The forthcoming establishment of the Security Industry Authority and its role in licensing operatives in the private sector will in no way diminish the requirement for officer screening. Arguably, the demand will be higher. You may ask: why?
In simple terms, as contractors the security companies do not know the people they employ. A man or woman can walk into a job centre, and within a week (having – hopefully – undertaken a basic induction training course and a five-year telephone vet) be deployed on a client assignment. Everyone concerned is taking a huge risk in placing such an individual in what is a position of great trust so early in the employment cycle. So why do we do it?
The root of the problem continues to lie in the wholly unacceptable terms and conditions of employment which so many officers have ultimately accepted. Until these contract terms are substantially improved, the industry will suffer again and again from extraordinary levels of staff turnover. Little wonder, then, that in this vicious cycle company vetting departments are continually being overrun.
Vetting staff are frequently working on the files of officers who have long since departed the company, not to mention the industry. Individuals slip through the net either by being employed prior to completion of the five-year telephone vet – or as a result of being retained well after the 16-week period of ‘provisional employment’ has expired (according to BS 7858). The problem is exacerbated by an increasing use of subcontracted labour.
A parlous state of affairs
A fundamental question must be posed: how often are the screening files on subcontracted individuals validated by the ultimate employer prior to them being placed on assignment? The answer is very rarely.
Let’s not forget that the client is vulnerable in all this, too. How many clients know the state of screening of each member of the contractors’ team operating on their assignment? It must surely make sense to insist that the contractor keep them fully briefed – on a weekly basis, if necessary – with regard to each individual officer’s state of progress through the screening cycle.
What about BS 7858? The Watchdog’s greatest criticism is that a company can be awarded a certificate (as a result of a formal inspection by an accreditation body) that is necessarily based on a random sample of individuals within the corporation. We believe very strongly that screening is such an individual process that, in many ways, it should not be treated in a dissimilar way to licensing.
In essence, it should be the individual who is awarded the certificate and not the corporation. Every time a crime is committed on site by a security officer we catch our breath at the corporate level, and hope that the individual concerned has been properly screened. Yet how many times has the system been found wanting?
Changes in vetting requirements
At The Watchdog, we believe that the five-year telephone vetting period should be formally reduced to three years. Only for those individuals who are not able to provide comprehensive proof of their movements within that three-year period is an automatic extension imposed to five years, before they are allowed to commence ‘provisional employment’. This should help to ease the bottleneck, and reduce the temptation for placing officers on site when they haven’t been fully cleared for the purpose.
Importantly, those security companies deliberately holding back on providing information in order to prevent the telephone vet being completed in time should be reported to both their Trade Association and accreditation body, and effective subsequent action taken against them. In a similar vein, individuals who have consistently failed to supply information to the appropriate screening department to enable full screening to be completed should be automatically dismissed at the end of their 16-week period of provisional employment.
Written references are all very well, but The Watchdog recommends that they should always be corroborated by ‘out-of-hours’ telephone conversations with the referees.
In addition, a form of grading on each individual being screened should be awarded on completion. For example, a reliance on Statutory Declarations should not achieve such a high grading as one which did not.
Ultimately, The Watchdog remains eager to dispel the view that, post-licensing, screening of officers will lose its importance. For too long we’ve all breathed a sigh of relief that an individual doesn’t have a criminal record, and have chosen to ignore the fact that he or she has built up an employment record littered with indiscipline and unreliability.
Licensing should bring comfort on the issue of proven criminality, and allow screening departments time to identify and expose those individuals who should not be accepted by the industry as a result of poor performance in times gone by.
We cannot hide the fact that, in our view, inadequate screening – more, perhaps, than any other single issue – could still prove to be the nemesis of the contract manned guarding industry as we know it.
