Monitoring News
Every month our Managing Director, Steve Kimber, fills us in on the latest monitoring news.
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Below is an archive of the previous year's monthly columns or click here for earlier news columns.
| March 12 | February 12 | January 12 |
| December 11 | November 11 | October 11 |
| September 11 | August 11 | July 11 |
| June 11 | May 11 | April 11 |
Connections
December 2008
Hello Again,
Welcome to the December Connections page, the previous month saw the departure of the CEO of the Security Industry Authority against a back-drop of failure to license their staff.
It seems quite ironic really that so much tax payers money is being used to support a regulatory body that continually is being picked up for poor performance, if this were a privately owned business it would have ceased trading by now!
Just prior to Mike Wilson’s departure I was at a CCTV stakeholder user group meeting in London which was sponsored by the SIA, unfortunately I was one of only a few practitioners in attendance, the vast majority being SIA staff, or those that provide services to the industry on the back of Statutory Regulation. During the meeting it was announced that the SIA was to produce a paper by the end of this year on the licensing of Security Companies for Ministers consideration.
It appeared to me at the time that before launching off on another form of stealth tax on the Security Industry, that one ought to reflect as to whether there has been any tangible benefit for the public from the licensing activity that has occurred thus far.
In our case, as a third party monitoring centre, monitoring reactive CCTV from sites that are not a public space but a private space, you can imagine we were not best pleased when told with 3 months to go that we were licensable, especially having previously been told we were not.
Notwithstanding the appalling timing of such an announcement by the SIA we have embraced the underpinning training that has absolutely no relevance to our staff and got ourselves licensed.
Has it benefited the consumer? Absolutely not, it has incurred additional cost to business and in turn the consumer, it has completely changed our recruitment and training plans due to cost as we do not wish to train transient staff, but established stable staff. Even then the training modules are either for guards or public space surveillance neither of which are
applicable to our business.
Has Government gone mad or will it ever be capable of meeting the needs of an Act of Parliament that it passed itself in the House of Commons, furthermore will it ever be able to do so without enormous cost to the public purse and UK Plc in particular?
Having got that off my chest, I have to say that it has been a very good year for us. Therefore all the staff at Southern & Northern Monitoring Services would like to wish all our customers, friends and colleagues a very Happy Xmas and a peaceful break with friends and family.
Bye for now,
Steve