A G4S security officer was recently awarded over £8,000 after a tribunal found he’d been unfairly dismissed. His employer lost track of his unpaid leave and wrongly recorded him as having resigned, without ever telling him. It’s a case about employer process failures, not about him doing anything wrong. But it raises a question worth answering properly: if you lose your job, does that put your SIA licence at risk?

The short answer: not automatically. But the SIA’s own criteria mean the circumstances of a dismissal can matter more than most licence holders realise.

What The SIA Actually Looks At

Losing a job isn’t on the SIA’s list of reasons to revoke a licence. A licence is only suspended or revoked based on specific triggers set out in the SIA’s official criteria — things like a relevant criminal conviction, working without the right to work in the UK, or breaching your licence conditions. We’ve covered the full list of what can and can’t get your SIA licence revoked in more detail.

However, the SIA’s “fit and proper person” test goes further than criminal records. Under its official guidance, the SIA can also take into account:

• Information passed to it by “another organisation such as the police, HM Revenue and Customs, another regulator, a local authority, or a private security company”
• Whether someone has been subject to misconduct or disciplinary proceedings by a public or professional body that the SIA considers relevant
• Behaviour that’s “likely to bring the industry into disrepute”

That middle point lines up with criminal record changes the SIA consulted on to tighten and clarify its fit and proper criteria which proposed extending the test to explicitly cover disciplinary proceedings and professional misconduct, not just criminal convictions.

It’s also specifically about proceedings from a public or professional body — not simply any internal HR decision an employer makes. A straightforward job loss, redundancy, or a dispute like the one above, where a tribunal found the employer at fault, isn’t the kind of thing that triggers licence action. But a security firm can pass information to the SIA, and a genuine misconduct finding — from a regulator, a disciplinary body, or a serious enough incident — can be considered.

What This Means In Practice

• A dismissal alone doesn’t put your SIA licence at risk. The SIA isn’t notified every time someone loses a job, and job loss on its own isn’t a licensing trigger.
• Being cleared or vindicated helps your position, not the reverse. In the case above, the tribunal found the employer, not the employee, had got it wrong — that’s the opposite of the kind of finding the SIA would weigh against someone.
• What could matter is the nature of any underlying misconduct, especially if it involved a security breach, dishonesty, or a formal disciplinary or regulatory finding — not the fact of dismissal itself.
• If you’re ever unsure, the SIA’s own criteria document (updated periodically) is the definitive source, not general assumptions about what “looks bad.”

If you’re navigating a dispute with your employer, this is about licensing risk specifically; for the employment side, an employment law specialist or ACAS is the right first call, not the SIA.

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