Yesterday afternoon I walked along Whitehall and paused at the entrance to Downing Street to take photos in case they were of use in Professional Security Magazine.
As I walked on I turned my eyes left to the Cenotaph and took my hat off in memory of my grandfather John Nunn. I noted the three police officers standing in front of the memorial.
As an aside, since when did the space in front of the Cenotaph become a Metropolitan Police van park?
I was on my way to the Palace of Westminster to meet a Labour source. I put to them my question: 20 years into the SIA-badging regime, why are police officers routinely used to guard such places, and crime scenes, when private security officers could do the job, cheaper? We can understand that the police would avoid giving ground to privatisation. Stranger still, 20 or more years ago you could hear senior figures in contract guarding making the case for privatisation; for use of security guards to do things done by police, that don’t require a constable’s power of arrest. That has happened, for example through the community safety accreditation scheme (CSAS); except that take-up has been patchy. Why has the call from within private security, for more, and more meaningful, police-style work, gone quiet?
The Labour personage answered that the Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in her proposals for law and order (see link to her speech to the Labour Party conference in Liverpool in the autumn) had promised more neighbourhood policing – to quote precisely, to ‘restore neighbourhood policing – 13,000 more neighbourhood police and PCSOs back on our streets’. Quite how much of the extra police promised would be community support officers, and how many constables, remains to be seen; also (the Labour source added) where the neighbourhood police would come from. Would an incoming Labour Government pull officers off rape investigations, cyber-crime and any number of other specialist units, into neighbourhoods? That may bring opportunity for private security. But neither main political party is airing privatisation of police.
That’s not (I would argue) because either Labour or Conservatives are ideologically for, or against, privatisation. Yes, the main Opposition party does lay into the party in Government, if something goes awry. Partly, I’d argue, precisely because they agree largely on crime prevention, and law and order, policy. To take two examples beyond the pale, no-one in politics suggests letting off criminals if they write a letter of apology and promise to try harder; nor that a convicted criminal should dig a pit and sit in it. That said; if one main party were to suggest privatisation of police, the other party may weaponise and polarise the debate by siding with police to condemn it (rather than debate the merits). Such is politics.
The Labour source did suggest that while the UK accepts that private security patrols shopping centres, and other semi-public spaces, it has a stumbling block over private security protecting public spaces. As a citizen, I agree; except that 100 yards from the Cenotaph, at an entrance to Westminster Tube station, I have seen a City of Westminster Council uniformed warden on patrol. The other day in Hammersmith in west London I saw a couple of Hammersmith council vehicles marked ‘law enforcement’. Other London boroughs have community safety or warden patrollers. On numerous London and other town and city high streets, you see SIA-badged patrollers, hired by business improvement districts (BIDs). Again, done piecemeal. In innumerable little ways, corporate security officers, at The Shard for example next door to London Bridge station (only to single out what I saw the other day) are standing, no matter how close to their building entrance, outside facing public space so as to ‘own’ it, to see any potential threats coming. Since the early to late 2010s – for such profound social changes, there is no exact date it happened – that’s been with police blessing. Private policing of public space is happening; only not systematically. Security officers on guard at the Cenotaph might cause raised public eyebrows, but not the outrage if some protester desecrated the Cenotaph.
Protection of such sensitive sites as the Cenotaph is different from crime scene preservation. The Cenotaph is across the road from Downing Street, naturally a sensitive site (and legally one of those particularly protected under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) 2005 – further evidence that the threats guarded against are not new. If more than one or two protesters did approach the Cenotaph and require restraining or arrest, before they did damage to the monument – to do incalculable harm to Britain’s standing, and provoke dismay among all those who still have some residue of respect for Britain’s war dead – those three police on static guard would have to call for reinforcements. Security officers could make the call as easily.
That morning I had walked through Blackheath Village in south-east London. The main street in the suburb had blue ‘police line’ tape to keep traffic out; pedestrians could still walk on either side’s pavement (and some commuters going to the train station nipped under the blue tape to cut out the walk around). A police car and officer were on duty to enforce the police line at the south end, and a police officer at the heath end. Again, why have highly-paid, highly-trained police do that task, when the Met could employ private security more cheaply? And deploy the police where their powers of arrest are more needed? As for why the contract guarding sector is not lobbying in public for such work, the mundane answer may be that guarding companies have plenty of work without taking the time and effort to lobby for more.
