SJUK Assistant Editor James Humphreys speaks to Anne Marie Chebib, Managing Director, Select Security and Stewarding and UK Crowd Management Association (UKCMA) Chair about her journey with the Association.

Diversity, education and fostering new talent are just some of the core values which the UKCMA has championed since its inception in 2001.

One of the key components in this mission is Chebib, having joined the association 16 years ago and helped establish it into what it is today.  

Back in April this year, Chebib was named the new Chair of the UKCMA, succeeding Eric Stuart QPM following five-years in the role.  

SJUK sat down with the newly-appointed Chair to discuss her path to this position and what Chebib hopes to achieve in 2024.   

The UKCMA appointed you as Secretary 16 years ago. When did you first get involved with the Association and why? 

The late Mick Upton, founding member of the UKCMA and Showsec and John Corbishley, current Chair of The Global Crowd Management Association (GCMA) introduced me to UKCMA in 2003.

At that point I was mainly managing doors (pubs and clubs) in Brighton. 

I wanted to join, but when I read the Constitution of the UKCMA, I wasn’t sure it was for me. It was a bit of an old boys’ network so, I joined tentatively and diligently went to the meetings.

I thought this is where the community is, and we’ve got to improve safety.  

Not long after, Mark Harding became Chair.

Mark is a welcoming character.

I have a clear memory of that time when Chris Woodford was Secretary and Mark was Chair and I would go into meetings and there would only be a few of us.

When Chris gave up being Secretary, that was the natural point for me to take on the role.

So, 16 years ago I said I’ll do it for about two years! 

Six years ago, Eric joined as Chair and things changed again.

We had done some good work, but we were still a well-kept secret. Eric, however, had a high profile of his own.

He was the Sergeant in charge of the torch relay event during the 20212 Olympics and had working on Notting Hill Carnival for many years, amongst other events.  

He did all the planning and preparation and off the back of that, he knew everybody in the industry. 

He also knew the stakeholders like the Home Office and the National Police Chief’s Council and that gave us a new impetus to be able to start speaking to stakeholders.  

What were the biggest challenges that you faced in the role and how did you overcome them? 

I have faced many more challenges in my business at Select than I’ve ever done at the UKCMA because I have a different mindset to it, although both are my passion.

Having said that, some days I wonder if the role of Chair is full-time or part-time!   

There have been challenges at the UKCMA, like when we worked on the Manchester inquiry with Sir John Saunders to get them to better understand the realities of the industry.  

Writing guidance is challenging.

I was in tears at one point working on the ‘Safer crowds, Safer venues’ documentation.

You get so involved and so wrapped up in these projects, you can’t help but feel like you need to see them through and when things don’t go well, it’s hard.

We have all experienced challenges behind the scenes, the trick is for it to appear seamless. 

When did you find out about UKCMA’s decision to name you as the new chair?  

We must keep due process over the role of Chairs and Vice Chairs, because at the end of the day, we have a constitution.

Everybody must be given the opportunity to put themselves forward, so I did and I knew in March the role was mine. 

How do you see your role as Chair evolving in the future?  

It’s always been a very hands-on role, but we have a much flatter structure now with eight Vice Chairs, a Secretary, Treasurer and two new member representatives.

There’s a team of 12 working with me. Eric and I were essentially doing everything for a long time, every single meeting, with a bit of help from our friends. 

Now, every Vice Chair has a very clearly defined area of responsibility for the organisation and has a very clearly defined stakeholder engagement piece, both of which sort of sit together.

For example, Mark Logan, CEO of Showsec looks after everything which has anything to do with the police, so he does all the kinds of police stakeholder liaison.

We also have someone dealing with mentoring, someone is dealing with diversity, and so on.  

What this means is, I can get on with trying to facilitate and speak at the top line.

There are certain stakeholders like the home office, central government and a few others that I’m keeping my hand in with.

I want to champion diversity in the industry, so I will keep working with Daniel Blackwood, Managing Director at ResponSec on this. 

The other thing I’m doing which is a really worthwhile, is supporting Dawn Dines and the work she’s doing with Stamp out Spiking, that’s a charity that I really think we should be involved in, because there’s a lot around spiking that’s not been brought to the fore.  

I’ll have these sorts of personal projects, and then I will have a facilitation role over the rest of it.

My role will become much more about facilitation and speaking to partners when and as I need to which means we can do a lot more and we can grow the association with us.  

We are in a position now where we can spend the time strategising and putting the proposition together and that’s probably where my skills are best placed.

We’ll put together a three-to-five-year business plan, investing the time to work out how we can monetise what we do.

We are doing amazing things and you’ve got to be sustainable to be able to keep doing it. The future relies very much on that model of management.

That’s the way the UKCMA is going to grow and shine.  

I would love that piece to be my legacy piece, getting the UKCMA to that point.

Kudos to all the vice chairs as they’ve been amazing.

There are good business reasons for being involved so it’s not all altruistic, but nonetheless, those people have stepped up, stood up and said, “I’m going to be counted and my voice is going to matter.” And we’ve got some big voices! 

What are your biggest goals for your organisation in 2024? 

2024 is for the foundations to be correct.

We’ve got to get the foundation’s right before we move on to having more fantastic ideas.

If we make those the foundations for success, it will reap massive rewards in the future and benefit everybody. 

There are some good things happening in the meantime, such as around diversity and mentoring.

This includes bringing people up to boardroom level and bringing fresh talent into the industry.  

We have the ability to create briefing sheets for the hundreds of thousands of staff- both security and stewards who work in our industry.

One tiny example, the language around the correct use of pronouns, is not very well known in the events industry.

If we can get that one simple thing moving, that will make a big difference to people’s knowledge of diversity and the language to use. 

This article was originally published in the August Edition of Security Journal UK. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.