Last updated: 9 September 2026

SIA ACS self assessment workbook: a 2026 guide for UK security contractors

The SIA ACS self assessment workbook is the scoring document UK security contractors complete to apply for Approved Contractor Scheme (ACS) status. It measures a business against 78 achievement indicators across seven criteria, requiring the minimum level on every indicator out of a possible 145 points, per GOV.UK before an assessor visits to verify the evidence.

Key Takeaways

• The SIA ACS self assessment workbook scores contractors against 78 achievement indicators covering staff training, financial management and health and safety policy, per ACS Pacesetters.
• Applicants must meet the required level across all 78 indicators, scored out of a possible 145 points, before becoming eligible for ACS approval, per GOV.UK.
• The workbook is organised into seven criteria — Strategy, Service delivery, Commercial relationship management, Financial management, Resource management, People, and Leadership — broken into 33 sub-criteria, per Pulse Operations's guide, The ACS self-assessment: how to evidence it.
• The SIA's annual registration fee per licensable individual deployed rose from £15 to £25, a 66% increase, effective 1 June 2026, per GOV.UK.
• Approved contractors are reassessed annually, and any improvement needs an assessor identifies must be closed within the timeframe the assessor sets, per Pulse Operations's guide, The ACS self-assessment: how to evidence it.

What is the SIA ACS self assessment workbook?

The SIA ACS self assessment workbook is the official scoring tool published by the Security Industry Authority (SIA) — the UK regulator for the private security industry, established under the Private Security Industry Act 2001 — that a business completes when applying for Approved Contractor Scheme status. It is a structured questionnaire, not a form of words: every claim a contractor makes about its policies and performance is converted into a numerical score against fixed indicators.

Contractors download the interactive workbook and the accompanying guide from GOV.UK, complete every section, and submit it alongside their ACS application. Many UK security businesses have obtained ACS approval since the scheme launched in 2006, and many buyers of security services now require their suppliers to hold it, per GOV.UK. It has become a de facto tendering requirement for contracts with local authorities, shopping centres, housing associations and large FM providers across the UK.

What are the seven ACS criteria and 78 indicators?

The ACS standard organises 78 individual achievement indicators into seven criteria, each broken down further into sub-criteria, per Pulse Operations's guide, The ACS self-assessment: how to evidence it. The seven criteria are Strategy, Service delivery, Commercial relationship management, Financial management, Resource management, People, and Leadership. Each indicator carries a required baseline achievement level, scored as zero, with additional points available where a contractor evidences good practice beyond the minimum. The full workbook totals 145 possible points, but every indicator must independently clear its own baseline first.

The seven ACS criteria explained

• Strategy — whether the business has a coherent plan for growth, service quality and risk management.
• Service delivery — how consistently the contractor performs against contracted duties.
• Commercial relationship management — how contracts are set up, renewed and managed with clients.
• Financial management — solvency, credit control and financial planning.
• Resource management — how equipment, vehicles, uniforms and technology are deployed and maintained.
• People — recruitment, vetting under BS 7858, licensing checks against the SIA register, training and welfare.
• Leadership — governance, management structure and accountability at board level.

The People criterion is where most assessors spend the longest, because it checks how well a contractor applies BS 7858 screening and verifies every officer's licence against the SIA's public register before deployment — exactly the kind of check-by-check evidence that's hard to produce from memory during a verification visit.

How the 78 indicators are scored

Every indicator scores zero unless the required achievement level is met, according to GOV.UK's self-assessment report. There is no partial credit for a policy that exists but isn't followed, or a procedure that exists but can't be evidenced. This is the point most first-time applicants underestimate: the workbook rewards demonstrable practice, not intention.

How do I complete the ACS self assessment workbook?

Completing the ACS self assessment workbook means working through all 33 sub-criteria, honestly scoring your business against each of the 78 indicators, and gathering supporting evidence before submission. Assessors from bodies such as NSI or the SSAIB don't take the workbook's self-declared scores at face value — they review staff files, payroll records, contracts, duty rotas, policies, procedures and site documentation, interview staff and customers, and visit operational sites, per Pulse Operations's guide, The ACS self-assessment: how to evidence it.

The practical challenge is rarely understanding what the indicators ask for — the workbook and its companion guide are detailed. The challenge is producing the paperwork on demand, months or years after the event, when a security company's records live across spreadsheets, filing cabinets, individual managers' inboxes and paper duty sheets kept at site.

