Editor Mark Rowe’s page 7 editorial from the January 2015 issue of Professional Security magazine.
One thing we know is that in May the UK has a general election. What we don’t know or rather what is hard to predict is which party or parties will win. Leaving aside what your party-political opinions are (if any), I felt it was newsworthy to hear from Labour (page 30). And as it happens I was in Brighton the other week to hear the Lib Dem former Home Office crime prevention minister (and classic car owner) Norman Baker (page 28). We are not now, nor ever will be a political organ but, in the interest of fairness, next month we will ask the Conservatives for their take on the future of the security industry.
You would have thought I would have learned by now, but I ate well before I went to the AGM of the Institute of Hotel Security Management (page 38; pictured). The nosh, if that is the right word to describe what is offered at The Savoy, was outstanding, but I could hardly have any. I was glad to go, though, to hear from the three finalists in the institute’s officer of the year awards. I did not say to them that I was a judge and that, as always in such cases, it was hard and unfair to rank all their good work. I will only add what’s intriguing arising from Michael Ehrhardt’s spotting someone suspicious, from as soon as he walked in, who sure enough tried to walk out with a stolen iPad. How did Ehrhardt know that of all the comings and goings in a busy upmarket downtown London hotel, to keep an eye on the thief? Experience in a word – to quote Alan Cain, head of security at the University of Leeds from the other month, the absense of the normal and the presence of the abnormal. The same must go for Heathrow, for all its time and motion study (page 68) and ports such as Southampton (page 69): besides processes and kit, you need people to respond.
As at that PaS launch, so often gatherings of security people are useful not only for the business of the meeting, but to allow various people to renew friendships and make connections. So it was at the Security Institute manifesto launch recently (page 23). It was as ambitious a list of aims as any in the institute’s first 15 years. That list, and the buzz of conversation before institute chairman Emma Shaw spoke, were signs of how UK security management has a body of capable and hard-working people who know each other, and have some continuity, in post and in the industry. How the tables have turned. No longer are the police and other senior public officials necessarily the long-serving, experienced ones. Private security is justified in asking the authorities: we’re doing our part; how about you do yours?! Now the institute’s hard work begins of making the manifesto real.
