At its second annual conference in Leeds, the Security Industry Authority owned up to an IT failure last autumn and looked ahead to – maybe – SIA licences for in-house security officers. Mark Rowe comments.
The distance that the SIA has come, but the way it still has to go was there to see as soon as the authority’s staff stepped out of their overnight hotel – Jury’s Inn, near the Royal Armouries venue in the centre of Leeds. Over the road was a construction site with signage for the local security contractor gough & kelly (http://www.gough-kelly.co.uk). The sign like its website showed it is a NSI guarding silver company and has the Safe Contractor approval, for companies working with the building trade. But the Leeds company does have SIA approved contractor status, and one of its passing liveried vehicles that I saw on the way back to the station in the evening had the NSI and SIA logos. The company’s signage and website have, presumably, simply not caught up yet. Other companies with signage, doing 24-hour wheel clamping in the regenerated area – UKCPS and Yorkshire Clamps – are not SIA-approved.<br><br>The dilemma not just for the SIA but for any regulator and indeed anyone trying to enforce and police – to do a really thorough job would be possible, but only if you had far more staff than you have. But to have extra staff there is only one way to get more income – put up the price of a licence application. One suspects that 245 quid is about as high as the private security industry can take, as it is after all badging mostly people on or slightly above minimum wage.<br><br>So even (another) above inflation rise into the higher 200s would not deliver that much more money to the SIA and would not mean that many more investigators on the ground. In other words, as the SIA is well aware, there are diminshing returns; to get at the hardest to reach – it almost sounds like cleaning your teeth! – takes the most time and effort. But without getting at those flouting the regulations, you do not achieve the level playing field that all those obeying the laws want. Without that level playing field, the majority of those complying will ask themselves: why bother? and the regulation loses credibility. Thatโs why it was so interesting that SIA and non-SIA speakers alike spoke of the SIA and the industry needing each other, to achieve what both sides want.<br><br>Who was there? An alphabet soup of people to do with regulation – from the SSAIB, NOCN, David Greer of Skills for Security, Keith Banbury of the British Parking Association, and Geraldine Lakin, the chief of the Irish equivalent of the SIA, the Private Security Authority. <br><br>Who was there<br><br>Who was there matters because, if you think about it, those who paid 92 quid plus VAT to attend, besides the cost of travelling there and back and taking a day out of the office, were, whatever their opinion of the SIA, at least showing they cared enough to attend. In that way, the people who did not bother to attend might be said to be washing their hands of the SIA. That said, it would be reassuring for the SIA to see a range of attenders from the guarding sector – a posse of people from big and small guard firms, such as G4S and OCS Security, and Interserve. Dave Donnelly of Reliance Security was among the invited seminar speakers. Bill Fox of trainers Maybo was there; and Mark Harding, MD of event security and stewarding contractors Showsec. <br><br>Networking<br><br>As at last yearโs conference (as at any conference?), it was the talk between the conference sessions that arguably was most telling. As someone said to Professional Security at lunch, security whether in-house or contract is seen as a grudge purchase; and people are not interested in it. If clients are interested in something, itโs innovation; that is, ways of doing things better but ideally cheaper, whether with technology or not, from controlling access to keeping chewing gum off the floor.<br><br>But to repeat, the SIA may already have done the damage by putting off people, even those with original goodwill, who have waited on the phone too long and too often or been too angered by waits for licences, which is after all putting their jobs that pay for mortgages and car loans at risk. Two stories to illustrate this. One trainer and investigator, who is one of the quite few people who does put in time with an industry body, told me he was not going to Leeds, complaining of the entry fee. When I replied that the SIA did have to pay for the day – I mean, how would minimum wage guards paying for their badge feel, paying for a buffet lunch for the SIA and guarding MDs?! let alone the bill for staying at a Juryโs Inn – this trainer said something along the lines of โwe pay enough alreadyโ. My point: that man who could and should be an ally of the SIA, who wants the right things of the security industry, has lost his goodwill towards the regulator. He will take some winning back. <br><br>And someone else I did not see at Leeds was the training manager at a guarding company that prided itself on, and made much of, being one of the very first to gain ACS. A couple of years ago when I met him, he complained about the SIA. I do not remember what he said, but I do remember his eyes. They were burning with hatred. So it did cross my mind that maybe the people attending the SIA conference at Leeds were not the front-line people who have to actually deal with the SIA day to day, who have suffered from hanging on the telephone for an (average!) 20 minutes to get through (get through!) to the call centre. <br><br>The SIA does read Professional Security. Baroness Henig hinted as much in her speech when she asked visitors to raise any questions with SIA staff. She was recalling last year when she asked SIA staff to stand up in the audience to show themselves available to talk to, but they were sitting next to each other at the front. Baroness Henig is not the sort of lady to have something like that happen to her twice. The SIA is indeed more approachable, as a number of people separately have said to me. Catching a breather during the tea and lunch break, the gathering was buzzing with people talking to each other. As Baroness Henig rightly pointed out in her closing speech, the networking part of the event is important. Indeed, she even wondered aloud whether the conference ought to become a two-day affair with a ‘social function’ in between. This is not Them and Us. <br> <br>One hesitates to get personal but there is no other explanation; the difference in SIA and security industry relations has come with the change from the authority’s first chief executive John Saunders to Mike Wilson. Saunders summed up his regime (2002-6) in a speech at IFSEC 2006, when he mocked people complaining of badge delays, Saunders reckoning the complainers were saying they were in the system ‘for 17 or 18 years’. Mike Wilson is not that sort of person. He is the sort of person who came on the train from York, then walked from the station to the venue, rucksack on back. <br><br>But, as the SIA well know, it is one thing to be approachable, and another to deliver the service. In her book Versailles and After – readers not interested in 20th century political history should skip this bit – Henig makes the telling point that there was nothing particularly wrong with the Versailles treaty (after the 1919 conference that, to be brief, ended the First World War but was seized on by Hitler as unfair). It was the enforcement of the treaty or rather the lack of enforcement that doomed Versailles. Ruth Henig, whose background is as a university historian, is due to write a book on the League of Nations, the (again, readers not interested in history should skip this!) 1920s and 1930s forerunner of today’s United Nations. For all the goodwill and talk inside conference chambers, the League faltered in the harsh, selfish reality of 1930s Europe. <br><br>Some made the point at the SIA conference that there was agreement between the SIA and the audience; they wanted the same sorts of things. What of the outside world not in the audience, though? The business reality of buyers buying security and everything on price, and a stubborn minority of licensable people ignoring, and seeming to get away with not keeping to, regulation? The parallels between the League of Nations and the SIA are uncomfortable.