The Standard Route and Passport Route

Applicants generally choose between two routes to ACS approval:

• Standard Route — the full self-assessment workbook, submitted and verified by an SIA-approved certification body (NSI or the SSAIB) through a site visit and document review.
• Passport Route — available to contractors who already hold a relevant existing accreditation recognised by the SIA, streamlining parts of the assessment.

Most first-time applicants, and most contractors without a qualifying prior accreditation, go through the Standard Route.

Evidence assessors typically request

• Staff files showing BS 7858 screening was completed before deployment.
• SIA licence checks against the public register, dated and logged.
• Signed contracts, duty rotas and evidence they were followed.
• Health and safety policies with sign-off dates and revision history.
• Financial statements and credit references.
• Training records mapped to each role.
• Incident logs and how incidents were closed out.
• Client complaints and how they were resolved.
• Evidence of a functioning daily occurrence book at site level.
• Records of management review meetings and continuous improvement actions.

Pulse Operations has published a fuller breakdown of this evidence list in its guide, The ACS self-assessment: how to evidence it, which maps each of the seven criteria to the operational records an ops platform generates automatically as a by-product of running the business.

"The assessors' pain is archaeology — records scattered across inboxes and cabinets. Run the operation in one system and the evidence assembles itself as a by-product of the work. Assessment prep should be an export, not an excavation." — Mo Hassan, Founder, Pulse

This is exactly the gap Pulse Operations's compliance runway is built to close: SIA licences, BS 7858 screening, DBS checks, right-to-work status, training records and statutory building compliance sit on one expiries timeline rather than in seven separate systems.

How much does SIA ACS approval cost in 2026?

SIA ACS approval costs include an application fee to the certification body, an annual SIA registration fee per licensable individual deployed, and the internal cost of preparing evidence. The SIA's annual registration fee per licensable individual rose from £15 to £25 — a 66% increase — effective 1 June 2026, per GOV.UK. Even so, after accounting for inflation, the new statutory fee remains lower than it was when the ACS scheme was first introduced in 2006, according to Security Matters Magazine.

For a contractor deploying several hundred licensable officers, the fee increase alone changes the annual cost of ACS membership materially — a business with 300 deployed officers now pays £7,500 a year in registration fees rather than £4,500. That arithmetic makes it more important, not less, to get the self-assessment right first time and avoid a failed or delayed application that still incurs the fee.

Who conducts the ACS verification visit?

An SIA-approved certification body — either the National Security Inspectorate (NSI) or the SSAIB — conducts the ACS verification visit after a contractor submits the self-assessment workbook. The assessor cross-checks the scores claimed in the workbook against real evidence: staff files, payroll, contracts, rotas, policies, site documentation, and interviews with staff and customers, per Pulse Operations's guide, The ACS self-assessment: how to evidence it.

Assessors also visit live sites. This is where a contractor's daily occurrence book, incident logs and patrol records get scrutinised in the field, not just on paper. A paper occurrence book completed retrospectively at the end of a shift is a common weak point — assessors can usually tell the difference between a record written in real time and one reconstructed from memory the next morning.

"A paper occurrence book is written at the end of the shift by whoever's left standing. Ours writes itself as the shift happens — every patrol, incident and check call lands in it with a timestamp, and nothing can be quietly rewritten afterwards. That's what an insurer actually wants to see." — Mo Hassan, Founder, Pulse

Pulse Operations's own tamper-evident daily occurrence book covers 18 incident types and uses a hash-chained (SHA-256), tamper-evident audit log with a built-in integrity check that walks the whole chain — the kind of contemporaneous, unalterable record an ACS assessor is specifically trained to look for.

Should you prepare the ACS workbook in-house or use a compliance system?

Security contractors preparing for ACS approval face a genuine choice: manage evidence manually across existing spreadsheets and filing systems, or run day-to-day operations through a platform that produces ACS-ready evidence automatically. The trade-off is time versus tooling cost.

Manual preparation works for very small contractors with few sites and simple records, but it turns into a weeks-long annual project as headcount grows — because assessors reassess approved contractors every year, per Pulse Operations's guide, The ACS self-assessment: how to evidence it, and every improvement need an assessor raises has to be closed within the timeframe they set.

An operations platform — covering rostering, SIA licence tracking, BS 7858 screening, incident logging and patrol verification in one system — generates the People, Service delivery and Leadership evidence as a by-product of running the contract, rather than as a separate compliance exercise bolted on before assessment season.

