Page 19 - CITS Theft Guide

CITS Guide for Theft Prevention
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5.3. Access Control
Access control should authenticate every person and vehicle entering the site, log the time of entry and
exit, and be capable of quickly answering who is on site at any time — a control that supports both security
and emergency evacuation accounting. Common measures include a staffed gatehouse, ID verification
against a pre-approved workforce list, vehicle logging, and turnstiles or barriers for pedestrian and vehicle
routes respectively. Rigorous access control also directly supports compliance with CDM Regulation
13(4)(b) on reducing access by unauthorised persons, and helps address the significant proportion of
construction theft that current reporting attributes to individuals with legitimate day-to-day access to a
site — subcontractors, delivery drivers, and opportunistic workers — rather than to outside intruders.
5.4. Surveillance and Detection
On-site or remotely monitored cameras, linked where appropriate to floodlighting, remains one of the
most effective and most commonly specified controls. Increasingly, sites use rapid-build, solar or battery-
powered surveillance towers with remote monitoring, which can be redeployed as the site footprint
changes and can cover large or remote sites without full-time on-site guarding. Some sites now also deploy
tethered or patrol drones for continuous aerial observation, feeding real-time imagery to a monitoring
station; CITS notes that criminal groups have adopted the same technology for reconnaissance, so any
drone capability should be matched by counter-reconnaissance awareness in the workforce security
programme described in Section 7.
CCTV providers should ideally be members of SSAIB or NSI and be certified to BS8418 requirements. This
ensures that the selected partner is inspected by a UKAS certified inspectorate and that the service being
provided meets a minimum standard.
5.5. Alarm Systems and Alarm Receiving Centres
Intruder alarms, and where appropriate hold-up alarms, should be linked to a monitored Alarm Receiving
Centre so that an activation results in a verified, prompt response rather than an unactioned notification.
Alarm systems are available for any equipment, and a false-alarm management policy should be agreed
with the monitoring provider so that genuine activations are not desensitised by nuisance alarms.
5.6. Positioning and Physically Securing Plant Overnight
Where practical, plant left on site overnight should be positioned and secured to make quick removal
difficult, and full immobilisers and hydraulic locks should be applied wherever the equipment allows.
Photographs of good and poor practice, drawn from CITS members' own sites, are set out in Annex C, and
include examples such as slewing an excavator cab and extending its boom arm, securing smaller
equipment beneath the boom arms of a mini-excavator, and positioning a machine to physically block