Corps Security are going for gold after their support for reservists earned them a silver award under the Defence Employer Recognition Scheme. We hear from Gary Broad at the guarding company.
The Corps has that silver award in a glass case in his head office reception. Right there, in the front window so that passers-by could see (pictured), and donate, last year Corps staff including Gary Broad, the major accounts director at the London EC1-based contractor, did a sponsored row on a static rowing machine. The £2100 raised went to the company’s chosen charity – the Royal Marines Charitable Trust Fund – and other causes. The company’s support for reservists and the armed forces generally, then, is practical. It’s not a ticking of corporate social responsibility boxes. “It’s interwoven in the company’s DNA, the caring for ex-service personnel and serving personnel. We genuinely do do it because we care,” says Gary. Briefly, the Corps of Commissionaires, as older readers will know it – the company changed its name to Corps Security in 2008 – began after the Crimean War as a way of offering civilian work to veterans. While times have inevitably changed, the need to bring returned veterans to society has not. Corps can still point to more than half of its staff as former police or armed forces. Gary can only point to a family, and his own cadet, background in the armed forces, but is ‘a military history fanatic’. He’s evidently in the right place, as the company has a part of a cemetery near Woking, and yes, Gary does take a mower there to cut the grass. He can show you on his phone pictures of some of the gravestones, including Victoria Cross holders, whose tombstones give their Army regiments, ‘and the Corps of Commissionaires’. Plainly the Corps mattered to those men, as it matters as evidently to Gary now. He will attend war cemeteries in full uniform on the anniversaries of such British campaigns as D-Day and Arnhem (and ‘Ypres when I can’), and lay wreaths.
Gary says: “I was keen that we fell in line with the MoD [Ministry of Defence] corporate covenant, where we made certain commitments within our organisation to support cadet forces, and attract and employ as many reservists as we possibly could, not only to meet the requirements of a reservist, but beyond that, give them more time off so they can have time with their families and whatever part of the military there are connected with through their reservist status.” It’s an overhead to the company to pay extra holiday so that the reservist doesn’t use up all their holiday time on manoeuvres. The Corps also provides security for the ex-servicemen’s charity SSAFA at cost price; and free security for events at the Battle of Britain Museum. As featured in our March 2014 issue, the National Army Museum in London is a Corps customer, and the contract security firm has donated to its fund-raising appeal.
There’s no doubting that the Corps has a long and lasting relationship with the armed forces. Yet it’s only fair to point to the sound business reasons behind it. Yes, the Corps is keen to get severely wounded veterans into work, and to support spouses of reservists. And Gary, who was 20 years at Chubb and who has been at Corps six years, says: “I love this organisation. It makes getting up every day to go to work every day so exciting and rewarding, to know that when we make profits, when we sell a new contract, we can perhaps look at giving more to military related charities and doing more for that side of the armed forces community.” In return for that support, the Corps gets committed, happy staff, who will look after customers, ‘which is the simplest business model in the world, but it works’, Gary says. Likewise injured veterans, like amputees and the disabled in general, can make motivated, hard-working staff, precisely because they value the job that gives their life value. This is especially true when you have an amputee veteran no longer physically fit to serve in the armed forces, and hence losing the comradeship and banter of fellow soldiers. Give that amputee a job that he is well able to do, in a control room for instance, and you are in effect saying that he can still do a worthwhile job; he has a future beyond the disappointment of injury. Other security and services companies have gained silver: Shield Security Services of Hull, Sodexo and G4S. Many more companies, such as MBSS of Exeter, are bronze.
As reported in our January issue, G4S provided cash in transit services for poppy collectors in London in November. Gary and others in full Corps uniform were selling poppies outside Farringdon station, down the road from the Corps’ head office. He speaks of how his faith in human nature was restored, by the number of people who put £20 or £30 in the collecting tin.
