The Security Industry Authority is shortly having an ‘away day’. Mark Rowe writes about the foreseeable future of the security industry regulator.
An away day – that’s where staff get together in company time to review, and look ahead. Let’s leave aside the sense, and indeed the morality of an organisation such as the SIA spending its money in such a way – money that largely comes from badged security officers on or not much above national minimum wage. There are however many topics for the SIA to have an away day about.
There is the recent sudden exit of chief exec Mike Wilson. In the December print issue of Professional Security Magazine I called the departure ‘frankly undignified’ which made it exquisitely unfortunate that of all things my SIA source said that Mike Wilson’s leaving was dignified. Let’s not go into the personal circumstances without the point of view of the man himself, a man so private that he did not list any contact details in his entry in Who’s Who. In any case, to quote (from memory) what I went on to write in the December magazine, such events are only surface waves on the deep ocean of everyday working life.
In the SIA’s case, that everyday life includes the following:
Approved contractor scheme: again, as featured in the December print issue of the magazine, the SIA has a problem of success with the ACS. It has well over 500 companies, mainly in manned guarding; far more than the authority expected, and prompting some – not least the customers of the SIA, the approved companies – to ask what is the worth of the ACS, if so many are members? Put another way, where does the ACS go from here, if it and the regulator seek to raise standards? One way may be to grade approved companies. Mischievously to an SIA source I suggested gold, silver and bronze, which are the three names for the National Security Inspectorate’s accreditation. But then there are only so many ways you can name a three-grade scheme. An alternative for the SIA would be to make a link to the police’s community safety accreditation scheme (CSAS). This would be welcome – to be flippant – because I have been writing about the police CSAS for years without much sign of it being relevant to the private security industry. To be more serious, this would give what you could call the cream of ACS companies something else. It does depend on the CSAS becoming more widespread; some large metropolitan police forces such as Merseyside have shown no interest in CSAS, so what’s in it for a security company with a guarding contract in Merseyside? However the Met Police for one may show (belatedly – CSAS came in with the 2002 Police Reform Act) some interest, out of self-interest, because of the Olympics because, as all commentators are agreed, there will not be enough police officers to go around. Will this satisfy everyone? because as featured in the November issue of Professional Security, not every guarding company is going for Olympics work.
Northern Ireland: The SIA man in charge of bringing regulation to NI is Andy Drane. As a former senior police officer he will not need telling – and if he does or ever did, the Northern Irish will tell him – of the challenge it is to bring badges to the licensable sectors, door staff, contract guards and so on. It is one thing however to be well aware that there are potential banana skins, and another thing to not slip on them. The Northern Irish cannot have it both ways. Are they as much a part of the UK as Southend and Strathclyde – or are they a special case? You could say they have been a special case so far because they are the last region – or nation – of the UK to get SIA-badged. Scotland though got badged at a different time than England and Wales, and the SIA way – of a London head office, call centres in the regions, and investigators mainly working from home – has worked. The SIA has appointed a man to the board specifically for Scotland, and it could be that the authority does the same for Northern Ireland. Quite apart from enforcing the Private Security Industry Act (PSIA) – and the SIA may struggle to meet the Northern Ireland Office timetable, as it has struggled to meet other timetables over the years – there are particular challenges in Northern Ireland. As indeed in Dublin. Organised crime (as indeed in Glasgow) and paramilitaries. In Northern Ireland, you have paramilitaries – some still want to kill police officers – who have gone into counterfeit goods and smuggling and other rackets; and the Police Service of Northern Ireland is reducing numbers from the height of the troubles.
