Check a provider is genuinely approved

How do I check an alarm company is genuinely approved?

Look the company up on the NSI or SSAIB register directly, on the inspectorate's own website, using the exact legal entity name and company number from the quote — not the trading name and not the logo on the website. Confirm the certificate is current and that its scope covers the service you are buying.

Logos are trivially copied, and expired certification does not remove them from a website. The register is the only check that means anything, and it takes about a minute.

Do this specifically:

Get the legal entity name and Companies House number from the written quote. Search the NSI and SSAIB registers for that entity. Confirm the certificate is in date, and read its scope — intruder alarms, CCTV, keyholding and fire are separately certificated. If the quote comes from a different entity than the one on the register, ask why in writing.

Then check the ARC separately. Your installer may be approved while subcontracting monitoring to a centre you have not been told about. Ask which ARC will monitor the system and confirm that centre's own certification.

Finally, check Companies House for the entity itself: incorporation date, filing history, and whether it is the same company that has been trading under that brand. A brand with a long history and a company incorporated last year is worth a question.

What is NSI approval?

The National Security Inspectorate is a UK inspectorate body that audits security and fire companies against the relevant standards and lists those that pass on a public register. NSI approval is one of the two routes — the other is SSAIB — by which an installer or Alarm Receiving Centre qualifies to obtain police response for its customers.

NSI operates tiers, of which NSI Gold is the best known. Gold adds a certificated quality management system on top of the technical standards, so it indicates the company has been audited as a business as well as on its installations.

What matters for you is narrower than the marketing suggests. Approval is what makes a company eligible to apply for URNs and to have its work accepted for police response. It also means somebody independent has inspected the work rather than taking the company's word for it.

Approval is granted to a specific legal entity for a specific scope of work. A company approved for intruder alarms is not automatically approved for CCTV or fire, and a group company's approval does not extend to a subsidiary or a subcontractor. Check the register for the exact entity that will sign your contract.

The register is on the NSI's own website and is the only claim worth relying on. A logo on a van or a website is not evidence.

What is SSAIB?

SSAIB is a UK certification body for security, fire and telecare providers, and the main alternative to the NSI. An SSAIB-certificated installer or Alarm Receiving Centre is equally able to obtain police response for its customers, and SSAIB maintains a public register you can check.

SSAIB and NSI do the same essential job — independent inspection against the applicable standards — and police forces accept both. SSAIB has historically been used more by small and medium installers, and NSI by larger firms and corporate ARCs, but that is a tendency rather than a rule and it should not be read as a quality difference.

As with NSI, certification is scoped. Check that the certificate covers the specific service you are buying, whether that is intruder alarms, remote CCTV monitoring, keyholding or fire detection, and that it names the company you are contracting with.

The register is on SSAIB's own site.

NSI or SSAIB — which is better?

Neither is better. Both are recognised UK inspectorate bodies, both are accepted by police forces for URN purposes, and a company certificated by either can arrange police response. What matters is that the certification is current, held by the entity you are contracting with, and covers the specific service you are buying.

The question comes up because installers use whichever body they belong to as a selling point, which implies a hierarchy that does not exist for this purpose.

The one nuance worth knowing is that NSI's Gold tier includes an audited quality management system, so it tells you something additional about how the business is run. That is a real difference, but it is a difference between NSI tiers as much as between the two bodies, and it is not what determines whether you can get police response.

Judge providers on the things that actually vary: whether the certification covers your service, who the monitoring ARC is, what the contract term is, what happens at renewal, and what the realistic response arrangement is for your address.

Is BS 5979 still a valid certification?

No. BS 5979, the old British standard for alarm receiving centres, has been withdrawn and replaced by BS EN 50518. A provider still advertising BS 5979 certification is quoting a withdrawn standard, which usually means their marketing material has not been reviewed for years.

This matters mainly as a dating signal. It is not evidence of a bad ARC — many centres certificated under BS 5979 transitioned to BS EN 50518 without any change in quality — but it tells you the website has not been maintained, and it is fair to ask what else has not been.

The current question to ask about a monitoring centre is whether it is certificated to BS EN 50518, by which body, and for which category.

The previous website on this domain advertised BS 5979 among its claimed certifications, which is one of several reasons its content was rebuilt from scratch rather than migrated.