Our first Security TWENTY 16 event of the year, at Nottingham, raised a bumper £3550 for MacMillan Cancer Support. Pictured left to right are Roy Cooper, MD of Professional Security magazine, and Neil Harvey, operations manager CCTV at Nottingham City Council.
Each ST event has a networking dinner the evening before the conference-exhibition; and each raises money from diners for a local charity. Nottingham’s was MacMillan to mark the care given to John Bloomfield, the CCTV manager at Nottingham City Council who died of cancer. The donation was doubly appropriate as ST16 Nottingham was on Thursday, February 4, World Cancer Day.
As ever at the dinner, money was raised by a raffle – prizes donated – and the heads and tails game, won by Dan Seale of Eligo.
Sponsors of the event at the University of Nottingham’s East Midlands Conference Centre were Canon, Anixter, Samsung and CSL DualCom. More words and pictures in the March 2016 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
For an online gallery of photos from the day, visit https://professionalsecurity.co.uk/gallery/st16-midlands-in-nottingham/.
At the conference, speakers included Mark Babington and Mike Sayers of the Birmingham-based public transport authority Centro, who described how the Centro control room last year took on the CCTV monitoring of Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council. Mark described how in a time of unpredecented public sector austerity, regionalised monitoring was not only possible but might be the only way for local government to provide non-statutory services such as CCTV.
DCI Mick Neville of the Metropolitan Police gave a typically forthright talk on how the Met has professionalised and indeed ‘industrialised’ its use of CCTV images to catch and convict offenders. He argued that the true end user of CCTV is not the shop or council, but the courts. Besides making ‘idents’ (identifications) of offenders, police are able to link multiple offences to the same offender, that courts would otherwise not know of. He summed up that CCTV is a cheap way to solve crime – cheaper than the other forensic disciplines of DNA and fingerprinting; by prosecuting offenders, CCTV is better able to prevent crime; and CCTV is now delivering ‘massive results’, he said. “You can take away the good news that police are starting to take this really seriously; we have measures in place to get a grip with CCTV.”
Liz France, chair of the Security Industry Authority (SIA), gave an update on the regulator, including its review, which she urged the industry to contribute to. “Our aim always is to remember that we are there to protect the public and improve standards.” She described private security as a ‘growingly professional industry’ and offered the prospect of the more self-confident and coherent the sector becomes, the more light touch the regulation will become. “That is where we want to be; we want to be working with those that understand compliance is not just ticking boxes.” That would allow the SIA to concentrate on those that take no account of standards.
Graeme Hazlewood, business development manager of the approval body the National Security Inspectorate, likewise gave a run-down on the NSI. As the NSI requires its Gold accredited firms – mainly fire and security installers – to also have the ISO 9001 management standard, besides its certification in its specialism, the new 2015 edition of 9001 means that NSI Gold companies have to be re-certificated by 2018. The NSI has provided a ‘gap analysis’ on the new 9001 and is about to offer workshops at its summit for installer members at the National Motorcycle Museum, near Birmingham, on March 10.
As a reminder, the other three ST16 events are in Dublin, on Wednesday, April 6; Manchester, on Tuesday, July 5; and London Heathrow, on Wednesday, November 2. Entry is free, whether you’re a security manager, installer of security products, or consultant or specifier.
