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>
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</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.
In practice
A compliance audit, sampling the deployed workforce.
Every file has a photocopy of a card. All are legible, all are in date on the face of them, and one of them belongs to somebody whose licence was suspended four months ago.
A card is a photograph of a position at the moment it was printed. The register is the current position, and a licence can be suspended or revoked between one and the other without anybody posting the card back.
The check that counts is the one with a date on it — not the date on the card, the date somebody looked.
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.