Anyone whose SIA licence rests on a BIIAB qualification, or who is training toward one, needs to check where their certificate now comes from. On 14 July the Security Industry Authority gave notice to the awarding body BIIAB to terminate its recognition agreement, citing serious and persistent material breaches that it said were not capable of being remedied. The decision came into effect on 10 August: from that date BIIAB can no longer issue any new SIA licence-linked qualifications.
Qualifications BIIAB awarded before that date are not automatically void. The SIA will still accept a BIIAB qualification for a licence application so long as it falls inside the normal acceptance window, broadly within three years of the qualification being awarded for a first-time applicant, or within three years of previous licence activity for a returning one. The practical trap is mid-course learners: if your certificate has not yet appeared in your SIA account you cannot apply for a licence on it, so anyone partway through a BIIAB course should contact BIIAB directly to confirm status, and anyone not yet started should check with their provider that the course is still going ahead under a recognised awarding body.
For a security business the action is a short audit. Confirm which awarding organisation actually issues the certificates behind your team's licences and behind any training you are booking or funding, because the SIA still holds recognition agreements with five other awarding organisations and a qualification only counts if it comes from a recognised one. The SIA's find-a-training-provider tool lists approved providers. This is an administrative shift rather than a change to the standards themselves, but it lands directly on renewals and new hires, and the cost of missing it is a licence application that stalls.
