It started with a call.
During Covid, the head of health and safety at one of our education clients, a large college group, called to ask us to build them a solution for Martyn's Law and in particular a Marauding Terrorist Attack. A few weeks into the project he called and said "I have had an epiphany, I want you to take our crisis off site". The explanation was simple, "we are trying to control a small war with admin staff". Hyperbole? Probably, but the point was taken.
That was revolutionary then, and it remains unique to Ag.
Ag is the chemical symbol for silver, and the reference is Silver Command, the tactical tier of the multi-agency command structure that coordinates how a response is delivered. Strategic responsibility stays with you. Operational control stays with your people on site and the emergency services. Ag coordinates the tactical tier, in the minutes when a building would otherwise be managing alone.
Why not an app?
Our team spent years building safety apps, and chose not to use one here. When we were planning Ag, a customer put it plainly: don't bother with an app, our staff will not download it onto their personal phones. Nothing since has changed that.
An instruction has to reach your staff on equipment you already own, not only the people who installed something. If an app were the right answer in this market, ours would be the best one.
Two minutes is all it takes to teach a member of staff to use Ag. It fits inside your existing induction, so there is no separate course to run and no retraining bill each time your team changes.
Built around unmatched expertise.
Ag Lockdown was built from the ground up over thousands of hours spent with schools and colleges, to look after the people you are responsible for.
The people behind the response.
It started with a call, and it is still people who answer. This team has spent its career at the forefront of safety technology, building apps for educational visits, lone worker protection for NHS community nurses, and convoy systems for the oil sector in Kenya and Algeria, before building this response centre platform with a major college group. The emergency response team behind it has looked after incidents since 2013. Ag Lockdown was not an existing product pushed into a new market, and these are the people who built it.
Ag Lockdown was not built by a software company that noticed a new law. It was built by people who have spent their careers in communications, emergency response and safety technology, and who made deliberate choices about how this should work. That is why the response centre is manned rather than automated, why an alert reaches the screens and handsets already on site, and why there is no app to download.
Tony Foote
Founder and Managing Director
Tony conceived and built Ag Lockdown from the ground up. His 35-year career in communications technology began at Marconi and includes senior roles at Quadrant PLC, Access, PIC, UK Cellular and NTT DOCOMO, giving him both the technical foundation and the commercial instinct to identify a problem that had not been properly solved. Through years of collaboration with schools and colleges he came to understand how education institutions actually operate, where they are exposed, and what an emergency response has to do in practice rather than on paper. He recognised early that education would move first under Martyn's Law, because its culture of duty of care runs deeper than most. The platform was designed around those realities, with features shaped directly by feedback from educators in the field and at sector events. Our emergency response team has looked after incidents continuously since 2013, with the ERC redeveloped specifically to enable our lockdown response. JobTrac+ has been proven in NHS environments since 2016.
Chris Gorman OBE
Strategic Advisor and Board Member
Chris has spent more than 30 years building high-growth businesses across mobile, retail and technology. He was honoured with an OBE for services to business and recognised by Ernst & Young for entrepreneurial leadership, and he is a longstanding supporter of initiatives tackling poverty through enterprise. His job here is to make sure a service that works for one college can work for a hundred without losing the thing that made it worth having.
Gregg Ross
Strategic Board Advisor
Gregg has spent more than 20 years in commercial insurance, most of it as Commercial Director at Laurie Ross Insurance, now part of Howden, where he led the firm's expansion across Scotland and handled its most complex client portfolios. He owns Ronald Ross Ltd. Insurers look closely at how ready an organisation really is, and Gregg knows how they think, which keeps us honest about the difference between having a plan and being able to act on it.
Tim Sagar
Board Director
Tim has held board and senior management roles at Motorola, NEC and Alcatel. He began his career at Racal Tacticom in 1980, was there for the birth of Vodafone, and has worked across every part of the telecoms business since, from infrastructure to handsets to applications and content. He holds a degree in electronic and electrical engineering from Loughborough. He is the reason we can say, with a straight face, that we spent years building apps and then chose not to use one here.
Natalie Waller, Head of Client Liaison
Natalie is the person our customers deal with day to day. She served in the Royal Signals, spent more than a decade in Australia where she built and ran her own business, and came back into the Emergency Response Centre itself, supporting live incidents, before moving across to look after clients. So when she sits down with a college to work out how the platform should be set up, she has already been on the other end of the call.
Her job is onboarding, making sure the system matches how your premises actually runs rather than how a manual says it should, and being the first point of contact when something needs changing rather than responding to. If you become a customer, hers is the name in your inbox.
The people who answer are a team, not a directory.
Our emergency response team has looked after incidents since 2013, and the centre is manned around the clock. Every Controller answering your call has a military background. Their calm comes from field experience and from making difficult decisions under real pressure.
Why it is built this wayBetween them, these people have built the safety technology, run the response, looked after the customers and carried the commercial risk.
That is why Ag Lockdown is built the way it is, and not the way it would have been if a product had come first.