Sir – I would like to offer an opinion on what I believe to be a hugely important issue – the non-licensing of specialist security dog handlers by the Security Industry Authority (SIA).

At Detect International K9 Support Services, we provide drugs and explosives detection dog/handler teams for deployment to clients throughout the UK. When the SIA announced its plans to regulate the security industry, we were looking forward to the introduction of training criteria and legitimate assessment. Alas, the only regulation that has been enforced is that security dog handlers must attain a security officer’s licence before they can deploy to site with their dog. In other words, there is still no specialist dog training required.

As things stand, anyone can work as a drugs dog handler (and, more worryingly, as an explosives detection dog handler) without having to undertake any kind of formalised and relevant training.

I fully understand that the SIA has faced – and, indeed, is still confronted by – a long and demanding process in regulating the private security industry, but the important roles of the specialist and security dog handlers are being ignored. In this day and age, when the threat from drug trafficking and terrorism is on the increase, we cannot afford to be complacent when it comes to the type of personnel we employ or the training given to those personnel.

I would like to thank SMT for allowing me to raise this issue. Hopefully, by doing so we have created an awareness of the situation among the non-dog handling sectors of the security community which we support.

Robert Taylor, UK Operations Director Detect International K9 Support Services

Source

SMT