Interviews

Simon Pears, new IPSA chair

by Mark Rowe

It’s a new beginning for IPSA, Simon Pears, pictured, the new chair of the International Professional Security Association, has told Professional Security.

He said: “I am just so excited to represent the front-line members,” and to seek to ‘really raise the profile’ of the industry. At the multi-national services contractor Sodexo since 2007, he’s their Global Security Director; which did mean plenty of air travel. He reflects that he hasn’t flown since March 20; just as many people whose pre-pandemic job involved face to face work, he’s able to date when he last did that important thing. Like so many, instead he’s been able to go over to online working; in Simon’s case, on Microsoft Teams.

While as for so many apps and the like have got him through the last six months and it looks like for the next too, he’s well aware of arguably the most profound question for the business world, profounder even than mitigating covid-19; knowledge of people and places has helped inform remote working since lockdowns – which for a global company like Sodexo, began in China and then spread to Europe, and to the Americas, meaning that lessons learned in one region could be applied to others. But as places change and so do people, so the knowledge from personal experience will fade. How will business fare as personal relations and knowledge cannot help but degrade?

But that is for all of us for 2021; for now, Simon stresses a positive to have come out of a negative; that the pandemic response showed the value of front-line security, and indeed others doing front-line services, whether collecting refuse or cleaning or staffing the food retail chain.

That’s why, when Professional Security jokingly asked if, in the year of pandemic, Simon did not have enough on his plate, without taking on the chair of IPSA, the most venerable of security bodies – up there with the US-based ASIS – Simon answers in terms of that front-line, that he has been able to follow from when covid-19 started, in China. It doesn’t matter what country, he says; security teams are a vital part, of infrastructure, almost; and that is what Simon wants ‘the new IPSA’ to reflect. “The new IPSA is going to open its doors to everyone working in front-line security,” including technicians, the ones who installed thermal cameras for temperature checking at entrances.

As Simon recalls, something easily forgotten as the pandemic continues, all front-line workers carried on – in supermarkets, schools, hospitals, plcs and campuses – when the risks from covid-19 were not fully known.

Simon also has something to say about the (mainstream) media representation of security officers. As he says, no-one could have functioned these last six months without ‘key workers’; but as Professional Security mentioned to Simon, there has been a tendency for whatever reason, if only ignorance, to only define ‘key workers’ as the 999 services and the NHS, when the lockdown reality was anything but.

More in the December 2020 print edition of Professional Security magazine.

About Simon Pears

He’s a Chartered Security Professional (CSyP), which he gained in December 2013 – that is, one of the earlier holders of that certification – and has been an IPSA board member since 2012. Visit www.ipsa.org.uk.

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