- Monitoring Services
SSAIB schemes cover a range of Monitoring Centre activities:
- Alarm Receiving Centres (ARCs)
- Remote Video Response Centres (RVRC)
- Management and operation of CCTV monitoring centres
Monitoring centres perform a central and critical role in both the intruder alarm and fire sectors. Intruder and fire alarm conditions from monitored systems must be routed through an ARC for verification using a Unique Reference Number (URN) before being passed to the relevant emergency service for response.
Remote Video Response Centres (RVRCs) reflect the convergence of technologies used by the security industry and BS 8418 was introduced to provide guidance on the design, installation commissioning, operation and remote monitoring detector activated CCTV systems. As such the standard includes recommendations applicable to the system, the remote centre where the system will be monitored and the operation of the system by the user.
Unusually, the standard places responsibility on the user of the system to ensure that it is operated correctly and that the RVRC is informed of legitimate activities at the supervised premises to avoid false alarms. This complex standard requires system providers to be conversant with several other standards, all of which are critical to ensuring that the system is designed, installed and properly commissioned.
SSAIB can offer guidance and support to companies seeking monitoring centre certification.
Police
SSAIB schemes comply with the requirement of ACPO and ACPO Scotland Policy, which means that certificated providers can obtain Police URNs for their monitored systems.
Fire Services
Changes in regulations and standards have led to an expansion in the need for certificated fire detection and alarm systems, in particular, the new Chief Fire Officer’s Association (CFOA) Policy for remotely monitored fire alarms. Fire authorities are adopting an approach modelled on the ACPO Policy outlined above. To obtain a response from a monitored fire alarm system in the future, it may be necessary to have a URN issued by the fire service and this may only be available to certificated providers. SSAIB certificated monitoring centres can obtain fire service URNs as they are operating in compliance with CFOA Policy.
