The situation
Halden run mobile patrols and alarm response across West Yorkshire — 31 officers covering roughly 120 sites on rotating routes, almost all of it overnight and almost all of it alone.
Lone-worker safety was a supervisor in a control room ringing round from a mobile phone. On a busy night the calls slipped, and when they slipped there was no record of it having happened at all.
What was actually going wrong
The safety system depended entirely on one person remembering, on the worst nights, to do something repetitive. That is not a criticism of the supervisors; it is a description of a system that will fail eventually and leave no trace of how.
ACS assessment preparation took two people the better part of a fortnight, pulling records out of four different places and reconstructing what had happened months earlier.
Keyholding response times were claimed rather than measured. When a client challenged one, Halden had no way to defend the number.
“The old system depended on a tired person remembering to do something boring at 3am. That works right up until the night it does not.”
What they changed
Automated check calls on a set interval, with a grace period and automatic escalation to the control room when one goes unanswered. Reminders are scheduled on the officer's handset rather than sent from a server, which matters on rural routes where signal comes and goes.
Every scan, check call and alarm response is logged against the site and the officer as it happens, rather than written up afterwards.
Reporting is generated from that record. Nothing is reconstructed for the assessment, because nothing needs to be.
Where they landed
The evidence pack came out of the system in an afternoon. The assessment itself was unremarkable, which is the point.
Supervisors stopped making check calls by hand, returning roughly a shift's worth of time every night to the work they are actually there for.
Response times are now a measured number Halden can show a client, rather than a claim they have to defend.
One thing they raised in their first month: they wanted to know what happens to check calls if their account ever lapsed. The answer is that check calls and SOS keep working regardless. Halden asked because a previous supplier had disabled a feature over a billing dispute mid-contract.
Compliance Manager
Halden Response
“We used to prepare for the assessment. Now we just export what already happened.”