In-house: the consultation as to whether in-house security officers ought to require SIA badges the same as contract guards has predictably shown opinions divided. At the risk of tipping the balance yet further, every signal I get is that the decision will be: licence in-house. It then becomes political. Just as it took years for the PSIA to reach legislators – and notoriously at the time it was admitted that it was not a perfect law, but it was the best available at the time, and for some time to come – it went through just before the 2001 general election, you will recall – so any amendment to the PSIA going to MPs and peers will only have one shot, certainly for the foreseeable (three or four years at least) future. Any case therefore has to be good. Leaving aside whether the case for bringing in-house into the licensing regime has a good case, during a recession, the politics are that Prime Minister Gordon Brown has to call an election by 2010. If he chose to go to the country in autumn 2009, or thought he might beforehand, that would affect what if any legislation went through parliament. And then there is the – let us say – fair chance that an election leads to a Conservative Government. The PSIA and SIA came in under a Labour Government after the Tories from 1979-97 chose not to bring in security sector regulation. Under David Cameron the Conservatives – notably John Redwood – have spoken of smaller or more efficient government and cutting red tape. While it would remain to be seen what actually came of such talk, it might be that a Conservative Government had a different view on in-house guards than a Labour one; or that it wanted to think about it first. Which matters if you have to draw up a budget for your university or warehouse in-house team that will need training and badging at what? several hundred pounds a pop.
Private investigators (PIs): One more licensable sector under the PSIA. One snag, that caused the SIA trouble as it brought in licences for door staff, say, was that no-one could say for certain how many people out there would require a licence, which would determine how many staff the regulator would need in call centres and so on. As Donald Rumsfeld so truly put it, there are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns (and so on). This is a known unknown. How many thousands of PIs are there in the UK? Putting it another way, nobody knows or can more than guess what percentage of PIs are in associations such as the Institute of Professional Investigators and the Association of British Investigators. An accident waiting to happen is how to handle complaints, as with wheel clampers (and the same with bailiffs – you could wonder why the Government has asked the Security Industry Authority to licence bailiffs). Namely: you can pass an exam and pay for your criminal record check and get a badge as a wheel clamper, or a private investigator. But what if someone is angry that they have had bad or no service from a PI, or that a wheel clamper has been unethical? Ethics … even if the authorities set up a complaints procedure (and they have had enough years to do so for clampers) it would collapse under the weight of allegations of he said I said but I said he said.
Consultants: Talking of the PSIA, consultants are one of the licensable sectors according to the PSIA, and yet … Mike Wilson in speeches made it as plain as could be that the SIA did not propose to regulate consultants, and that remains the case. Where is the public demand for it, the SIA would say. Which does make you wonder why then were consultants named inside the PSIA?
Enforcement: The SIA points happily to its checks that find 90 to 95 per cent of those checked are properly badged. Critics will point out that five or 10 per cent still equals several thousand people of 200,000 or more licenced, and it comes back to Rumsfeld’s known unknowns (and so on); how many security people who ought to be badged, are not, in those harder to find places at harder times of the day (and night); the county agricultural shows, those surprisingly remote west country seaside resorts.
Registration: There’s long been a school of thought that – as other countries have gone about it – the SIA should not have badged individuals, but companies. The SIA will reply that it has had to work to the PSIA (so it’s all the fault of the politicians?! and the people who draw up laws for them?). The SIA is proposing that registration of companies be compulsory. Cynics will say that the authorities will not use such information merely to send out Christmas cards.
How am I doing: Which leads on to the relationship between the security industry and the SIA, its regulator. A telling moment was at the end of Mike Wilson’s talk to the September quarterly meeting of ASIS UK in London. On a show of hands earlier, among the audience were several approved contractors. Mike Wilson offered to take questions; there were none. None. Are we really saying that none of the senior security managers in the audience had anything they wanted to say to the SIA chief exec? Now short of interviewing every man and woman in the audience, there is no definite answer why that was. Did people feel there was no point in raising an issue with the regulator – at least in public, rather than over a sandwich later? Or: did no-one want to rattle the cage, to put their head above the parapet. Whatever metaphor you want to use, security people grumble, but do not want the risk of shall we say coming to the attention of the SIA or any regulator. That is not, to stress, any suggestion that people keep quiet because they are breaking the law; rather, that law-abiding people weigh the benefit from speaking up about something unsatisfactory (perhaps we are coming round to the ‘what’s the point’ explanation) with the possible disadvantage of looking like a trouble-maker. For the same reason, people don’t bother to report a crime to police, or if they do report it and a call handler says, we’re too busy today, people accept it. Or most do. Enough do. To be fair, the SIA has set up networks, for ACS, small businesses, and others to put their points to the regulator. But: and we return to that away day: there is a certain disconnect between the regulator, any regulator, and the businesses it regulates?
