The cheapest officer on site is usually the one who leaves

Since 1 April the National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over has been £12.71 an hour. The real Living Wage — calculated independently by the Living Wage Foundation against what it actually costs to live — is £13.45 outside London. The difference is 74p an hour, or roughly £1,443 over a full-time year.

AGS Security pays above the real Living Wage to every directly employed officer. We are not asking anyone to applaud that. We are making a commercial argument.

What the money actually buys

An officer who can afford the job tends to stay in it. That matters more in security than in most trades, because the value of an experienced officer is largely accumulated knowledge of one specific site: which gate gets propped open, which delivery arrives before six, which stretch of fence has been cut before and repaired badly.

None of that is in the assignment instructions. It is learned on the ground, and it walks out of the gate when the officer does.

A site that churns through officers is paying for presence and receiving attendance. They are not the same thing.

There is an honest limit here, and it should be stated rather than buried. Paying more costs more, and that cost reaches the client. A contractor paying above the real Living Wage cannot be the cheapest quote in the pile and should not pretend otherwise. What it can be is the quote where the price holds, the roster does not collapse in month three, and the officer on site on a wet Friday in November is the one who was there in January.

Why it matters locally

Guarding is local employment, and it is not easily offshored or automated. Wages paid to an officer working a Wolverhampton site are largely spent in the same economy that generated them. For a region with the Black Country's employment profile, the rate on a security contract is not only a cost line — it is money that either circulates here or does not.

What to ask your contractor

The useful question is not what the hourly charge rate is. It is:

• What proportion of that rate reaches the officer?
• What has staff turnover been on comparable contracts in the last twelve months?
• Are officers paid the same rate on nights and weekends?

Any contractor worth appointing can answer all three without hesitating. The answers will tell you more than the number at the bottom of the quotation.

We have set out the full analysis on our website, including why changing security contractor does not change what officers are paid — the TUPE position that locks a rate in at the first award and carries it through every retender that follows.

Zak Khan is Managing Director of AGS Security, the trading name of Albrighton Group Services Ltd, Wolverhampton.  0333 577 1777  ·  albrighton-group.co.uk