Our work is urgent. There is no time to waste, said Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer ahead of the King’s Speech, that today will set out Labour’s planned law-making. What might private security ideally want to happen in terms of ‘law and order’ under the Labour government, replacing a Conservative regime that had become intellectually as much as literally exhausted? Mark Rowe asks.
Online safety
A complaint made against the previous incoming Labour Government of 1997, led by Tony Blair, was that it was too set on making new laws when the country had plenty of laws already that could be applied to problems. The Online Safety Act 2023 has made the broadcast regulator Ofcom the regulator for ‘online harms’, particularly faced by children. Will Ofcom have the staffing, funding and (as necessary) willpower to truly tackle online content harmful to children (such as pornography), and new offences with bewilderingly new names such as ‘intimate image abuse’ and ‘epilepsy trolling’, besides the more catch-all ‘threatening communications’.
Just as other countries have their own campaigns for online safety, implying controls over the powerful social media platforms – in the United States, lobbying is for a Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) – so the online world implies anything to curb its harm has to be international, if a social media company based in the US has content moderation staff in country B covering a continent where in country C online incitement leads to harassment or worse.
Fraud and scams
Three years ago may seem a long time in UK politics. In July 2021 PM Boris Johnson had a large majority, he had come through covid, and set out a ‘Beating Crime Plan‘, ‘building on what we’ve achieved in the past two years’. It didn’t seem to matter that the plan spoke of ‘rises we have seen in recent years in homicide, serious violence, and neighbourhood crime such as robbery and burglary’, rises that had occurred during Coalition and then Conservative government. Somewhat in passing, the 52-page document said that the Government would ‘replace Action Fraud with an improved national fraud and cybercrime reporting system and increase intelligence capabilities in the NCA and the national security community to identify the most harmful criminals and organised criminal gangs’. Action Fraud, much unloved, is only part of shortcomings from services for victims of fraud (the number one crime, by volume) to actually collaring the fraudsters, who may well be abroad (and where, if the frauds are carried out online?).
Drugs
The ‘Beating Crime Plan’ also mentioned the Johnson regime would publish a cross-Government Drug Strategy later in 2021, as it did, to ‘set out our longer term ambition to tackle drugs’. The ambition was set at ten years, giving the impression that the Tories (and Johnson in person) meant to be around for ten years. They may have been swept away, and the two documents may have been utterly forgotten, yet the problems of drug addiction, and criminal trade, remain; causing much shop theft, as addicts steal to afford their habit, and funding further organised crime, respectively.
Surveillance camera commissioner
The Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner (whose role is ‘to encourage compliance with the surveillance camera code of practice’) still exists, but is moribund. The certification scheme for CCTV users to show compliance with the code is closed to new applications. You can make the case that the times have passed since CCTV was a separate sort of surveillance meriting its own regulating, and that video (including from drones, door bells, mobile phones), and facial recognition are all data, better regulated under one umbrella; except that, where is the umbrella?
Data protection
The current law is the Data Protection Act 2018, the UK’s applying of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In other words, years after Brexit, the UK still has the European Union’s law on data protection, as regulated by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). As with Ofcom, the ICO is another case of a regulator with far more responsibilities than it can possibly cover – data privacy taking in the recent Synnovis cyber attack affecting London hospitals, freedom of information (the Police Service of Northern Ireland is still working through its 2023 data leak in response to a FoI request), and telephone marketing. It makes for capricious regulating – who can say how much non-compliance goes on, while the regulator with finite investigative resources goes after who knows what fraction of offenders. Whether this alters will depend on what kind of state Labour wants, and can afford. All the while, the sense is that tech is developing far faster than the state and its appointed regulators can keep up.
Only now do we come to what got much if any airing during the six-weeks before the July 4 election.
Violence against women and girls (VAWG)
The further release of prisoners from near-full prisons as already announced by Labour was interesting; a new government could act without being blamed for something that plainly had occurred before their time. Yet release even earlier than the already accepted halfway through a sentence did throw up which criminals were regarded as relatively less unsafe to return to society. The charity Refuge which offers services for victims of domestic abuse such as a telephone helpline urged the government, in comments ahead of the King’s Speech, to protect victims of domestic abuse.
Significantly, Refuge also raised online safety – ‘tech-facilitated abuse is a growing form of domestic abuse, and the response to this threat must be prioritised by the government’. Earlier, commenting on labour’s election win, Amy Bowdrey, Policy and Public Affairs Officer at Refuge, also notably made wide-ranging points; about the backlog of cases in courts (that we might add is leaving victims and witnesses, and indeed the accused, in limbo), besides how ‘VAWG is rooted in misogyny and we are pleased to see in Labour’s manifesto their pledge to make misogyny a hate crime’. She went on that ‘to truly tackle VAWG the Government needs to put survivors at the heart of the system and the focus of this needs to be funding specialist support services for survivors that have been impacted by austerity underfunding for over a decade’. Law-making, the applying of ideas, and money, are each part of what’s called for.
Public places
Over recent years Professional Security Magazine has, among its other news, featured private patrollers in outright public places – in the July edition, in central Birmingham for the Colmore business improvement district; in August, by the contractor Amulet on the buses in Manchester. SIA-badged private security officers are ever more routinely on railway stations on platforms and at ticket barriers, on buses (in the West Midlands, safer transport officers, also featured in July’s edition), on high streets, in shopping centres and stadiums and – symbolically, and for practical reasons to get wind of any approaching threats – facing outwards towards public space. How do they fit with the police? Ought there to be national minimum standards for their kit, liaison with local police? No doubt police have their own reform agenda. Ministers only have so many waking hours, so much parliamentary time.
As indeed have private security managers; Martyn’s Law alone, a legal responsibility to take steps to counter terrorism, in the Home Office jargon a Protect Duty, would amount to the largest change to private security since the SIA regulatory regime came in, in the mid-2000s. The SIA, as I blogged most recently, wants to make its own reforms, and may seek parliamentary time to alter the Private Security Industry Act 2001 it works under.
See also the August edition of Professional Security Magazine.