In practice: at Priority First — the founding team's own London security & FM operation, where Pulse was built before being offered to other operators — a prestige central-London estate asked a direct question: can you prove every one of its 16 buildings gets its patrols, every night? Before Pulse, the estate could not see delivered-vs-contracted without ringing the office, and multi-building rounds are exactly where patrols quietly go missing. Each building was set up as its own site in Pulse with its own checkpoints and evidence trail; recurring findings surfaced automatically instead of being lost in individual officers' memories. Since going live in March 2026, the estate has logged over 4,100 patrols — roughly 250 to 280 per building — with 100% of checkpoint completions photo-verified. That's the same category of evidence an ACS assessor wants to see for the Service delivery and Resource management criteria, produced without a separate audit exercise.

Your SIA ACS self-assessment workbook checklist

• Download the current interactive workbook and assessor guide from GOV.UK before starting.
• Work through all 33 sub-criteria and score honestly against each of the 78 indicators.
• Gather staff files evidencing BS 7858 screening completed before deployment, not after.
• Confirm every deployed officer's SIA licence against the SIA public register.
• Assemble signed contracts, rotas and proof they were actually followed at site level.
• Pull financial statements, credit references and evidence of solvency for the Financial management criterion.
• Check your daily occurrence book and incident logs are contemporaneous, not reconstructed after the fact.
• Budget for the SIA's annual registration fee of £25 per licensable individual, effective from 1 June 2026.
• Book your verification visit with NSI or the SSAIB with evidence organised by criterion, ready to hand over.

FAQ

What is the SIA ACS self-assessment workbook?

The SIA ACS self-assessment workbook is the official document a security business completes to apply for Approved Contractor Scheme status, scoring the business against 78 achievement indicators across seven criteria. It's published on GOV.UK alongside a companion guide explaining each indicator.

How do I complete the ACS self-assessment workbook?

You work through all 33 sub-criteria, score your business honestly against each of the 78 indicators, and gather supporting evidence before an SIA-approved certification body — NSI or the SSAIB — verifies it on site. Assessors review staff files, payroll, contracts, rotas, policies and site documentation, and interview staff and customers.

What are the seven criteria in the ACS standard?

The seven ACS criteria are Strategy, Service delivery, Commercial relationship management, Financial management, Resource management, People, and Leadership. Each is broken down further into sub-criteria and individual achievement indicators.

How many indicators must a company meet for ACS approval?

A company must meet the required achievement level across all 78 indicators, scored out of a possible 145 points, before becoming eligible for ACS approval, per GOV.UK. Every indicator carries its own baseline — there's no averaging across a weak indicator and a strong one.

What is the difference between the Standard Route and Passport Route for ACS approval?

The Standard Route requires the full self-assessment workbook verified by NSI or the SSAIB through document review and a site visit. The Passport Route is available to contractors who already hold a relevant recognised accreditation, which can streamline parts of the process.

How much does SIA ACS approval cost?

Costs include a fee to your chosen certification body (NSI or the SSAIB) plus the SIA's annual registration fee, which rose from £15 to £25 per licensable individual deployed — a 66% increase — from 1 June 2026, per GOV.UK. Internal staff time preparing evidence is usually the largest hidden cost.

Who conducts the ACS verification visit after the self-assessment workbook is submitted?

An SIA-approved certification body — either NSI or the SSAIB — conducts the verification visit, reviewing evidence against every indicator and visiting live operational sites.

How long is SIA ACS approval valid for?

ACS-approved contractors are reassessed annually, not given a fixed multi-year approval and left alone. Where an assessor identifies improvement needs at an annual reassessment, they must be addressed within the timeframe the assessor sets, per Pulse Operations's guide, The ACS self-assessment: how to evidence it.

Preparing your ACS submission with Pulse Operations

Every problem this guide describes — evidence scattered across inboxes, a paper occurrence book reconstructed after the shift, no reliable way to prove a patrol actually happened — is the exact gap Pulse Operations was built to close. Pulse runs SIA licences, BS 7858 screening, DBS checks, right-to-work status, training and statutory building compliance on one compliance runway, so the People and Service delivery evidence an ACS assessor asks for exists as a by-product of the working week, not a separate project.

Every checkpoint on Pulse is completed by a mandatory watermarked photograph showing the officer, site, GPS location and time — no tag scans by design — and the platform's photo-verification rate across live operations currently sits at 96.2% of checkpoints (trailing 90 days, as of July 2026; see Pulse Operations's benchmark). Read Pulse Operations's own guide, The ACS self-assessment: how to evidence it, for the full mapping of ACS criteria to operational records, or get in touch for a tour of how the compliance runway and photo-verified patrols work together ahead of your next assessment.

Related Reading

• Legionella Risk Assessment Frequency: UK Guide 2026
• Body Worn Camera Rules for UK Security Firms 2026
• Guardhouse Alternative 2026: Best UK Options Compared