Nick van der Bijl, one of the stalwarts of the healthcare security sector, is retiring. Mark Rowe visited him at his Somerset offices.
Nick has been a writer to the letters page, and a speaker at industry events – most recently at the Global Security Summit in London last autumn, featured in our December 2012 issue. I began by asking something slightly different; about his work as a magistrate. Why be a magistrate? Nick’s brother, a judge suggested it; Nick had no idea beforehand what the work meant. What does a magistrate do? “For the first ten years, I was a winger,” he begins. That’s not to do with football but means that in a court of three magistrates he was one at the side of the chair of magistrates seated in the centre, who gives the verdict. As a chair’s ‘wing-man’ you learn how the law is applied – ‘you don’t have to know the law’ – what the possible sanctions are, and as Nick puts it ‘how to say things to people when you are going to give them a bit of bad news, maybe, or indeed good news’. You learn to treat everyone with respect – offender, lawyer, or witness. Then Nick became a chair – ‘daunting at first, but I had some very good colleagues, who support you and give you guidance. We have legal advisers who are very good at giving us guidance so we are not entirely on our own’. He’s done a complete range of cases, from murder (which goes on to the higher, crown court) to domestic violence to RSPCA cases involving animals, even disagreements over planning applications which reach court. Nick has also worked in youth courts.
The work has given Nick insight into how to handle offenders. “So you are able to bring some of what goes on in courts to the job, frankly. I found it very worthwhile, there’s no doubt about it.” To be a magistrate does require you to have roots, whether in your county or city. He was a magistrate Bridgwater where he’s worked as the Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust’s security manager. As he goes on to explain, Somerset like everywhere else has seen many small town courts close, and justice has centralised – in his case, to the county town, Taunton. Bridgwater’s courthouse closed 18 months ago, he recalls, and when I walked past it afterwards in town I saw the building was for sale as a ‘development opportunity’. Magistrates, offenders, witnesses, all have to travel further – in rural counties such as Somerset, maybe long distances. Some offenders, as Nick adds, have ‘chaotic lifestyles. Bearing in mind the article in July’s Professional Security about how courts and police are behind the times in using digital CCTV evidence, it was interesting that Nick spoke of being surprised – still surprised – about the lack of IT in courts. Files, amendments, are still on paper. Although as Nick notes, government (including the NHS) has had a reputation for not having very good IT systems. Nick confirms there’s a lack of familiarity with CCTV, although Nick queries one other application of CCTV – prisoners ‘appearing’ in court remotely, by video rather than in person. If someone wants their day in court, they should have it. The courts are changing, due to social change and technology, like everything else – Nick has seen change – and yet the institution is many hundreds of years old. That people, non-professionals, are still coming forward to be magistrates, speaks volumes for its effectiveness, Nick says. He’s the only security person on his bench; others may be doctors, teachers, some former police officers (‘they have a different style’). Seldom has an offender objected to what a magistrate has to say: “And I think people accept the system, and that’s important. But I also think local justice is important, it’s after all local people who know the local area and why things happen in a particular area; they are the people who know the roads, the shopkeepers, the local scenarios; as soon as you start removing that then you become a little bit like a judge, where to some extent you are quite divorced.” Speaking of Somerset, someone from Taunton won’t understand Bridgwater, and vice versa; and so on around the country.
Does he recommend becoming a magistrate? “If you are in security, you can bring a certain flavour to the decision-making process. But because it’s all done on a majority, it may or may not be that your views are accepted, it’s a bit like a jury; that’s the way it goes. Yes, I would recommend it. I have been very lucky that my NHS employers have allowed me away, largely because we are able to bring something back to the office, even if it’s only a bit of experience. “
What of the conflict, as it’s local justice, if someone stands in front of you that you know? You would declare that to the court’s legal adviser (previously known as the clerk of the court) and decide whether to proceed. As Nick says, in Bridgwater, as in any town, some magistrates know a lot of people, ‘and you can walk down the street and you will see somebody; maybe you have just given them a fine or something, and they will recognise you, and generally there is a wry grin, maybe, but I have never come across any animosity about what we [magistrates] are doing. But it’s about bringing a local perspective to the courts, at the lowest level.” He adds: he doesn’t recommend becoming a magistrate because you are in security, but because you want to make a contribution – a long-term one – to our society.
