CSS won the tender from Southampton City Council after the local authority increased its property portfolio with school buildings previously looked after by Hampshire County Council.
The council opted for a keyholder programme for its schools instead of having a traditional manned guarding service, cutting the annual cost of minimising vandalism on one site to less than GB pound 2,000 with the aid of CCTV. It is also ploughing back cost savings into on-going security improvements and protection for schools, including increased CCTV and the correct interfacing of new technology as it becomes available.
The keyholder programme was implemented by CSS, who initially arranged for every school to be surveyed by a trained security technician. A central monitoring station was established to monitor all alarms on the project, with keys being held for all schools on the scheme.
Key removal is monitored through security tagging, and when an alarm is triggered, the monitoring station sends trained security staff to the site, cutting response times to one hour or as little as 20 minutes in comparison to the national average of four hours.
Luke Pearson, security co-ordinator at the council, said: “CSS won the tender because they placed the needs of our customers first. They have achieved our primary objective to secure our properties and minimise any risk to staff.”
Roberto Fiorentino, managing director of CSS Total Security said: “By setting maintenance budgets low, we hope to increase spending on surveillance devices and further improve the effectiveness of the service we deliver.”
