Nigel Churton MBE is the 11th Master of the Worshipful Company of Security Professionals (WCoSP). One of the earlier ten, Una Riley, interviewed him for the May print issue of Professional Security magazine.
Formed in 1999 as the Guild of Security Professionals the company has become known as the charitable arm of the profession providing education and health services to members of the wider world of security. In January 2008 the Company became the 108th Livery Company of the City of London. From the early days of the Guild it was an aim to help pave the way for the security industry to become known as the security profession. The endeavours of the members of the WCoSP have worked to make that vision a reality and as a consequence the Company petitioned for a Royal Charter which Her Majesty the Queen approved and was granted in February 2010. Membership of the Company is drawn from industrial and retail sectors, serving and retired members of the police and armed services, consultants, academics, heads of security for corporate businesses, investigators and electronic surveillance companies. Since 1999 everyone involved with the evolution of the WCoSP has played a part in the journey of this benevolent organisation that has indeed helped the security industry be viewed as an important professional sector. Within the City of London the WCoSP is recognised as being a one of the modern livery companies that is contributing to the future of the livery movement.
Nigel is not a newcomer to the Livery, in fact while I was Master of the Company of Security Professionals in 2003 to 2004. Nigel was the Master of the Worshipful Company of Distillers. His connection to the distillers is that of a Non-Executive Director of the Hook Norton Brewery. That brewery remains one of 32 independent family-run breweries in the UK. From Master of the Distillers to Master of the WCoSP, it is evident from his acquired city skills that Nigel has been able to afford the company the benefit of his knowledge. Nigel was in business prior to serving with Her Majesty’s Forces. This was followed by further business experience before he embarked on a career at Control Risks Group, where he served as CEO for 18 years, as vice-chairman and ultimately in the capacity of non-executive director. Nigel is a committed security professional demonstrated by his roles as a past-president of the International Security Management Association (ISMA), a former director of The Security Institute (SyI) and a member of the American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS) in the UK. I recently caught up with him to discuss the forthcoming ASIS European Conference in London which he attended, having judged the first Women in Security (WiS) Awards. I also took the opportunity to ask him about his year as Master thus far. I asked what was the most important change he would like to effect.
Nigel said: “One of the things I have always been passionate about is trying to improve the image of our industry. From a very early stage I realised that you can professionalise within your own organisation by ensuring you have the best people, good training, mentoring and continual development of people’s skills. However, it was a different story outside. In general this was an industry where there were no or very few standards in place at all. Therefore, soon after I took over Control Risks, one of the first things I did was look at the entire university sector. We very quickly instituted a prize at Loughborough University for the best security project. My aim was to encourage people coming into the security industry to know how to write a proper report that could be submitted to management. We then moved out and looked at other universities and how we could encourage them. This led to people coming into our profession with a degree of understanding of the boardroom and in particular, when they were coming in from Leicester, Loughborough, Strathclyde or Portsmouth we knew what we were getting. We were encouraging those universities to produce candidates who could actually work in a corporate sector. In my opinion the problem was that traditionally academia does not like actually producing people to work in the corporate sector. It was people like Chris Horne at Loughborough University that helped change perspectives. I had met Chris whilst I was in Australia where we both realised we were getting people coming out of university having notionally attained diplomas and whatever, but they couldn’t write a business paper for love nor money. Academia would not acknowledge for an example that a business paper has to have an executive summary on the front. This is a basic requirement because a board of directors needs an executive summary with the recommendations and the paper behind it, which they can then read if they want to dig in to it in greater detail. But getting academia to actually acknowledge this simple requirement was a serious issue. I started there and then looked at other areas of industry training. Whilst in Australia I had become a member of ASIS and obviously joined the UK chapter once it was set up. They have embraced security education by way of the introduction of the CPP [Certified Protection Professional] for which they should be applauded. However, in my opinion although ASIS is such a huge organisation, from my point of view as a chief executive I could not get what training I needed from ASIS alone. I could not attain the quality of input that I required as a security CEO (out of sight of my staff, to admit what I didn’t know if you like) so I joined the International Institute of Security Management Association (ISMA). In my view this is the crème de la crème of security associations because it contains the top (notionally anyway) 400 people globally involved in security. One reason to join them is that you get a very influential network but more importantly they offer very powerful educational courses. They run leadership courses at Georgetown University. The programme is an intensive executive education and management development progression taught by the university professors and certified by Georgetown.”
Nigel could not speak highly enough of the ISMA. I asked about the criteria for ISMA membership and he explained that requirements are necessarily stringent to ensure its members represent the highest levels of leadership in the security profession. Nigel is convinced that the level of quality teaching delivered by ISMA enables the security professional to convince the board that security should be seen as a ‘value add’ to any organisation. He went on: “At board level now it is a dog-fight. f you are going to be a Chief Security Officer in a multi-national corporation today you have to be a business professional first and a security professional second. If you are working in the consultancy arena you have to know how to present information that is going to add to a company’s bottom line … not take away from it. Also, that information has to be presented in a way that is usable immediately and that will not cause inconvenience within the company. The aim is to make it easier for the management of the company to operate. All the time through my career I have tried to ensure my staff is better educated from a business perspective. With that people coming in to our industry are able to identify entry levels that are clearly benchmarked. That is one of the reasons I helped set up the Security Institute. We also now have the Chartered Security Professional. That’s why it is quite fun being Master of the WCoSP because the Company is able to influence these things. We are involved with setting up the Chartered Security Professional through the WCoSP and we were able to give the register to the Security Institute so that we are all playing our bit.”
Nigel talked about the enjoyment he has had during his year so far helping to develop the industry by way of debate with politicians, industry and the media. He explained how he had tried to take away the negatives that our industry has been affected by in the past. Nigel added: “I have been very lucky, I have been involved with building an International business so I have had the ability to cross post people at our offices across the world. The benefit of that to the company is enormous. When those people come back they are much broader thinking … they suddenly realise that one size does not fit all. I think that has been one of the great things I learned when I worked in Australia, America and South America and that actually the old expression multi-national – multi-local is absolutely true. You have to appreciate that local law is different, local expectations are different and local standards are different and the first thing you have to do is embrace the difference. In my opinion we will never-ever get to an international standard where every guard or every installer is at the same level … we would all love to I am sure but we never will. What we can get at management level is much closer to that with the like of the ASIS CCP. Of course we now have the Chartered Security Professionals and if that is picked up by other organisations outside Britain we can start to influence other places. We are getting there but we still have some way to go”. I asked what his ideal security professional will look like. Nigel replied: “I think that they will be university educated. They will also have a broad based knowledge with a degree in some form of wide risk management involving political risks. They will not necessarily have gone into military service or the blue light services, more likely they will have gone into industry and they will have come up through that company in a business capacity whilst keeping an interest in security. Then I think we will see much more of what we are seeing in America and Japan where people are brought in and placed as the chief security manager or risk manager with a number of specialists working for them who have possibly come out of the services. At the end of the day the government is the only true place where money is seriously spent on security. So there will always be a place for people who have worked for government whether they are working in the police or crime prevention areas, the military or the security services or whatever. So I envisage a mixture of very well educated fundamentally business people first, security and risk professionals second and a very, very strong layer of extremely good security professionals in areas of business, so it is business continuity in its widest sense. Below that it will be technology led. We won’t have hundreds and hundreds of guards everywhere … they won’t exist. That is what I believe and that is why as a security profession we have to ensure that we are setting up education systems from universities to the Security Institute to the Chartered Security Professionals to the CPPs.” Visions do have a habit of becoming reality sooner than we think.
