Private security has become an essential component of Europe’s wider security and resilience ecosystem. Across the continent, private security professionals protect critical infrastructure, transport hubs, airports, major events, businesses, and public spaces, while working alongside police, emergency services, and public authorities.
The scale of the sector is significant. The Confederation of European Security Services (CoESS) represents 23 national associations from 17 EU Member States, covering around 45,000 private security companies and approximately two million private security guards across Europe.
Yet CoESS believes this considerable resource is still not being integrated sufficiently into Europe’s preparedness and resilience planning.
For Catherine Piana, Director General of CoESS, one of the greatest challenges is what she describes as the “preparedness gap”: Europe has become increasingly effective at identifying threats and vulnerabilities but has not yet become equally effective at bringing together all the available resources, responsibilities and capabilities before a crisis occurs.
Private security has an important role to play in helping to close that gap.
The sector itself is also changing. Technology, artificial intelligence, remote monitoring, digital communications, and emerging challenges such as malicious drones are transforming both the services private security companies provide and the skills expected of their workforce. At the same time, stronger public-private partnerships, appropriate procurement practices, and common quality standards are becoming increasingly important.
Underpinning all of this, however, is something more fundamental: people. Private security remains a human-centred industry whose purpose, as Catherine puts it, is to “protect people, assets and infrastructure.”
CoESS will be running a workshop at CIPRE 2026 headed by with Catherine Piana, Director General. See more here: https://www.cipre-expo.com/coess-workshop/
Ben Lane spoke with Catherine to understand the work of CoESS: www.coess.org
Ben Lane: You have been Director General of CoESS for more than a decade. How did you become involved with the private security industry, and how have you seen its role change?
Catherine Piana: I ended up at CoESS by chance. I had previously been Director General of other associations and was freelancing when the then Director General of CoESS went on sick leave. They needed somebody to step in, and somebody kindly suggested my name.
I spoke with the chairman and thought, private security — I have never worked in that area before. Let us see how it goes. Very quickly I became interested in it, bordering on passionate.
It was also a particularly significant time to join the sector. We were around 2014 and Europe was entering a period marked by a wave of terrorist attacks. Progressively, private security became much more visible to the European institutions and public authorities.
During crises such as the terrorist attacks in Brussels, you could see private security officers working alongside the police and helping people. That period represented an important moment in the development and recognition of private security in Europe.
Ben Lane: How is private security moving beyond its traditional guarding role and becoming a more important part of Europe’s wider preparedness and resilience?
Catherine Piana: The first thing to understand is that there is no single European private security market. The situation differs considerably between Member States because legislation governing private security is national.
Consequently, the level of maturity of the sector and the way private security is used can vary significantly from one country to another.
What is already clear, however, is that private security protects highly visible events, businesses, and critical infrastructure. In that respect, we are already an essential service.
Where we now need to move is towards a much stronger preparedness and resilience model.
We know many of the threats. We know many of our vulnerabilities. What we have not yet done sufficiently is look at all the resources available to us and work out how they can operate together, how we cooperate, integrate, and prepare before something happens.
That is what I call the preparedness gap. It is the gap between knowing what resources and capabilities exist and putting them together so that they work effectively before a crisis occurs, rather than trying to create solutions ad hoc during the crisis.
Human beings are quite good at identifying risks and saying what should be done. We are not always as good at turning that into action until something happens.
That must change.
Before an incident occurs, we should already understand who has responsibility, who needs to be where, who reports to whom and what the communication channels are.
We have around two million private security guards across Europe, roughly comparable in scale with the police. That represents an enormous potential resource.
We need to make much better use of it.
Ben Lane: Does that mean Europe needs to develop stronger public-private partnerships between private security, police, governments, and other public authorities?
Catherine Piana: There really is not much choice. There simply are not enough police officers to do everything, but it is also about making sensible use of skills and resources.
Police officers undergo extensive training. Using those highly trained officers for something such as routine access control may not necessarily make sense when appropriately trained private security personnel can perform that role effectively. It is about ensuring that the right resources are used for the right tasks.
In some European countries, public-private partnerships work relatively well. But our research has shown that the situation remains very patchy.
Sometimes cooperation works extremely well for a particular event or location, but it has not developed into a general framework or a holistic approach.
We also need to look at procurement. In too many cases, buyers still select security services primarily based on the lowest price. The lowest-cost solution is not necessarily the most secure solution.
Through our work on public-private partnerships and critical infrastructure protection, we have therefore looked closely at best practice: where does cooperation work well, why does it work, and what can we learn from it?
From those examples, you can begin to develop a blueprint for what effective public-private partnerships should look like.
There is also sometimes a lack of awareness about what private security is legally able to do. In Belgium, for example, legislation allows private security to carry out several missions under police supervision, including access-control activities at police facilities. Yet not every potential user necessarily knows those options exist.
So, part of our role at European level is increasing the visibility of these possibilities, sharing best practice, and providing recommendations. However, our national associations must nurture those relationships with the relevant authorities in their own countries.
Ben Lane: You have argued that security should be regarded as an enabler rather than simply a cost or burden. What do you mean by that?
Catherine Piana: The simplest way of explaining it is this: imagine one day without private security.
Imagine that all the women and men working in private security simply do not turn up for work for one day.
