The Home Office is making a second effort to bring stewards at sports and other events under SIA-licensing.
The SIA could licence events, or add a new licence for sports and events security guards, according to a Home Office document. The Home Office says it is ‘firmly of the view that it is right in principle that the sports and events sector should remain within the scope of the licensing provisions of the Private Security Industry Act 2001’. This is from a ‘partial regulatory imapct assessment on security guards at sports and other events and the Private Security Act 2001’, a consultation document before Government decides what to do. Last year, as reported in our October issue, football got its way, gaining through the Department for Culture Media and Sport an exemption from SIA licences for stadium stewards, unless stewards did SIA-licensable work, such as on the door of a bar. Other sports, such as cricket, have sought the same exemption.
But the thrust of the Home Office document is to bring stewarding under the SIA umbrella. The document speaks of the private security industry’s a major role in providing security at sports and other events: “The police may charge on the basis of full cost recovery which is significantly more expensive than the cost of employing security companies … An overriding consideration in deciding a way forward on the application of the 2001 Act to the sector must be to ensure that those people specifically tasked with undertaking hands-on security duties at sports and events are properly trained to do so and that the public can have confidence in their suitability to hold these positions.
The document does speak of what it calls ‘confusion’ and ‘a number of grey areas’ over a definition of what is security in the sports and events sector. And as the document admits, the event sector questions whether stewards doing bag searches or stopping pitch invasions are security staff; and whether a licence would be feasible for stewarding, generally a second job for non-security people. Most of the document wrestles with what is or is not defined as security work. Volunteers do not require a licence. Among the knotty questions are: if a concert steward is employed to watch for overcrowding and yank people out of the crowd for safety reasons, is that SIA-licensable; but what if that steward removes people in a crowd disturbance – according to the document, a SIA-licensable ‘activity’?
The document talks of applying the Private Security Industry Act 2001 to the ‘[events] sector in a risk based and proportionate way’. One option is that the SIA licences events. But as the document acknowledges: “Spectator safety and stewarding at football grounds are already regulated by local authorities under the oversight of the Football Licensing Authority (FLA).”
What would SIA-licensing cost the sports sector? The document admits costs are ‘difficult to quantify’. The document says: “The sector is vast. A large sporting venue holding sports matches and other types of events, for instance, employs over 600 in-house stewards, about 250 contract stewards and also uses over 300 volunteers. A failure to clarify which people require licences for security duties could lead to confusion, over-regulation and unnecessary licensing.”
You have until June 16 to reply to the consultation document. Write to: Security Industry Section, Crime Reduction and Community Safety Group, Home Office, 4th Floor, Peel Building, 2 Marsham Street, London
SW1P 4DF, or email [email protected]
