FOI release

Companies assessed for ACS approval who failed assessment

Published 22 September 2025

Request

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I am writing to formally request the following information held by the Security Industry Authority (SIA) in relation to the Approved Contractor Scheme (ACS)

Question 1

A list of all companies assessed by the SSAIB between 1 January 2025 and the present date that were denied ACS accreditation or failed their ACS assessment, either initially or upon reassessment.

Question 2

For each company listed, please provide the general reasons for failure, particularly indicating whether failure was due to non-compliance with Public Space Surveillance (CCTV) licensing, deployment, or operational criteria.

Question 3

Of the companies identified, please confirm:

• which submitted an appeal
• whether each appeal was upheld or denied
• whether the SIA was involved in reviewing or responding to these appeals

Question 4

Any aggregate statistics showing how many ACS applicants assessed by SSAIB were denied specifically due to issues with CCTV/Public Space Surveillance criteria.

I recognise some elements of this request may touch on commercially sensitive or personal data. However, given the public interest in transparent and consistent application of licensing standards, particularly where companies are held to legal obligations under the Private Security Industry Act 2001, I request that information be disclosed where possible, and appropriately redacted where necessary.

Response

I confirm that we hold the information requested.

This part of the email will constitute a refusal to deal with your request for the reasons I will set out below.

Exceeding the appropriate cost limit

Section 12 (1) – (4) of the Freedom of Information Act allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to comply with the request in its entirety or to confirm or deny whether the requested information is held. In the case of a public authority such as the SIA, the appropriate cost limit is £450.

The ICO guidance The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 sets out how a public authority should estimate whether the work required to obtain information is reasonable and appropriate. In the case of requests that would require work on the part of public authority staff, this is estimated at a rate of £25 per person per hour. This means that 18 hours is considered the appropriate limit.

In order to provide a response to your request, the SIA would need to interrogate 188 ACS company files where an assessment was conducted by SSAIB between 1 January 2025 and 25 July 2025 to determine the information required to respond to your request. The time required to undertake this task would significantly exceed the appropriate time limit.

What information can we provide?

Question 3, bullet point 3 requests information on whether the SIA was involved in reviewing or responding to appeals.

There is a right of appeal against any decision we make to:

• refuse approval
• attach additional conditions to an approval
• withdraw an approval

Any communication advising of an appealable decision that the SIA make will explain the process for making an appeal. A company will always be given the opportunity to provide a written response to us, which will be considered when we make a final decision.

Following this, formal appeals can be made to a Magistrates’ court, or the Sheriff in Scotland, within 21 calendar days from the date of our decision. Where the Magistrates’ court or Sheriff Court makes a decision, the SIA or the appellant may appeal that decision to the Crown Court, or the Sheriff Principal in Scotland.

The SIA will always take an active role in appeal proceedings.

Next steps

In order to better facilitate your request, I suggest that you limit the scope of your request, so that we can manually search our systems until the appropriate cost limit is reached. Given that this will be a very time intensive exercise to manually search our system and filter out the relevant information, I would ask that you limit your search to a particular month within the period that you are interested in.

The SIA will search the relevant ACS folders for as long as possible up to the appropriate cost limit within this reduced timeframe. If we are able to search for relevant information well within the appropriate cost limit, we will get in touch and request that you provide us with details of a further month that you would like to be searched.

I would be grateful if you could confirm your position in respect of this part of your FOIA request and whether you would like assistance in trying to refine the scope of your request.

[Ref: FOI 0569]