The earliest region to be TARGETED WAS THAT OF HAMPSHIRE and the Isle of Wight, where the SIA ran its pilot programme for door staff. Surprisingly, when the Authority compared an existing city database against its own criminality criteria, there was only a 10% failure rate among those door staff whose details were cross-checked.

When SMT points out that this isn’t the kind of result we would have expected, one discovers how much respect Andy Drane has for many members of the door fraternity.

“There’s an interesting snobbery surrounding door supervisors,” he claims. “They are often undervalued by the rest of the private security industry. Personally, I have a lot of time for many door supervisors because I used to work directly with them during my time in the police service. They should be absolutely crucial to keeping the peace on the streets late at night. Despite their reputation in the national media, most of those we have licensed have no criminal convictions whatsoever.”

Harking back to the extended police family, Drane believes that, in the fullness of time, licensed door supervisors could – by way of an example – “move out into the street” and provide security for the taxi and bus queues adjacent to pubs and clubs. These queues are the location for a good deal of trouble in the night-time economy as people make their way home after drinking heavily and, in Drane’s eyes, it makes perfect sense to address the issue. Indeed, there are already several examples of this happening across the country.

“It’s really a case of the venue managers and door staff accepting their social responsibilities,” opines Drane. “Town and city centres can then continue to be vibrant places, and attract inward investment. The leisure sector will also thrive because people will be enjoying themselves in a safer environment, which naturally attracts more people once the word spreads.”

Experiences in the early regions where door staff needed to be licensed led to the SIA reinforcing to industry leaders the fact that a great deal more targeted planning and management would have to be applied. “They didn’t heed our words,” comments Drane with a sigh of despair. “Due to the difficult circumstances in which the door industry now finds itself, it is all-too-easy to look towards transferring the blame our way. They use a variety of anecdotes to illustrate their argument and, it must be said, some of their case studies are true. However, we are able to demonstrate that some security companies or individuals have told blatant lies about their application status.”

Source

SMT