This month has included a ministerial visit, meetings around the country with ACS companies and licensed individuals, and celebrating significant anniversaries with two of our stakeholders.
At the end of October our Minister, Lynne Featherstone, visited the SIA office for the first time. The Minister was given a whistle-stop tour of SIA operations as she spoke with representatives from the Customer Service, Licensing, Intelligence, Compliance and Investigation, and ACS teams. She then attended our Board’s Performance and Finance Committee to discuss the SIA’s current performance and future plans for the new regulatory regime.
As I mentioned last month, we have been running a series of ACS forums and future of regulation roadshows around the UK (although I’m afraid that we did not come to Wales on this round, something I hope to remedy early next year). I attended the events in Bristol, East Kilbride and Northampton and colleagues attended those in Chester, York, London and Belfast. These events have allowed us to explain the latest proposals on the new regulatory regime and to gain valuable feedback from those attending. We held the forums and roadshows on the same day, sharing the venues to reduce our costs and this appeared to work well. I hope those of you who attended found the sessions interesting, we are looking at rolling out further events in the future.
We will be hosting our next live Facebook forum on 5 December focussing on our proposals for the future of regulation. This will be a good opportunity for you to ask us questions and to find out more about how our proposals may affect you.
I also attended the Small Business Network meeting in London and the Door Supervisor Network meeting in Leeds. Again, we were able to discuss the latest position on the new regime, but there were also questions and debate on preparations for the Olympics and the role of private security during the Games.
As part of our work to engage with those who buy private security, we held our third Buyers’ Meeting on 4 November. I would like to thank those who attended for the lively discussions, particularly in relation to business licensing and the value of the ACS hallmark. The next meeting will be held in early 2012 and any buyers interested in attending should e-mail stakeholder@sia.gsi.gov.uk
The beginning of November saw me at CONSEC 2011, the annual conference of the Association of Security Consultants. The agenda for the day was varied; however a key theme for discussion was the economic and business downturn in relation to the private security industry.
And finally, I attended the National Security Inspectorate (NSI) event to celebrate its 40th anniversary and the British Institute of Innkeeping (BII) 30th anniversary event. My congratulations to both organisations and I look forward to working with them in the future.