We turned to the National Health Service. It’s true that anyone working in security – banking, retail, critical national infrastructure, transport – has to keep up with changes in that sector, besides security. Has the NHS ever had a chance to settle, as each government has made political, organisational changes? There’s a lot to keep up with inside hospitals; doctors and nurses, all the people who support them, and the ‘grey suits’, the managers (many qualified doctors and nurses, note); and the NHS is, as Nick adds, ‘very much at the heart of the country’. From someone giving birth to dying, the NHS is there, doing its job of treating people. I suggested to Nick that on the one hand his job is simple – stopping thieves and fraudsters, and drunks assaulting staff – but on the other, keeping tabs on change (in job titles, and buildings) is a job in itself?! Nick agrees. He gives the example of acute hospitals, general hospitals, covering a big area, and Security people are expected to provide a sense of security in places that until the 1990s didn’t consider security. Nick recalls how once hospitals were ‘wide open’. Yet if you went to sleep in a house, would you leave doors open or unlocked? Probably not. Why then do or did we allow hospitals, expensive places, to be unprotected? Not only from criminals, but unwell people who might want to leave hospital? Never mind terrorism, or health and safety, such as infection control – do you want just anybody taking their germs around wards?! ”So I see security in some respects as fulfilling a protective screen; I don’t see us, and this is probably going to be quite controversial, as purely involved in crime prevention. In my view, if a crime is committed on a hospital site, then we have lost; but what we need to do is prevent those crimes happening; that is why I prefer this term ‘protective security’.” Put another way, Security puts a ‘bubble’ around a hospital. Since being in healthcare security in the mid-1990s he has found staff generally are aware of security, and you can get staff on your side, to protect themselves, and hospital property, and their cars in the car park, and patients. “But when I first arrived and found it was possible to walk on to a ward without going through a locked door, I have to say I was shocked at the time, because I didn’t expect it.”
Looking over his near-20 years in the field, he says security provision had become ‘much, much more professional, much more reliable, much more diverse’. I recalled the Royal London Hospital, featured in our April 2013 issue, and how that Whitechapel hospital reflected the diverse population of London’s East End. Rural Somerset feels far from the capital, yet it too has many eastern Europeans. It’s the nature of the NHS, Nick says, to deal with a cross-section of society. He tells a story from his previous work at Southmead Hospital in north Bristol; a sister on a ward rang that a Sikh had arrived, wearing his curved knife in his waistband. What should she do? Knives were not allowed on wards. A colleague of Nick’s, a former soldier, took the knife from the Sikh, also a former soldier; the hand-over was, Nick recalls, ‘almost ceremonial’, and when the man left the ward, the reverse happened. Nick returns to that word ‘respect’. “And you do have to use your imagination to solve problems, because anybody that comes into hospital will be frightened, certainly if they are patients, they may be ill, they may have travelled some distance and all they want to do is get well. And if Security can help them along by providing a decent service.” That said, Security has to be robust, if thieves are wandering, looking for chances to steal, or do damage. The aim; to transfer risk away from the hospital. “And it’s very difficult for hospitals to do that, but it’s not impossible, with a decent protective security strategy and a good security team.”
Talking of being robust, what of Friday and Saturday drunks. As Nick said, Security has to be robust to enable nurses, porters and cleaners to do their jobs. This may be a matter of separating the drunks and those behaving badly. Nick thinks hospitals are better at dealing with such late-night bad behaviour; certainly doctors in accident and emergency (A&E) feel more able to call Security or help resolve problems. While we still go to A&E with a broken arm, in cases of mental health, and care of the elderly, the trend is ‘care in the community’, as it’s seen as best to keep people out of hospital beds, if possible. That means nurses and others travelling and entering people’s homes – being lone workers, in short. How to protect them, and not only from violence and aggression? What if a nurse gets a flat tyre in the Quantocks (a range of hills in mid-Somerset) or skids off the road in the middle of winter? Nick makes the point that protecting workers is also about their welfare. Some mobile reception in Somerset Nick describes as ‘lousy’, ‘therefore we revert to good old-fashioned land lines and people reporting in and people are now getting used to that. Initially people objected to it but more and more I think there is more acceptance that what we are trying to do is’ really worthwhile.’ Some technology around lone worker protection, Nick recalls, in the early part of the century was ‘not very good, but it’s vastly improved’.
