Most businesses do not set out to create a risk. The decision to nominate an internal keyholder — a manager, a director, or a trusted long-serving member of staff — tends to happen by default rather than by design. Someone needs to hold the keys. Someone needs to be reachable if the alarm goes off. A name goes on a list, a set of keys gets handed over, and the arrangement rolls on unchallenged for years.
It is only when something goes wrong — or when a business takes a proper look at the liability it has quietly accumulated — that the problem becomes clear. A professional key holding service exists precisely to address these risks before an incident forces the issue.
When a member of staff is designated as a keyholder, they are being asked to attend a potentially dangerous situation, alone, at any hour of the day or night, with no security training and no backup.
Consider the scenario. An alarm activates at 2:30am. Your designated keyholder receives the call, gets in their car, and drives to the premises. They do not know why the alarm has gone off. It could be a sensor fault caused by a power surge. It could be a spider on a detector. It could also be an active break-in, with one or more individuals still on site.
A trained SIA-licensed security officer is equipped to manage that situation. They have the training, the situational awareness, and the protocols to assess risk before approaching and to coordinate with emergency services when necessary. An untrained employee does not.
The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 places a duty on employers to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety, and welfare of their employees. Sending a member of staff to attend a potentially live security incident — alone, in the dark, with no training and no support — is very difficult to reconcile with that duty of care.
The risks are not limited to physical safety. The expectation that an employee is available to respond to alarm activations at any hour raises a series of employment law questions that many businesses have not properly considered.
Working Time Regulations. Under the Working Time Regulations 1998, adult workers are entitled to 11 consecutive hours’ rest in each 24-hour period. If an employee is called out at 3am and is expected to be at their desk at 9am the following morning, there is a real question as to whether the business is meeting its obligations under those regulations.
On-call entitlements. Whether on-call time counts as working time — and therefore attracts pay — depends on how it is structured and what the employee is required to do during that time. This is an area of employment law where businesses frequently find themselves exposed.
Implied contractual obligations. If a keyholder role has never been formally written into an employee’s contract, the expectation that they respond to out-of-hours calls exists in an uncomfortable grey area. If they refuse, or if they become unavailable — through illness, leave, or resignation — the arrangement collapses at precisely the moment you need it most.
Even setting aside safety and employment law, internal keyholding arrangements are operationally fragile. What happens when your keyholder is on holiday? When they are ill? When they leave the business? When there is a handover and nobody thinks to update the alarm monitoring company?
The answer, in most cases, is that nothing happens — until an alarm activates and nobody responds, or the wrong person receives a call in the early hours, or the police are dispatched to a property where there is no keyholder available to meet them.
A professional key holding provider absorbs all of this complexity. Your response capability does not depend on the availability of any individual employee. It does not degrade when someone leaves or takes leave. It operates identically at 3am on Christmas Day as it does on a Tuesday afternoon.
The vast majority of alarm activations — well over 90 per cent, according to both industry practitioners and published research — are false alarms. Sensor errors, power fluctuations, insects on detectors, cleaning staff triggering motion sensors at unusual hours. Every single one of these must be treated as a genuine activation until it is confirmed otherwise.
For an internal keyholder, that means a disrupted night every time it happens. The cumulative effect — in lost sleep, reduced productivity, growing resentment, and potential staff attrition — is a real business cost that rarely appears on any spreadsheet.
A professional key holding service eliminates that burden. Every activation is attended by a trained officer. Your staff are not woken. And because professional responders can confirm a false alarm quickly and efficiently, the disruption to the site itself is minimal.
Many commercial property insurance policies include conditions relating to key holding and alarm response. Where an insurer has specified that alarms must be responded to promptly by a competent person, an untrained internal keyholder who delays, fails to attend, or mishandles the situation may not satisfy that requirement.
In the event of a claim, insurers will want to know how the alarm response was managed. A professional key holding service, with an SIA-approved contractor providing documented responses and full incident reports, is a substantially stronger position than an informal arrangement involving an untrained employee.
Veritech Security provides professional key holding services that replace informal, high-risk internal arrangements with a fully managed, SIA-approved response capability operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Our services relevant to replacing internal keyholding include SIA-licensed alarm response with documented incident reports; 24/7 control room monitoring and dispatch; emergency and scheduled access management; vacant property inspections; mobile patrol integration for sites requiring additional coverage; and SC Cleared officers for sensitive or restricted environments where standard SIA licensing is insufficient.
We hold SIA approved contractor status alongside ISO 9001, ISO 14001, Constructionline, SafeContractor, RISQS, Achilles, and Cyber Essentials accreditations — the professional standards that demonstrate we operate to the level your business, your insurer, and your employees deserve.
If your current key holding arrangement relies on a member of staff, speak to Veritech before the next alarm activation makes the problem visible.
Call: 0800 799 9800 (available 24/7) Email: info@veritech-security.com Or request a free key holding consultation online.
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18-20 Millbrook Road East,
Southampton, Hampshire, SO15 1HY
Tel: 0800 799 9800
Email: info@veritech-security.com
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