The latest in this year’s series of Security TWENTY (ST19) conference-exhibitions around the British Isles by Professional Security magazine ran in Glasgow yesterday. The night before, a dinner at the venue, the Hilton Hotel in William Street, raised £1400 from a raffle and donations to play the traditional before-dessert ‘heads and tails’ game. In the absence of a suitable coin-tosser, event organiser and magazine MD Roy Cooper did the honours with a jumbo pack of playing cards and led diners in a ‘play your cards right’ contest. The last two still standing were both from Hikvision; and sales director Gary Harmer triumphed, although runner-up, regional sales manager for the northern UK, Scott Davis, was among the nine raffle prize-winners later. A well-wisher’s donation made a total of £1500 raised for the night’s good cause, The Police Treatment Centres.
Pictured left to right are Roy Cooper and Colonel Patrick Cairns, chief executive of the Centres. As Patrick Cairns told the dinner, the aim of the charity – with sites in Harrogate and Auchterarder – is to offer physiotherapy and psychological well-being treatment to police officers, whether due to extreme events such as the Hillsborough disaster or acts of terrorism, or the everyday stresses of the job.
Sponsors of ST19 Glasgow were Hikvision, Seagate, IFSEC International, Pyronix, CSL and Security Dynamics. The three-hour morning conference had a highly Scottish flavour, including opening speaker Maxine Fraser, MD of Stirling-based crime reduction partnership Retailers Against Crime; Les Allan, the head of safeguarding at Heriot-Watt University, and Scottish regional chair of the university chiefs of security association Aucso, who described how campuses look after students and staff in an ever more international context – Heriot-Watt offering third years the chance to study either in Scotland (besides its main campus outside Edinburgh, it has smaller bases in the Borders and the Orkneys), Dubai and Malaysia.
After the tea break, David Scott, curriculum and quality leader at New College Lanarkshire, went some way to explaining how NCL is the largest fire and security training provider in the UK in terms of its apprentices, having branched out into all the disciplines of an installation engineer – fire, intruder, access control and CCTV – and lately branched further into offering pre-apprentice courses. David said: “There’s a skills shortage. As a college we can either sit back and let that happen, or do things like pre-apprenticeship courses.”
Manufacturer updates came from Martyn Stanley of Todd Research (on post-room mail screening) and David McCandish, the Scotland business development manager for Hikvision (on some of the manufacturer’s many recent developments, such as in thermal cameras, and video intercoms).
The next stop for ST19 is in Manchester, on Tuesday, July 2, at a new venue; the Principal Hotel near Oxford Road railway station. While entry to an ST event is free, whether you are visiting as an installer, consultant or specifier, or end user, organisers ask that you register online beforehand, to help with the gauging of numbers for catering. The doors open around 8.30am and the day includes bacon butties at about 8.45am, mid-morning coffee and biscuits, and a hot buffet lunch.
More in the June 2019 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
For a gallery of pictures from the dinner and yesterday, visit the ‘gallery‘ part of the website.
