Licensing & regulation
What is a licence check?
A licence check is verification that an officer holds a valid SIA licence of the right category for the assignment. It is checked against the SIA's public register, not against the card itself.
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<img src="https://secureoptix.co.uk/glossary/licence-check/diagram.svg" alt="licence check — diagram from SecureOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://secureoptix.co.uk/glossary/licence-check">What is a licence check?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://secureoptix.co.uk">SecureOptix</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>The register is the authority. A card can be genuine and the licence behind it suspended, revoked or expired, and only the register shows the current position.
Checking at recruitment and not afterwards is the common failure. Licences expire on rolling dates across a workforce, and a firm with a hundred officers has one falling due most weeks.
The check is per assignment as well as per officer, because the category has to match what the officer will actually be doing at that site on that shift.
What goes wrong in practice
- Checked once at onboarding and never rechecked.
- Verified from a photograph of a card rather than against the register.
- Category matched to the officer's usual work rather than to this assignment.