Why choose one guarding contractor or another? asks Mark Rowe.
It’s an existential question for the guarding contractor. Unless enough customers pick him (and pay the invoice, and allow enough of a margin), he goes out of business. Yet guarding may be a commodity to the buyer; a guard is only an insurance requirement. A buyer may be indifferent to the marketing, the certifications, all the things that make a product or service stand out, just as when you push your shopping trolley to the bakery part of the supermarket, you may look only at the price of a loaf before you throw one in.
To take the metaphor further; in fact not all bread is alike. You may absolutely want a white, wholemeal, or ‘best of both’ loaf. And guard firms will say that they cater for particular sectors of industry: shopping centres, ports and airports, or universities. Yet in the most recent OSPAs thought leadership webinar, Ollie Curran, deputy security manager at University College London, spoke of having to tell some guard firms that wanted the (considerable) UCL guarding contract that his city centre campus is about more than traffic and bicycle thefts.
Perhaps how the guard sector divvies itself up in its own mind and in its vocabulary – retail loss prevention, critical infrastructure and so on – can get in the way of winning business. Take for example the spectacle in downtown Glasgow or London’s West End of a queue on the street outside a high-end retailer at an unearthly hour of the morning. Why? They may be queueing to buy a limited edition new item. That suits everyone – the customer gets to feel they’re owning something special, the retailer gets committed, and hopefully loyal customers, far preferable for any business than having to forever chase new customers. At high-end retailers, guarding calls for suit and tie, and greeting each customer at the door (and if a customer thinks to swipe expensive clothes or shoes and scarper, the guard at the door serves as a deterrent). How then to still provide that service, and manage a queue outside, perhaps in bad weather? Which calls for the skills of a crowd management stewarding contractor?
It implies a nimbleness in the contractor, a willingness to see a gap in the market that the usual run of guard firms isn’t filling, which is why the MD of a security contractor that has gone into that niche said to Professional Security: “We ignore the industry, in the sense, if I want some inspiration I will see what Apple, Tesla and Amazon are doing, not what G4S and Mitie are doing. Seeking to be against the security grain.”
Talking of G4S and Mitie, they were the two firms in the running for the Sizewell C contract, that it was recently announced went to G4S. Only those two firms are large enough and have the pedigree in providing guarding (and related facilities management) services to nuclear power plants. Do G4S or Mitie or any guarding firm have to hand the number of security officers required, in that corner of Suffolk? Probably not; but what counted was the ability to mobilise a contract; to know what it will take, not only the security risks to protect against, but how to engage with the locals as the energy firm EDF seeks to do in general, as G4S has shown at the Hinkley Point C new build, featured in the September and October print editions of Professional Security Magazine.
While not doubting a guarding firm of any size when it says that it’s a national supplier, it’s also true to say that even the very largest firms draw on other contractors, even large rivals, sometimes. That raises the spectre of sub-contracting, which the NSI, SSAIB and ACM-CCAS inspectorates acknowledged in 2021 by bringing out a code of practice for the provision of labour in the security and event sectors. You may procure guarding services from a firm that is one of the 800 or so approved contractors (ACS) of the Security Industry Authority. Under the ACS like any other certification scheme you know what you are getting. But what if that approved firm contracts out some of the service, in a remote area or where its coverage is weak, and what if the sub-contractor contracts out further? If your building site in the country or car park on the coast has few SIA-badged guards around for a national firm to draw on, what’s to say a smaller firm will be able to find a guard either?
As so often, you can learn as much from when a contract has gone badly, as when it’s run well. The February 2021 edition of Professional Security featured the scandal of quarantine hotels in the Australian state of Victoria. Various complaints arose about the contract security guards at hotels, not least that the very guards supposed to help stem the virus in fact were a cause of spreading it, after the giving of the contract to a small firm. The contracting had to happen at short notice (the final report of the official inquiry wrote of a decisive day in March 2020 at the outset of lockdown being ‘measured in minutes’) and happened in the emergency of covid lockdown in Melbourne requiring travellers to be quarantined and checked on that they stayed there.
March 2020 was a novel and confused situation for all around the table setting up quarantines; as the inquiry put it, ‘the decision was not one made by an ‘individual’ but, rather, there were those with influence who contributed to an understanding being reached that private security would be used’. The (relatively junior) official who picked the firms had ‘no particular experience with the security industry’. Who to pick was discussed among officials on a WhatsApp group chat; a theme in the messages ‘was that the security companies needed to be reputable, and that there could be problems with some’.
She told the inquiry did not know about that register of quality-checked guard firms in the state, namely State Purchase Contract: Agreement for the Provision of Security Services (State Purchase Contract) and that there were publicly available details, including email and mobile numbers, on a website. In other words, ‘without relevant knowledge and expertise to guide them’, the procurers were (towards midnight), ‘reinventing the wheel when, all the time, the information they needed was readily available to them on a website, following a process that had vetted security companies for their suitability for government work’. (The inquiry elsewhere was not able to drill into such detail, finding that ‘key witnesses were unable to recall key events and those who might be expected to know who decided to engage private security denied having this information’.)
The inquiry explicitly saw sub-contracting as a problem; the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions’ (DJPR’s) ‘heavy reliance on subcontracting posed a significant risk to the success of the Hotel Quarantine Program in terms of the quality and competence of security guards actually recruited’; the Department didn’t even know what was sub-contracted.
Shortcomings so often are not confined to whether this contract or that is well managed but to the wider running of something, and in the case of the Victorian quarantine hotels, the inquiry found no risk register was kept. As the final report pointed out, that meant there was no ‘capturing what is happening at and across sites, and the value of having a central repository for this information to ensure that a risk addressed on one site is analysed and addressed to assess whether there may be a systems-wide issue to address’. Indeed, the inquiry in its chapter on private security went so far as to blame ‘systemic governmental failings’ rather than individual security people.
Just as it takes two to tango, so any failures on contracts aren’t solely due to the provider; the inquiry found the ‘role performed by private security was ill-defined from the beginning’ and in any case changed over time from the original static guarding. As the contract did not give ‘clarity and certainty as to who was in charge of security services personnel’, that left guards less or not at all supervised. And more to the point during covid, not ‘having clear, consistent training and PPE requirements led to contractors having different levels of knowledge and sophistication when it came to the use of PPE’.
