How soon and how well the private security industry will return to normal depends on your point of view, writes Mark Rowe.
Optimists will like to think that the economy will re-boot quickly and fully, while pessimists will doubt if life will go back to normal at all soon even when the lockdown restrictions are lifted, until the world has a working and widely available vaccine to the coronavirus.
As private security is a service, its recovery will depend on public demand for its various roles and activities; and, again, on how badly people want to return to pre-virus habits. Take cashless payments, given a boost during the lockdown as payment by card avoids close contact by hand, and the handling of cash from shop floor to cash office to cash in transit (CIT) courier to cash centre, and back again.
Will the break in cash payments be the death of CIT? Older customers, who may be more disposed to using cash, are largely locked down. Once some or all of the social distancing restrictions are lifted, they may carry on using cash. It may be years before cash is overtaken by electronic payment methods; and the CIT can point to statistics that the actual amount of cash in circulation has been at an all-time high, despite the burgeoning cashless economy.
How will those fields closed due to the virus – pubs, music and other events, spectator sport – fare? Demand for stewarding may take time to return if professional sport can only be played in otherwise closed stadiums. It may depend by generation. The younger generation may have chafed at being kept indoors, and an end to lockdown may prompt a burst of consumer spending and leisure activity, just as in 1945 at the end of the 1939-45 war saw a boom in watching all sports, and visiting art galleries and museums. With time, as people aged and changed, spending patterns settled. Will the same happen again, only speeded up over weeks or months, instead of years.
According to pollsters Yougov, many Brits say they will feel uncomfortable going to newly reopened stores and services such as gyms, once the lockdown is lifted.
Will fewer people choose to fly, meaning less demand for security screening and searching at airports; or to travel for business, if they find that they can manage by ‘meeting’ remotely, via Zoom or Microsoft Teams? The virus-lockdown may in that and other respects only reinforce trends already present. Procurement has for years been through electronic bids, which cuts out the time-consuming physical meetings. That may suit procurement managers, for whom a manned guarding contract is just numbers on spreadsheets, like toilet roll, because to the non-specialist procurement specialist, a guarding service is much of a muchness, to be judged largely on price. If business invests enough meaning into something – and if a businessman really wants to take the extra trouble to gain the contract – they will still want the face to face contact.
In education, likewise; demand for university places has remained strong, even though there has been nothing for years to stop the student from getting all their learning online. Evidently young people value years at university for the social life, which implies the need for campus security, and its slide in recent years from merely protecting buildings, unlocking them in the morning and locking them at night, to providing a more pastoral service, looking to protect students’ well-being.
Even if corporates change the way they do business, working more from home and slimming their head offices, they will still need protecting from physical and cyber enemies; for the virus-lockdown has thrown up plenty of evidence that criminals are still at work.
To repeat, your view may depend on whether you see people in terms of a ‘profound paternalism’, or whether, in a crisis, you believe that ‘collectivity creates resilience’, to quote Stephen Reicher, Bishop Wardlaw Professor from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, at the University of St Andrews.
He wrote: “This paternalism is embedded deep in some of the language of crisis management where the ‘first responders’ in an emergency refer to ‘blue light’ agencies such as the police, ambulance or fire services. It implies that government must communicate sparingly and simply lest people are overwhelmed by what they are told. And it even suggests that the measures used to mitigate against a crisis may have to be adjusted to deal with human frailties.”
As he sets out in an article on psychology, your view will inform whether you see people as the problem in an emergency – to be evacuated and cordoned off while blue light responders arrive and clear up, or: ‘As so often in disasters, the real ‘first responders’ are the people themselves, way before any emergency services can arrive on the scene and the role of the state must be to scaffold, not substitute for that self-help.’
