The SIA Licenses Your Guards. It's Now Looking at Licensing Your Business Too.

Every guard on your rota needs an SIA licence. Your company does not. That gap, a fully licensed workforce sitting inside a business with no licence of its own, is exactly what the Home Office has been consulting on since December.

What's actually being proposed

The consultation, "Licensing of contractors who carry out security services and in-house CCTV operators," ran from 18 December 2025 to 12 March 2026. It covers two of the Manchester Arena Inquiry's monitored recommendations: MR7, on whether in-house CCTV operators should be licensed, and MR8, on whether contractors who carry out security services, in other words, security businesses themselves, should be.

Right now, SIA licensing reaches frontline operatives and the partners, directors, managers and supervisors named on a firm's licence. It does not touch the business as an entity. The model on the table for MR8 is a registration and "fit and proper" baseline test built on the probity standards already used in the voluntary Approved Contractor Scheme, with the possibility of extra competency conditions on top.

Where it actually stands

The consultation closed five months ago and there's been no ministerial announcement on a preferred option. That does not mean it has gone quiet. The SIA's own 2026 to 2027 business plan already references working with the Home Office on "the roadmap for delivery of the preferred business licensing options," subject to ministerial sign-off on which option gets chosen. Planning for delivery is underway before the policy decision has even been confirmed publicly. That is not typical of a consultation heading for the shelf.

Worth being honest about what is not yet known: no confirmed timeline, no confirmed scope, no confirmed compliance criteria. Anyone telling you exactly what business licensing will require and by when is guessing. What is fair to say is that ACS-style probity and competency standards are the explicit reference point being discussed, and that is a reasonable steer on the direction of travel.

Why ACS as the template matters

ACS assessment already asks operators to evidence things like supervision, training records and quality management, not just describe them. If business licensing follows that shape, "we run things properly" stops being an answer you can give from memory. It becomes something you produce on request: who was briefed, when, which checkpoints were actually completed versus scheduled, what got logged and by whom.

Most firms outside ACS currently have none of that in a form they could hand over quickly. A WhatsApp group and a rota spreadsheet do not produce evidence, they produce a scramble when someone finally asks for it.

Why this is worth acting on before it lands, not after

If business licensing arrives in something close to the shape being discussed, the operators already running shift-by-shift, timestamped records will clear it without much disruption. The ones relying on paper and memory will be doing a rushed evidence exercise under a deadline they did not choose. Getting ahead of that is not about betting on a specific outcome, it is about the fact that "can you show me what happened on site last Tuesday" is a reasonable question regardless of which way this consultation lands.

Three things worth having in place now, independent of how the policy shakes out:

1. Supervision and briefing records with names attached, not a memory of who was told what.
2. Checkpoint and patrol completion data, not just the schedule. Scheduled and completed are different facts.
3. Incident reports timestamped at the point of writing, not reconstructed days later.

Where TacDesk fits

This is the same gap TacDesk closes day to day: GPS-verified clock-ins, patrol checkpoints and incident reports that are timestamped and signed as they happen, exportable as a record rather than living in someone's memory or a phone thread. We are not going to tell you TacDesk makes your business licensable under a scheme that has not been designed yet, nobody can honestly say that. What we can say is that if you can already produce shift-by-shift evidence on request, you are not starting from zero whatever the Home Office decides.

If your record-keeping currently lives in a filing cabinet or a WhatsApp group, this consultation is a reasonable prompt to fix that before it's a deadline. Have a look at tacdesk.co.uk to see how the record-keeping side works.