Mark Rowe considers the state of guarding.
On a wet summer’s weekday afternoon in London you learn that PPE (personal protective equipment) such as a coat and trousers are not necessarily water-proof, the same as safes are only built and certified to keep fire out for a set time, so your outer works clothing will only keep the rain out for a while. An officer walked on a Soho pavement with hood up and shoulders hunched forward, until he reached a delivery ramp and took his hood down and shook it.
In Burlington Arcade, the 200-year-old high-end covered shopping walk off Piccadilly, where the security officers are in ceremonial garb, the officer at the northern, Royal Academy end of the arcade, the officer standing on duty at the entrance was wearing a coat whose sleeves were slightly too long for him.
In a downpour, security officers stand out more; they cannot very well hold an umbrella (except perhaps if a concierge or on duty at a hotel, to offer it to a visitor) or take shelter until the rain stops: whether at Rathbone Square, the London home of Facebook and a cut-through for Soho pedestrians, or at a holiday park on the Kent coast, or at the door of one of the hotels housing asylum seekers after they cross the English Channel.
Private security has become, 20 years after the launch of the Security Industry Authority’s badging regime, an accepted sight in British urban life as much as a part of policing, even if private security has not gained quite so much of a place in the sun as some in the contract guarding sector might have hoped, when the SIA was forming. The police, while now routinely stretched, have held on to their monopoly of public sector policing, partly because the public would not have it any other way. The recent hoo-ha around TikTok-video-incited ‘looting’ on Oxford Street, that Home Secretary Suella Braverman described as ‘reprehensible’, boiled down to teenagers on summer holiday from school and college having a cheap and entertaining day out, with the thrill of looking for trouble and enjoying the spectacle of police horses and Met Police Territorial Support Group vans with flashing lights. What may have been lost on those young people filming the scene and themselves was the sight of the West End’s private security contractor’s on-street patrollers doing their best to control the crowds alongside the police.
If SIA-badged private security people are doing police-style work, even if only in incident response, that begs questions of whether security officers are as equipped or as trained as the police. At least arguably, security officers have a harder time than cops. Whereas the police now are a blue-light, 999 service like fire and rescue – they dash from call to call insulated in a vehicle, or carry out ‘surge’ operations or ‘days of action’, forever dotting from one hot-spot to the next, to keep a lid on things – security officers are routinely first (and maybe only) responders, whether to a trip-or-bump in a shopping mall by an elderly person who needs a kind word as much as a plaster; or youths riding cycles or hanging around, and acting threatening if spoken to. Even if the youths are not bad people but are acting rudely because they’re in a group, they are not mature enough for it to occur to them that the security officer is human too, maybe someone like their father; and maybe a Christian who doesn’t swear and is genuinely upset by swearing.
Whether any guarding contractor can truly offer a nationwide service – a guard in Plymouth, Portsmouth or Glasgow, should a national client request – is moot. Some of the largest contractors may insist that they are nationwide; smaller firms who are offered their sub-contract work differ, pointing out that there’s simply not a pool of SIA-badged people in Plymouth, say, awaiting a call.
While guard firms continue to report a shortage of guards, they often qualify that’s a shortage of quality guards. One long-time guarding person put it this way, that whereas once they might get 100 applications, and 30 would be of usable quality, now it’s three or four. Contractors may deploy on site, with care, those with SIA badges whose English is poor to sites – those with better English work in reception; the rest in a loading bay (where they may routinely deal with drivers whose English is also poor, a side of the UK seldom heard). A long-time recruiter spoke of a particular lack of security managers with the right skills – if there is a suitable candidate for you, they’re probably working for a competitor.
To return to guards, the other side of the coin is whether a guard measures up in skills and experience to what the customer wants. Even at the same site, the demand for security may change – although the client may not grasp that. As the long-timer put it, a retailer might have an incident of violence in a store, and ask for a guard to stand at the door to deter more incidents and to reassure staff, at least for weeks or months, a set time until withdrawn. That retailer may complain that the guard is not acting against shoplifters, though that’s calling for different skills (to deter violence, you need only look big and off-putting; to do loss prevention takes customer service – spotting someone is acting suspiciously on an aisle, and disarming the suspect with customer service – such as, by offering a basket for what they’ve picked up).
As the long-timer said, even the well-trained and motivated guard will have quiet periods of a shift, when they feel drawn to picking up their mobile phone (which is as true as a concierge in a corporate lobby, or inside the door in a JobCentre or court). It looks bad, takes the officer’s mind off the job and the alert thief or trouble-maker may take advantage. The long-timer spoke of equipping in-store officers with a smartphone, enabling them to view the store’s cameras. The phone is locked down so that they don’t view TikTok. Not only does such equipping make the guard’s work more fulfilling, and potentially safer – an alert can go to a remote monitoring centre so that an operator follows an incident. The equipping sends a signal that the officer is being invested in.
Is that enough to retain officers? Perhaps not, if a guard has had a landlord put his rent up £600 a month. That guard may be doing overtime and his wife may be working an may be able to make ends meet; or the need for extra cash may be enough for the pull of even a small extra rate per hour to matter. A recurring refrain among providers of guards and stewards is that officers get poached or allow themselves to be, for an extra £2 an hour, or less. While it’s supply and demand of labour at play, it has to be grudgingly accepted even if it makes life more difficult for those supplying a contract. And it works both ways; if there’s no such thing as loyalty, why should a guard firm or a client invest in the officer.
In London, another long-timer in guarding said that the London Living Wage (of £11.95 an hour) isn’t enough. The difference from a generation ago is that guarding rates were as relatively low then, but you could save to put down money towards a mortgage, even in London. Now, you need a six-figure sum. In short, the cost of living; and inflation.
Procurement is another matter, another perennial and insoluble grumble for guarding; suffice to say that procurement managers aren’t paid to take account of any labour market shortages.
Photo by Mark Rowe; University College London security officer with bunch of keys, summer evening, Gordon Square, pavement wet after rain.
