The DSU Services Limited Directors today defended their decision to alter the admissions policy of Dunelm in the evenings. The decision, which came to light in a leaked document two days ago, would alter the basis on which admissions to Dunelm were decided.
At the moment, with the exception of a few specifically barred individuals, all members of the student union are allowed access to Dunelm on presentation of their DSU card. The document claims that this has caused security problems, with some barred individuals simply disguising themselves as other Union members and borrowing DSU cards.
A member of security staff, who wished to remain anonymous, said that with over ten thousand members, it's easy enough for people to evade a ban on a specific member
.
The document suggests, as a solution to this problem, changing the admissions policy to a policy where access is denied by default, and a list of those members allowed access is kept instead. There are a small number of members known to have genuine reasons for requiring access, and these would not be affected by the change.
The planned change, however, has provoked outrage from many users of Kingsgate, who claim that legitimate access to DSU services may be affected, and that the current system is a better balance. The DSUSL Directors, however, are confident that there will be few problems, and issued the following statement.
We do not believe that there will be any denial of legitimate service caused by the alteration of policy. There may be a few members who rarely attend who are initially not recognised by the new system, but if they have a legitimate reason for attendance then this will be quickly rectified. We plan to make available instructions for determining which members a particular activity uses, so that requests for allowing specific members can be submitted.
The DSUSL Directors have denied claims that they are out of touch with the reality of the security system, and claim that in the long term this will reduce the workload on security staff. One director pointed to the success other organisations have had in implementing a default-deny
policy, and said that of over twenty organisations asked, most had already moved away from their old default-allow
policies or were considering it.