke of getting to the bottom of concerns with the industry, to see if the SIA could bring in appropriate changes. On the other big chunk of the SIA business – compliance and enforcement – continued ‘pretty well undiminished; and a highly successful area’. He spoke of work with partners – that is, the SIA does not go on the street and check door badges, by and large. Rather, the regulator works with police and local government staff, for example in ‘blitzes on town centres’: "We have now achieved regularly over 90 per cent compliance, which isn’t as good as we would like it to be, but it’s encouraging," he said, despite what he termed the ‘prophets of doom’. He reported in June receiving 1122 pieces of information, and associated with that, 39 revoked licences, 325 suspended, and 105 companies assessed with a view to ‘corrective action’: "So behind the licence business, the guts of the organisation, the compliance and enforcement activity is steaming on and has been, I think, very successful." <br><br>On badging of non-front line directors, he admitted it’s a ‘major irritant’ that directors including non-execs and chairman including of holding companies who may not be in this country who have nothing to do with security, require a licence: “We are trying to find a way of getting off this particular hook.” <br><br>On in-house guarding, as previously Mike Wilson noted that opinion is divided (as to whether in-house officers should require a licence like a contract guard). “We are trying to bottom it out in this financial year and make recommendations to ministers by the end of the year.” Also mooted is compulsory registration of security companies, which Mike Wilson admitted is ‘another contentious issue’. Again, the SIA intends to make recommendations to ministers. “My personal view is that there is more of an appetite for compulsory registration than there was. I think it would certainly be welcomed for vehicle immobilisers as a sector, if not the other sectors. But it isn’t my call.” On bailiffs, the government is inclined towards the SIA taking on their regulation: “Our concern is that we don’t want to end up with the position we are with vehicle immobilisers.” That is, an expectation that the authority will sort the sector, but the law does not allow it. (Mike Wilson was interviewed in a recent ITV Tonight documentary on wheel clamping recently that found no change in some ethically-dubious clampers, and the SIA and trading standards saying it was a matter for the other.)<br><br>On consultants, Mike Wilson was definite: the SIA does not intend to even visit regulation of that sector until 2011. “Again, my personal view is that there is no political appetite to licence security consultants. The SIA has no particular wish to go down this route, certainly not at this stage.”
