Guarding in a post-regulation landscape

There's no doubt that among those who take this industry seriously, and harbour a desire to provide an excellent security/loss prevention service – while aspiring to engage security practitioners on acceptable terms and conditions – the Working Time Directive and private sector regulation will ultimately help them in their quest.

In light of many and varied – and often heated – discussions, it would seem to me that the guarding sector is indeed at a crossroads. Having moved from a laudable pre-regulation position of introducing sufficient law to ensure that we don't employ individuals with criminal records, and make sure that criminals can't form security companies, we'll soon find ourselves in a post-regulation environment that will introduce very significant increases in costs on an already badly eroded operating margin due to necessary training, inspection and validation requirements.

My concern is how we travel this expensive route, absorb the increased costs, pay our staff what will become the market rate determined by the demand for – and supply of – licensed officers, and eventually reach a point where end users accept the inevitable increases in costs and pay more for the service.

We'll all have views on how we might achieve this 'Holy Grail', but none of the foregoing will of itself prevent the guarding function from being taken back to being an entirely in-house operation, or identify the many officers who leave security companies each year without any disciplinary action having been taken, and in respect of whom new employers receive an inaccurate reference. That's a huge problem that we must face up to... and fast.

Have we really reached the point where we want to be? The point at which all of this legislation was designed to lead us towards?