Something else that came in the 2000s was the NHS fraud and security management service, now called NHS Protect. That service brought in the LSMS job title (local security management specialist) which Nick finds ‘a bit of a mouthful’. Each NHS health body is supposed to have a LSMS. Nick spoke of one factor in being a security manager as being seen, by all, whether managers or canteen staff – ‘security by walking around’, a bit like being a bobby on the beat. His mid-Somerset NHS trust has more than 100 sites, which means Nick’s job calls for a lot of driving. Visits, even only dropping in for five minutes, are important, he says. It gives people the chance to raise problems, and shows that Security is there to support, and that they can ring, yes, even on a Saturday or Sunday.
Before entering the NHS, Nick was 22 years in the Regular Army. While he has had a cut-off date at work for some time, he has three years to go as a magistrate. He plans to go on writing – he has written several books of modern British military history, covering for instance the Falklands, Cyprus and Northern Ireland. His newest book reflects his Intelligence background: it’s a history of the Intelligence Corps since 1940. He’s got some other things worked out. He’s a past chairman of the National Association of Healthcare Security (NAHS) and is the association’s president. To stress, that’s not the same as NHS Protect, which offers training and central policies. Nick describes NHS Protect as ‘a very good thing, but I do think it could have gone about it in a much more sensitive manner. And I think their idea that you could just lump all security managers into one basket was completely wrong and I believed lacked respect [that word again] for those of us who had been security managers for the previous x number of years. To some extent that meant that healthcare security did not take a significant step forward, in some respects it took a bit of a step back. Having said that, many of the LSMSs within the health service, there’s no doubt in my view, that they re all doing the very best they can in some instances very difficult circumstances. There does need to be a security department within the health service. But it does need to be a department of experts.” In terms of benchmarking, Nick makes the comparison with the security of the Ministry of Defence – instead of hospitals, you have barracks. There are differences: the MoD has classified documents and closed sites, whereas the public expects the NHS to be open-door. What Nick means is that the MoD’s security is run by relatively few people, ‘but in that organisation there were real experts on security and therefore those experts could advise the ministers and the generals and all the rest of the armed forces, the best way to manage their security. I fear we are not there within the NHS. Because we don’t have that expertise. And it has to be expertise.” Take CCTV for example; why not, Nick asks, have available a simple, national NHS specification for a lock, or CCTV system? That said, the NHS is ever-changing, with new buildings (Nick is based on the outskirts of Bridgwater on a new business estate; next door, earth-movers are still loudly at work – on a new police station). As organisations change, so building stock comes together with various intruder alarms and access control kit, for example. If you centralise, you might make savings, but would you deliver local service? That brings us back to where we started; how the NHS, and indeed magistrates, best serve us.
About Nick van der Bijl
Army background in the Intelligence Corps – the provision of operational intelligence so that the commander can fight his battle, (as during the Falklands campaign), and to make protective security recommendations to defend the Army and its civilian components from espionage, sabotage, subversion and terrorism. He entered ‘Civvy Street’ with no civilian-recognised qualifications, in spite of 20 years involvement in security in several countries and a British Empire Medal for a security task in Hong Kong. He took several courses making himself something of a pioneer by taking the postgraduate Diploma in Security Management at Loughborough University (1990-1992). No security management degrees then.
To give another point of view, it’s difficult to do justice (pardon the pun!?) to being a magistrate in a few words, but here is what Baroness Ruth Henig, former SIA chairman, has to say about being a magistrate in Lancashire, which she describes as ‘one of the most interesting things I have ever done’.
You learn so much about human nature, and about why people commit the offences they do. There are so many people who drift into crime through inadequacy – mental health problems, early life handicaps they seem unable to overcome and so forth, leading to drink or drug addictions. Then there are those who set out to get round or flout laws in a much more calculated or deliberate way. And the young lads who regularly drink 11 or 12 pints in a session and then get aggressive … Trying to find an appropriate punishment, in line with approved guidelines, while at the same time trying to help to rehabilitate the more inadequate offenders is often a tricky but sometimes very rewarding task. And as a magistrate you never know what cases you will be called upon to deal with – because all cases, even those which go on to crown court such as murders – start in the magistrates` court.
