Site assessment
12 days
The policy required ninety. The recorder held twelve.
The situation
A jewellery business operating from eight or nine premises, with a Jewellers Block policy that set conditions on the security system: specified detection, specified locking, and recorded surveillance retained for ninety days.
The promoter believed all of it was in place. The system had been installed by a reputable firm, it had been signed off, and the policy had been renewed on that basis three times. He asked us to look at it because he was opening a further location and wanted the same specification applied.
What we found
| Policy condition | Status | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| 90 days recorded retention | 12 days | Storage sized against a lower frame rate than the cameras were actually recording at |
| Detection on the strongroom | Present | Installed and functional. Correctly specified |
| Hold-up devices | Not connected | Four devices installed. None wired to a receiving station. Never tested |
| Counter and till coverage | Unusable | Cameras positioned for coverage rather than for identification. No usable face capture at any counter |
| Signalling path | Unmonitored | The system could not detect that it had lost its route out, and had done so at some point |
| Alarm response | Undefined | Nobody could say who would be called or what they would do |
The retention shortfall was not the largest failure on the site. The hold-up devices were. But the retention shortfall was the one that carried a financial consequence the promoter had not considered, because the policy conditions were not decoration. They were the terms on which a claim would be assessed.
He had been insured for three years against a condition his system had never met.
What happened next
- The report was written against the policy conditions line by lineEach condition, the installed reality, and the gap. That format made it something his broker could read, which a technical report would not have been.
- Storage was resized and retention verified by measurementNinety days confirmed against real recording rather than calculated.
- The four hold-up devices were connected, tested and loggedTo a named receiving station, with a monthly test schedule that is still running.
- Counter cameras were respecified for identificationA different job from coverage, and the reason the original design had looked adequate on a drawing.
- The new location was designed against the policy from the startWhich was the conversation he had originally called about, and the reason he is still a client.
The outcome
What is not in question is that nobody had checked, in three years and three renewals, whether the installed system did what the policy required, and that the check takes one day.
Whether an insurer would have declined a claim on that basis is a question for an insurer.
What this is an example of
In this trade the specification is not a preference, it is a policy condition, and almost nobody checks the installed system against the document that will be used to assess a claim. We find the same gap repeatedly across the jewellery sector: the equipment is usually present, and the conditions are usually unmet in one or two specific ways nobody has looked for.
It is a one-day check. If you hold a Jewellers Block policy and nobody has verified your system against its conditions, that is the assessment to have.
On the figures
We do not name the buildings or organisations in our case studies.
The figures are from the job file and are unaltered. Names go on the client list, because a client is proud to appear there. Numbers go here, because nobody is proud to appear in a report about what was broken on their site.
If you would like to speak to a reference, we will ask them first.
Find out what your system is actually doing.
Every camera, panel, reader and sensor tested, and a signed condition report naming what has failed.
The assessment is chargeable, quoted against the site, and adjusted in full against the first year if you take cover. Where cover is not taken, the fee covers our team’s time on site and the report we leave behind, and the report is yours either way.
Chargeable, and adjusted in full if you take cover.
Book an assessment