Project Name: Network Rail Trespass, Vandalism and Welfare Concern Services – Southern Region
Start Date: 01/10/2021
End Date: 30/09/2025
Lingwood Security are in place as the main partner to Network Rails Southern Region to provide Manned Security Officers to Network Rails stations assets and hotspot locations including a Mobile response Service which tackles trespass, vandalism, anti-social behaviour, security, suicide prevention, fare evasion and other incidents of crime. We are providing a 24-hour proactive and reactive service for 365 days a year covering Kent, Sussex, and Wessex routes. We have recently been awarded a 2-year extension to the contract due to a high level of service and how beneficial the service has been to the client.
The teams’ main duties are to provide high visibility patrols to stations, level crossings and hotspot areas all throughout the Kent, Sussex and Wessex regions whilst being tasked to respond to incidents within 60 minutes across the network which is instructed in the first instance by Network Rails Route Control. These incidents may include fatalities, trespass, crowd control and obstruction on the line. We work in partnership with various stakeholders such as Rail Operators, BTP, Network Rail MOMS and Samaritans to enhance the safety and security on the network. This includes a weekly tasking call with all of the above to determine any causes for concern / significant upcoming events over the next week and work collaboratively to determine the best use of the resources.
Overseen by Contracts Managers Steve Quinton & Matt West we have assigned a team of 42 operatives and 4 supervisors to this contract on a full-time basis. They are deployed into 6x teams of 2x operatives daily, 3x teams covering day shifts and 3x covering night shifts. The shift times are 04.00 – 16.00 / 16.00 – 04.00 which were organised to prevent disruption to the service by being stuck in peak time traffic. We also have teams who will travel on the trains to monitor behaviour on the network using train passes.
All members of staff hold a valid SIA Licence and are trained in PTS (Personal Track Safety), Chainsaw Operations, Suicide Awareness Training, First Aid and Action Counters Terrorism Awareness as a minimum. All operatives are made aware of the railway byelaws which is refreshed every 6 months via toolbox talks. Supervisors and Managers receive further training such as Security Line Managers course through our partners Peninsula and Equals Training and also hold the RSAS (Rail Safety Accreditation Scheme). All training competencies are monitored and updated I within 8 weeks of expiry via our HR Department and our Sentinel Administrator.
Feedback and crime intelligence is essential on this contract to determine the incidents we are dealing with and ensuring Network Rail are getting the most out of the resources. Best practice has included our officers providing daily, weekly, and monthly reports to Network Rail which feeds in to the overall taskings meetings between Lingwood Security, Network Rail Security Team, and Route Crime Team to ensure hot spot areas are constantly being monitored. We also provide Network Rail and British Transport Police with a dashboard showing all statistics from the previous 4 weeks and from these dashboards we have seen a significant reduction in anti-social behaviour and trespass since the beginning of the contract. Our average response time in the Sussex region is 32 minutes and 40 minutes in Kent which is in line with the contract KPIS.
During this contract our client kept having issues with their covert cameras that they had deployed to stations and hotspot locations across the network, with them being vandalised or stolen and the upkeep being avoided. Therefore, we proposed that we would assist with the new roll out and monitoring of the new cameras purchased. We proposed that our 24-hour control department would be set up so that they get an alert when there was detection or fault on the cameras. Our supervisor or Contracts Manager would then log in to confirm If this was a false alarm or a confirmed intruder / fault allowing our team to respond accordingly. The response would vary from sending a patrolling team to check it out, call the emergency services or call on station / NR staff to respond or fix the issue. We have received fantastic feedback from the Head of Security, Crime and Resilience Paul Langley on the roll out on these stating his gratitude in our assistance.
During the recent industrial action and events such as the Royal Jubilee and Coronation, we had an issue where the rail network staff was to be reduced significantly and our client required a quick uplift to the current security requirements to ensure the safety of passengers/ staff and to protect the stations and assets. We had less than a week to mobilise this and called on all of our management team and teams from other areas to assist in this cover. We have a national contract with Northgate Vehicles where we can hire vehicles at short notice which is liveried up with our magnetic signs which offered our client the deterrent they required at short notice.
During the additional support with the strikes, we were also tasked with completing visual reviews on bridges across the routes to ensure safety, assistance with picket lines, static security to cover NR roles, transportation, and other similar tasks.
Please see below feedback provided from the previous Network Rail Head of Security, Route Crime and Intelligence Jon Ruch.
“Just wanted to say a huge thank you for your time and commitment last week in supporting the strike action and the short notice mobilisation you managed to put in place for the additional team requirements. Overall, the week went very well and ensured a robust security provision across the region. If you could ensure our thanks are fully passed on to the Lingwood teams working last week.”
Jon Ruch, Former Network Rail Head of Security, Route Crime and Intelligence