About Alarm South East

 

 

The history for a regional group in the South East goes back further than Alarm South East; SEIOG, which stood for the "South East Insurance Officers Group", was the first effective forerunner of Alarm South East in the 1980's.

 

This group was led by the County Councils: Ray Barber, formerly at West Sussex County Council, Malcolm Davies at Surrey County Council, Michael O'Shea at East Sussex Council Council, Evelyn Kaluza (now at Aylesbury Vale, ex-Oxfordshire CC) and Dave Simons at Buckinghamshire County Council were key individuals in setting this up.

 

As well as a regular programme of insurance themed meetings, SEIOG held an annual conference at The Witterings, near Chichester from the late 1980's moving to the venue at Latimer - which is now used by Alarm South East - in 1996.

 

These conferences focussed mainly on insurable risk considerations but the ongoing development of risk management as a much wider discipline signalled a need to change the emphasis of these conferences to meet the new challenges faced by those actively engaged in managing risk.

 

In the meantime, the South East Regional Risk Management Group, SERRMG, was formed to focus on Risk Management activity. The very first meeting for SERRMG was held on 11th January 1991 at the offices of Berkshire County Council. The first elected Chairman was Ken Kennedy, then at Surrey County Council and later of Zurich Municipal.

 

Brian Roberts from London Borough of Ealing became Chairman in 1992 since Ken Kennedy was elected to chairman of Alarm.

 

At that time SERRMG was affiliated to Alarm but with its own constitution. The development of the other regional groups was based on the SERRMG model which then became fully integrated and supported by Alarm.

 

David Hearn (Kent County Council) became Chairman of SERRMG in 1993, Charles Morris (LB Camden) was Chairman in 1994 and Peter Rogers (Southampton City Council) became Chairman in 1996.

 

It was agreed at the meeting held on 23rd January 1997 that SERRMG would become known as Alarm (South East)

 

Jackie Algar (Brighton and Hove City Council) took the Chair from 01/02/1997.

 

Jackie introduced a shared spreadsheet to detail each officers' experience of projects and produced an agenda item called "Don't Be Shy"

to promote sharing of new developments or successes/problems. More guest speakers started to be involved along with meetings at sites of interest (the first one was the National Army Museum).

 

Following Jackie, Chris Robbins (RB Kensington and Chelsea) was elected for the 1998/99 period. 

 

Hugh Alexander (LB Merton) was elected Chair for 1999/2000 and 2000/2001. Hugh proposed the format of Group meetings to be less constrained by meeting format to be more focussed on education content.

 

Thus began the present format of Alarm South East as a forum consisting of a series of one day educational Seminars throughout the year and an annual Conference. The first of these conferences was a one day event held at Newham Town Hall in 1999.

 

After the last SEIOG Conference in 1999 the baton was passed on to Alarm South East as the obvious successor organisation to run the event going forward.         

 

All subsequent Alarm South East conferences have been held over two days at Latimer Conference Centre. The events generally cover insurance, risk, legal and business continuity topics along with a healthy proportion of soft skills and networking opportunities.

 

Chairpersons of Alarm South East since that time are:

 

  • Sharon Roots (now at LB Barking and Dagenham, then at LB Newham) (two terms) 2001/2002 and 2002/03.
  • Paul Dudley (Hertfordshire County Council) (four terms) 2003/04 to 2006/07
  • Steve Mappley (RB Windsor and Maidenhead) (three terms) 2007/08 - 2009/10
  • Angela Claridge (Luton Borough Council) 2010 onwards

All Committee Members since 1999:

Hugh Alexander, Peter Andrews, Amanda Bateman, Jon Chessher, Angela Claridge, Bob Craik, Malcolm Davies, Maureen Dennie, Paul Dudley, Brian Gilmour, Jason Goodwin, Mary Guruparan, Steve Mappley, Darryl Mattingly, Gwen Ridley, Chris Robbins, Peter Rogers, Sharon Roots, Kathy Slowther, Stephen Stuchbury.