Hatton Garden jewellery break ins
April 2015, Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company, an underground safe deposit facility. The total stolen may have a value of up to £200 million. This weekend, a gang drilled through a back wall to get into the upmarket George Attenborough and Son Jewellers in central London, at the start of their £500,000 heist.
Both of these incidents could have been prevented by the Spider-Sens building protection system. Originally designed for military munitions storage and protection, it can be used in all types of high security environments and can be monitored remotely from a secure location.
It is amazing that when you read the recent story about how someone ‘or persons’ had entered the initial building which is ‘a bookies‘ so easily, it really shows how lax people and companies are with their own security.
Our team saw immediately that the CCTV design was just ‘there‘! It was just having a normal cctv camera in a corridor. It raises a huge number of questions of the security design, set up, implementation, design and then a massive issue for us, is someones who approved this set up, complete lack of security measures and understanding.
But, saying this is easy. We are a company are not interested in just ‘fitting a system, creating a invoice, desperate for a job etc etc’, I could go on. We will only work on a design with a proper understanding of the clients needs, what the client is expecting, what are they looking to prevent, what is the loss value against the system/operational costs, are they looking for security system or a cheap installation?
An example is, we recently had a meeting with one of our top clients who is a clothing retailer, who thought they needed a site CCTV system. The site is huge!, it is a complicated layout with corners, bends, car parks, roofs, fencing and gates all over spread over approx 1 acre. Someone had ‘quoted’ them £6,000 ex vat for a CCTV system for the whole external coverage.
The client wanted us to match or be cheaper, we actually closed our laptops and said “Go for it!“, that is a cheap price and we would not be able to cover that level in a million years. We then explained why, “You asked for night time remote monitoring and control, there are not enough sensors, the sensors are wrong, wind & rain in this location of the country would cause a huge failure rate on these sensors and false detections, there are no white lights, the infra red cameras they have specified will not cover the area, the cameras are not able to cover the distances or the areas in full, we could go on“.
The client then understood where we were coming from as we explained a security detection system along with a CCTV system with out of hours remote monitoring was a huge design task and ultimately not cheap. We estimated immediately £100k before a survey blog with monthly running costs!!!!
We all agreed that the client would not spend that amount and we agreed as the losses within the company would not merit that coverage. We agreed that instead of having Perimeter Intrusion Detection systems or commercial CCTV with possibly remote monitoring, that they should spend the money and install new external white flood lights and nothing else, which they did.
Ultimately, the issues on site have reduced already, the client spent less money than even the £6,000 and security has improved. We were not interested in creating an invoice or a sale, we were only interested in giving the correct advise. This client now believes what we say, they will extend the contract in the future, that is far more valuable to us than a single quick invoice for something that will only create a headache and damage our reputation in the future.
We would rather have 10 meetings and have a single approval with a single successful, fully operational working system and 1 happy client rather than having 6 x invoices and ultimately a bad name, poor reputation and numerous telephone calls with clients complaining that we have sold them something something that is cheap and not working.
We like sleeping at night, do you??