Several hundred thousand people in the UK have Security Industry Authority badges, far more than there are uniformed police officers. Likewise, far more people have been security officers – that is, have applied and paid for SIA licences, leaving aside those in-house officers that are not required by law to be badged – than have been in the police.
Yet the police have far more profile; and as a recent Perpetuity Research study found, featured in the October 2017 print issue of Professional Security magazine, police lack respect for the work of private security, despite all the (largely unsung) work done in corporate asset protection, retail loss prevention, and guarding people and premises particularly in pubs and clubs at night (although significantly, the Perpetuity report did find more police appreciative of that night-time economy work, as well they might).
What gives? To stay with the Perpetuity study of UK police officers, as part of its larger Security Research Initiative, they may simply be ignorant of all the work that private security industry professionals do; and may have residual fear that private security will take over their work, or push down their own pay and conditions, even though several years into public sector austerity privatisation of policing could arguably have been the dog that has not barked.
Security Industry Authority regulation
Security industry shortcomings may, frankly, also play a part. Until the Security Industry Authority came into being, in the mid-2000s, anyone could work in the security industry, as those campaigning for regulation of the sector pointed out. The SIA does have a productive story to tell of those refused their application for a badge, because of their criminal record or other disqualification to work in the security industry.
While organised crime remains an element in private security as in other sections of industry, the SIA has in the Private Security Industry Act 2001 tools to act against organised crime groups and ‘cowboys’ alike (for they are not necessarily the same thing; for as a former chief exec of the SIA, Bill Butler, disarmingly once pointed out, organised crime groups can run efficient guarding companies).
But the PSIA only covers licensable sectors, to use the jargon; and two sectors mentioned in the Act, investigators and consultants, have not been badged, and after all this time do not look like being badged either. Some sectors, such as investigators and locksmiths, not badged in the UK do have to be to work in the Republic of Ireland, under their equivalent of the SIA, the Private Security Authority (PSA).
The SIA only covers contract security guards and cash and valuables in transit staff; door staff; contracted CCTV control room operators; close protection officers; and (in Northern Ireland only) wheel clampers. They have to undergo a criminal record check; and take and pass a four-day training course. While that training syllabus has changed over the years, so have the crime and other threats that security people face; hence recent calls for Project Griffin counter-terrorism awareness training to become required by the SIA.
That SIA badge training only covers officer, entry-level work. What of supervisers, managers, advisers to the board? What of the trappings of a profession – a body of knowledge proven by qualifications, chartered status, standards of doing work that if not met can mean that the wrong-doer is denied the right to work in that occupation any more.
Private security lacks those. This has effects on recruitment and retention of people – security remains not a career that school-leavers would think first of entering, compared with the Army and police. In cyber the problem is at once more and less pronounced – cyber-security is more publicised due to breaches of security, and yet precisely because the threat is changing so quickly, as technology in general develops, those doing cyber-security and wishing well for that occupation are straining to keep up with training courses (whether by universities or more directly practical courses such as the recently-launched Digital Cyber Academy (DCA).
