John Saunders and (then chair) Molly Meacher launched the SIA just over two years ago, threatening to improve standards, but to my mind all that has been achieved is failure and confusion.
The night-time economy is no better as a result of the SIA’s involvement. If anything, it is worse. Further, the smaller security companies are all about to suffer the costs of licensing. It would have been easier – and far better – if the companies were licensed, not the individuals within them. Easier to implement, with easier cost implications. A better solution for everyone, in truth.
You might say: “Isn’t that what the Approved Contractor Scheme (ACS) is all about?” Why are we trying to reinvent the wheel here? As I see it, the ACS will be populated solely by companies currently in possession of ISO 9001 certification. The National Security Inspectorate runs an accredited approval scheme for contractors with Gold, Silver and Bronze memberships. A scheme valued and trusted by the majority of insurers. The same insurers who are far less enamoured with the SIA’s proposals. It follows, then, that membership of the ACS is an additional and unnecessary burden.
I am now in the process of attempting to discover if the regulator has overstepped the mark on this occasion (given that the Government is attempting, via the Better Regulation Task Force, to reduce the impact of regulation).
Still the SIA remains silent on what the cost of ACS membership might be. I would suggest they will charge something in the region of GB pound 20 per head. In other words, a security company employing 600 staff will have to pay GB pound 12,000 to replicate an accreditation! That is nonsense. Frankly, I am stunned that this industry is just glibly sitting back and accepting it. Am I really a lone voice?
After two years in office, John Saunders is “still compiling evidence to take to ministers” to prove that the aptly-phrased ‘in-house contradiction’ should be amended by Government. Two years to compile information on what is obvious to us all?! Surely this is indicative of an arrogant, mute organisation?
Clearly the in-house ruling ought to be repealed, but the Home Office has only just indicated that it is not only alive and well but thriving (at least if the outcome of a recent meeting between the Football Licensing Authority, sports minister Richard Caborn and Home Office minister Hazel Blears is any kind of yardstick).
As stated in last month’s Security Management Today (‘Football authorities bid to ‘sidestep’ regulation’, News Update, p7), Government ministers are fully prepared to grant football stewards an exemption from SIA licensing under Section 4 of the Private Security Industry Act 2001 provided that “suitable alternative arrangements” are in place. In other words, independently-accredited training (including conflict management) with Criminal Records Bureau checks for some stewards.
The exemption applies to in-house stewards only. Agency stewards performing designated ‘security’ activities will definitely require a licence.
The implications of this for subcontractors are severely prejudicial.
The training being talked about is the revised Football Stewarding Qualification, now known by a somewhat more grandiose title – the Certificate in Event and Matchday Stewarding (which sits on the national qualifications framework approved by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority).
Given that my company subcontracts to football clubs in the Premiership, according to the Home Office we will have to license our stewards via another route. The SIA and the Home Office insist we provide evidence of ‘competency’ via, say, the retail security award in manned guarding. That syllabus has nothing whatsoever to do with manned security, but at least we’d be legal!
We have provided security, search and ejection-trained stewards to the Premiership over many seasons. Come the start of next season, though, because we are a subcontractor that provides equivalent trained and screened stewards we will not be allowed to do so unless we can instigate a four-day training programme that has nothing to do with event stewarding, subsequently paying GB pound 190 for each steward to be licensed. That is onerous and in no way equitable. We will have to seriously reconsider our business case for continuing with football work in 2005-2006 and beyond.
I know of one company that employs 30-plus security officers in-house. Those officers have neither been properly trained nor vetted, and what’s more the company concerned has no intention of addressing either issue. Rest assured that, after the first subcontracted officer is convicted of working without a licence at some point in 2006, I’ll be the first in line calling for a Judicial Review.
How can it be that an in-house officer is exempt from what his or her fellow subcontracted officer might be criminalised over?
As things stand, the SIA’s regulatory regime equates to little more than an inequitable ‘tax’ on employment, paid for by some and not others who are carrying out exactly the same routines on a daily basis. To my mind that cannot be right.
Jon Elliott, Director, Matrix Security
