About AK K9 Security Services

How an enquiry actually works

It starts with a survey, and the survey happens before the quote rather than after it. We look at the perimeter, the access points, the lighting, what is actually on site worth taking, and the hours that genuinely need covering. That visit is free and carries no obligation.

What you get back is a written schedule: what is covered, when, by how many people and of what type, plus the escalation path. What an officer handles alone, what triggers a call to you, and what goes straight to the emergency services, all agreed before the first shift rather than improvised at three in the morning.

Then the deployment runs to that schedule and you get reporting against it. Patrol times and routes, anything found and what was done about it, visitors and vehicles where we hold the gate, and incident reports with times and names. Written so that somebody else can rely on them later, because that is what a report is for.

The standards we work to, and what they actually mean

Compliance claims are easy to make and rarely explained, so here is what ours mean in practice.

SIA licensing. Every officer and handler on your site holds a current Security Industry Authority licence. We will provide the licence numbers for personnel assigned to your site so you can check them on the SIA public register yourself. Licence class matters as much as validity: Security Guarding, Door Supervision and Public Space Surveillance are separate, and an officer licensed for one is not licensed for another.

NASDU. Our dog handlers are trained and assessed against National Association of Security Dog Users standards. That is a documented assessment rather than a claim of experience, which is the distinction that matters when a dog is working on your premises.

BS 8517. The British Standard covering the use of detection and general purpose security dogs. It governs how teams are briefed, how dogs are transported and rested, how much continuous working time is reasonable, and what happens when a dog indicates on something.

Guard Dogs Act 1975. A handler must be present and in control of a guard dog at all times while it is being used to secure premises, and a warning notice must be displayed at each entrance. In practice this means a dog is never left on a site alone. If a contractor offers you unattended dogs as a cheaper option, they are proposing to break the law on your premises, and the liability will not stay neatly with them.

Dog welfare is a client issue, not just an animal one

Working hours, rest periods, water and vehicle temperature are managed and recorded on every K9 deployment. This is not presented here as kindness. It is presented here because it is a service-quality control and a risk you carry.

A dog that has spent hours in a hot vehicle is not detecting anything, and a handler covering a double shift is not either, so welfare failures are also security failures. Beyond that, welfare failures attract local authority attention, and the client whose site was the location of one does not escape the reputational part of it.

Ask any dog contractor how they manage vehicle temperature and rest periods. The quality of the answer tells you what you are actually buying.

What we will not do

We will not quote before surveying. A number given over the phone for a site nobody has seen is a guess, and it is usually a guess that gets revised upward once the work starts.

We will not leave a dog on site unattended, at any price. See the Guard Dogs Act above.

We will not be the cheapest quote you receive, and you should be suspicious of the contractor who is. Licensed and screened staff, paid lawfully for unsocial hours, insured and properly supervised, costs a certain amount. A rate materially below the market means one of those has been cut, and the failure mode is not usually dramatic: it is an officer who was present but asleep, or a report that turns out to be unusable when your insurer asks for it.

We will not claim coverage we cannot service. If your site sits outside the area we can reach within the response time we advertise, we will say so rather than take the work and hope.

We will not staff a licensable role with an unlicensed person to make a quote look better. It is your premises and your exposure, not only ours.

Who we provide security for

Principal contractors and construction firms across the four counties, on everything from tight urban infill to large logistics builds. Property managers and landlords with void commercial and residential stock. Warehouse, yard and industrial operators with perimeters too long for static cover. Event organisers needing search, stewarding and dog teams. And occasionally private clients with rural property and long approaches, where detection matters more than deterrence.

What most of them have in common is that they have used a security contractor before and something went wrong: a report they could not use, an officer who was not licensed for the role, or a response time that turned out to be aspirational.