In Devon and Cornwall, non-police, hired officers are pioneering on-street, explicitly public space patrolling; which not only is for the public good, but serves to show private security to good effect. Such work is crying out for national roll-out. However, Devon and Cornwall ought not to be the model for the rest of Britain, Mark Rowe writes.
Devon and Cornwall PCC Alison Hernandez described her force area to the regional areaโs police and crime panel at their meeting in Plymouth in July as one of the few โwhere CSAS is being used to its best advantageโ. As she told the meeting, the Community Safety Accreditation Scheme (CSAS) gives partners involved in a community safety or traffic management role a range of powers usually only available to police. CSAS members often include street marshals, park wardens, security guards and parking attendants. โThe scheme aims to contribute to community safety and combat crime and disorder, public nuisance and other forms of antisocial behaviour. There are a range of powers a chief officer might grant, including requesting an offenderโs name and address, issuing a fixed penalty notice, confiscating items such as tobacco or alcohol and directing traffic.โ
Likewise, blogging about how the force manages the midsummer tourist season, Hernandez has pointed to street marshals (employed by councils, part-funded through her office) besides PCSOs, and warranted officers, who do the visible โhotspot policingโ (a national programme) of the two counties. As along the north Wales, and other coasts, the extra visitors place demands on police and indeed all services, as anyone catching trains for the south coast and south west at London Waterloo and Paddington respectively this month can see. Further reasons inform why public policing in Devon and Cornwall has chosen to draw on others than the police.
Distance
The first is what Australian historians call โthe tyranny of distanceโ. Itโs 120 miles from London to Bristol, across the trunk of England; and then another 120 miles from Bristol to Plymouth, the main city of the south west region, on the border of Devon and Cornwall; and another 80 miles from Plymouth to the last town before Landโs End, Penzance. Go north from London and 320 miles takes you past Carlisle over the Scottish border; the 200 miles through Devon and Cornwall compare with London to Birmingham, or Lincoln (and crossing numerous police force areas). Devon and Cornwall has the advantage, then, of setting one policy for policing, though the main centre (Plymouth, where the panel met; which saw anti-immigrant rioting in the summer of 2024) has little in common with the raucous resorts of Newquay (where West Ham shorts are not out of place) and Torquay, or genteel or upmarket harbours.
CSAS drawback
The drawback for 20 years with CSAS โ and a reason for its at best patchy uptake โ is that each chief constable vets (which takes months โ what security officer wants to wait that long?!) and trains those to be CSAS-accredited. In the West Midlands and other urban areas, that would mean a security officer needing two or three accreditations, hardly practical for officers who travel some distance for work. Pre-covid I came across a night security officer at a south Devon car park who routinely drove there 40 minutes from Exeter because the work was steady, which appealed as he was self-employed. On the M62 corridor, the equivalent would see such an officer live one force area, cross another and work in a third.
Second, social deprivation, which anywhere means crime and nuisance. You holiday in the south west to promenade along the heaving main streets of Falmouth, or enjoy ice cream at Clovelly, not to note the begging in St Austell or the shuttered shops in Ilfracombe, Bodmin and Barnstaple and the pervading sense in such small towns of โleft behindโ more associated with the deindustrialised north. But that phenomenon of struggling high streets โ as a Centre for Cities recent report pointed out, in truth an outcome of struggling local economies โ is real; so are the antisocial bored youth, nuisance behaviour by on-street drinkers and begging by the homeless (if anything, worse placed than in, say, Lancashire, because theyโre priced out of the local housing market) and shop theft to feed drug addictions.
As a further sign of how CSAS has not caught on, Hernandez told the panel that Devon and Cornwall has over 150 CSAS accredited officers. By comparison, Plymouth (ranked 49th in the latest, July 2025 Security Industry Authority statistics for where the SIA-badged are based) has some 1692 licence holders; and Exeter has exactly 1000. Then come St Austell-Newquay (counted as one, though theyโre 16 miles apart) with 457; Torquay and Paignton with 419; Redruth and Truro with 403, Barnstaple with 260, Falmouth 127 and Bideford with 114. Liskeard, Penzance, Wadebridge, Bude, Launceston and Kingsbridge-Dartmouth also feature, and bring a total to 4837. In other words, those 150 CSAS-accredited are equivalent to 3.1 per cent of the SIA-badged in those 16 places. While not an exact comparison, it does show that CSAS has scarcely touched the SIA badging landscape.
That may suit all; because (as these patrollers will tell you) some doing police-like patrols may prefer not to wear the CSAS logo (itโs a difficult design to explain, to say the least, not that the Devon and Cornwall forceโs badge is either, plainly heraldic). More to the point, with CSAS may come police-like powers that might sit uncomfortably with some patrollers, who may prefer to engage with street drinkers and loitering youths without the option of taking names; turning officious.
It does beg questions. What percentage of SIA-badged guards might the sector have to supply, to meet a nationwide roll-out of hired patrollers like Devon and Cornwallโs? Three per cent of 455,000 (the July total of SIA licence holders) would be about 13,500, which may sound about right compared with the UKโs roughly 170,000 police.
Whether you call them โenhancedโ, however you equip and train and integrate them into the police (with email addresses, tablets, power and indeed duty to input data), Devon and Cornwall might serve as a template for parts of the UK โ such as Norfolk-Suffolk and Lincolnshire, the Welsh Marches, West Cumbria โ only. As a veteran retail security man put it to me, in shires and small towns (as in most of Devon and Cornwall) authority figures get shown a basic respect that they do not in, for example, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. Labour may have prescribed โneighbourhoodโ policing for the country, but even in Devon, neighbourhoods differ. Thus, as the Devon and Cornwall panel heard in July, the Stonehouse district of Plymouth has had the โClear Hold Build (CHB)โ approach from the authorities, โto improve the response to serious and organised crime (SOC) at the local levelโ, more associated with big cities.
Photo by Mark Rowe: Falmouth quayside.
