It would seem the SIA is at last bowing to pressure from the Guild and other industry organisations in respect of licensing costs.

The Guild has openly and publicly criticised the SIA for their licensing fee structure which at present means that anyone undertaking duties requiring a license for more than one licensable sector has meant that those individuals are having to pay £190 for EACH license they need.
As the SIA supplied a breakdown of costs attributed to each process of the license issuing structure, our own argument was that, as a criminal records check only has to be done once regardless of the number of licensable sectors being applied for, it seemed unreasonable for them to apply that particular portion of the payable license fee multiple times.

We still feel there is further room for improvement, for example, if they had adopted a tiered licensing system, one license could cover multiple sectors and thus reduced the processing costs further by only having to issue ONE license instead of one license for each successful licensable sector for which the individual had applied for.

Never the less, we are looking forward to an official announcement from the SIA  confirming that secondary sector licenses will now cost £95 instead of £190 which we feel is far more appropriate.