There is no access control at companies. Either nobody can get in or everybody can get in, and you do not want either of those situations.
There is no private security supporting emergency departments in hospitals, where security can become extremely important.
There are no passenger or baggage security-screening services at airports.
There is no private security protecting critical infrastructure.
Private security is also involved in protecting highly sensitive facilities. Nuclear infrastructure in countries including Belgium and the UK involves private security, while access control at NATO headquarters in Brussels is carried out by private security.
Take all those people away for one day and a great deal comes to a halt. That is the simplest explanation and the stark reality!
Ben Lane: If private security is taking on this wider role, how significant is the challenge of attracting, retaining, and developing people with the right skills?
Catherine Piana: It is a major challenge. We are effectively fishing in the same pond as the police, armed forces and other security and defence organisations. These sectors are often looking for similar kinds of people.
There are workforce shortages in many countries, and the situation became particularly difficult following COVID. Many people working in areas such as aviation and event security suddenly found themselves without work and moved into other industries. Bringing them back has not always been easy.
We therefore need to create attractive careers, provide good working conditions, and ensure that people are paid fairly.
But there is another challenge as well. As private security becomes increasingly technological, using new technologies and artificial intelligence, we also need people with the appropriate technical capabilities.
So, it is a double challenge: creating attractive jobs while simultaneously attracting the right profiles and skills.
One interesting finding from our EU-funded INTEL project was the importance of word-of-mouth recruitment within security. Many people enter the industry because somebody already working within it introduces them to it.
That suggests we have considerable potential to make the industry visible to a much wider group of people.
Together with our social partner UNI Europa, we are working to create the right environment for people to join and develop careers in a sector that has a very important purpose: protecting people, assets, and infrastructure.
Ben lane: Technology is increasingly changing private security. Where do you see some of the most important opportunities — and challenges?
Catherine Piana: I will give you two examples.
The first concerns communications with emergency services.
Monitoring and alarm receiving centres already monitor sites, verify incidents, and then alert the emergency services. They therefore perform an important filtering function and can provide verified information.
Yet in many situations that information still reaches emergency services through traditional voice telephone calls.
We believe this needs to become much more digital. If verified information can be transferred digitally, we could potentially reduce a process that takes several minutes to perhaps one or two minutes while also improving the accuracy of the information being provided. When you are responding to an emergency, those minutes matter.
The second area is drones, and particularly counter-drone capabilities.
Again, Europe currently has a very patchy situation. In some countries private security can detect drones, while there are very few circumstances in which it can act against a malicious or unauthorised drone.
We need to have that conversation urgently. Drones are appearing around airports, ports, and other infrastructure. They can disrupt airport operations, be used for smuggling or hostile reconnaissance, and potentially present much more serious threats.
The problem is that by the time the police are called and arrive at the location, the drone may have disappeared or already done whatever it was intended to do.
We can do better than that. I am not saying that private security should automatically have responsibility for countering drones. I am saying that we need to decide who should do what, under whose authority and under whose supervision before an incident occurs.
We cannot wait for a serious incident and only then decide that we need the resources, legislation, and procedures.
That takes us straight back to preparedness. We need to know who should be where, at what point, and what they are responsible for to manage a crisis and provide resilience to businesses, society, and citizens.
Ben Lane: Alongside preparedness and technology, what role do standards and clearer regulatory frameworks have in improving the quality of private security across Europe?
Catherine Piana: Standards may not sound like the most glamorous subject, but they have a very important strategic dimension.
One area in which CoESS has been particularly active is developing European standards that help buyers of private security services understand what quality looks like when purchasing services for critical infrastructure.
These standards provide objective quality criteria developed through CEN, the European standardisation system.
This is important because it gives buyers an independent way of understanding whether a security provider reaches the appropriate quality level.
In many ways, I see this as an operational translation of the Critical Entities Resilience Directive. European legislation obviously cannot prescribe every operational detail for every individual organisation, but standards can help translate broader requirements into practical quality criteria.
There is a general standard covering private security service providers (EN 17483-1) and sector-specific work covering areas including aviation, ports and maritime security, and energy (respectively EN 17483-2, -3 and -4). We are currently also working on healthcare (pr EN17483-5).
The intention is to look across critical infrastructure sectors and give buyers practical tools so that when they purchase security services, they know what they should be looking for.
Standards also have consequences beyond procurement. They affect working conditions, training, motivation and how attractive the industry is to potential employees.
Private security remains a very human-centred industry. Technology is becoming increasingly important, but the human factor remains fundamental.
We therefore need to look after our people and ensure they have the right conditions, skills, and training. Standards help us achieve that.
Ben Lane: If there were one message you wanted governments, critical infrastructure operators, and other security stakeholders to take from this discussion, what would it be?
Catherine Piana: Private security represents an enormous potential resource. We have millions of people with a very clear purpose: protecting people, assets, and infrastructure.
So, use us!
Europe needs to recover a more systemic way of thinking about security and preparedness. We are a system, and we need to work together rather than concentrating only on our individual roles, organisations, or territories.
When threats come from outside, we need to bring our resources together.
Private security is one of those resources.
We already have the people, expertise, and capabilities.
The challenge now is to integrate those resources properly, establish responsibilities in advance and make sure that when the next crisis comes, we are prepared rather than simply reacting.
That is how we build a more resilient Europe.