The idea of privatisation is not private security, but the two are bound up. While privatisation of public utilities seems at a low ebb, thanks to history and politics the idea may be never stronger.
To define the two: if you live in a village and are running a summer shindig, you may want to hire security, like you see on a pub door. You might try to tap up your Uncle Ron, because he’s big and looks mean. Or, you could hire someone with an SIA licence, badged by an arm of the state. They could be self-employed (genuinely, or ‘bogus’ – made to have self-employed status by a security contractor) or you could have whoever the security contractor sends. What doesn’t happen is that when you search on the SIA website for an approved contractor (because how else would you seek such a security service?!) you find any firm belonging to the state.
Consider how the state has no appetite for entering security guarding for itself. A melancholy thought, but a risk is that in a couple of years, after peace in Ukraine, Russia may next try to invade the Baltic republics. That could mean Britain is at war with Russia. A war with a major power would be uncharted territory for Britain in the 21st century; presumably in that case Britain would (as when it sent expeditionary forces in 1914 and 1940 to the Continent) denude itself of armed forces. In 1914, voluntary militia sprang up. In 1940, the Local Defence Volunteers and then Home Guard are well-known; hardly so, National Defence Companies, set up on the eve of the Second World War, uniformed and paid troops to guard places in need of guarding, such as military bases. Those hired were typically middle-aged veterans of the First World War, which freed younger men for the front line. If Britain were in a similar crisis in a few years, it’s hard to imagine the state (with so much else to do) setting up its own force; it would turn to private security (itself snowed under with demands to guard sites).
Privatisation is a two-pronged idea: that state monopoly services are best avoided, because service is poor and innovation slow; and that when things are in the private sector, society gains.
Some history
It’s worth remarking on quite how nationalised and socialistic Britain was, before the heyday of Margaret Thatcher as Conservative prime minister in the 1980s. If you wanted a telephone, you had to go through the telecoms side of the Post Office (unless you lived around Hull which had its own telecoms, and white phones boxes, pictured, not red). Water, gas and electricity were state monopolies. The railways were nationalised (and British Rail had spread itself, into hotels for example), buses were municipal. The Conservatives’ political genius of privatisation as an idea was not only to create a constituency that gained from taking the state ownership of things private (not only people buying shares in British Telecom and so on, but the paid work of processing the applications, the legals, and so on) but to strike at the bases of power of their Labour rivals (those state monopolies were also heavily unionised, and trade unions backed Labour). The further and more lasting genius was that the change stuck; even when the Conservatives fell at the 1997 election and Labour took power in a landslide, Labour had no appetite to undo privatisation. Indeed, it had its own ideas, such as PFI (Private Finance Initiative).
Some politics
As for the present, it appears privatisation is past its high tide. Labour is re-nationalising the railways; water companies loaded with debt and polluting waterways and not repairing ageing pipes have a bad name. Still, the pendulum has swung so that no-one is proposing that the state sets up a chain of mobile phone shops, or sets up a national guarding force for hire (although even 20 years into the SIA regime, the UK has no true national guarding contractors, and you could at least argue the case for such a state offering; even the largest firms with most claims to be national such as G4S and Mitie, routinely sub-contract some work to more local firms). The time has passed for Labour in government since July 2024 to generate many, or any ideas; it’s deluged with events, such as the need to balance the budget and war in Ukraine. That leaves the Conservatives and Reform; what ideas are they at work on, to make the 2030s belong to them?
Some more history
In the wake of the privatisations of the 1980s and to 1997, came guarding contract company entrepreneurs with a wish to take some (no doubt profitable) work off the police. That too has ebbed, partly because private firms genuinely don’t want to do what only the state has the power to do: such as arrest people. Partly because so much of the state’s work is contracted out; and always has been. Just as police forces and fire services don’t have factories and laboratories to develop their own software, so they didn’t make their own paper, or paper clips; they bought off the shelf. That’s partly driven by the size of an organisation. The larger a council, NHS trust, fire and rescue service and so on, the more specialisms it can accommodate. As heard at the BAPCO 2025 show in Coventry about communication products and services for the 999 services, East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) has wholly outsourced its IT. It has a ‘small’ team internally, otherwise the service is by Telent. That makes sense; IT has fractured into dozens of specialisms – information security and governance to name two; can a small team possess all the knowledge and skills? Better to bring in what’s required, whenever. That begs the question, how large should a public body be, to justify in-house departments, and whether even at a national level a public service can generate a support service. Presumably, small police forces such as North Wales and Bedfordshire do not have the same number of (to take only two unrelated specialisms) firearms officers and data protection officers as the largest force in Britain, the Metropolitan. That’s not to suggest anything’s the matter; North Wales and Bedfordshire don’t have the assets that need covering by armed police that London has. Should public bodies bulk up, to generate more size to enable them to have more specialisms in-house? That may explain the drive for unitary councils, doing away with the two tiers of district and county councils. In policing, some work’s best done regionally by police (such as by ROCUs, units against organised crime) or nationally (again, against the most serious crime types, by the National Crime Agency and Action Fraud). Yet there again, the question will be whether they have the size to do everything in-house.
Drive to use tech
While no-one’s proposing that fire or police be privatised, the political drives are for more use of private industry. To stay with tech; just as last month East Sussex Fire Authority had to raise tax by as much as it’s allowed to, and Authority chair Amanda Evans spoke of ‘limited options to balance our budget and protect local services in the face of increasing costs and reductions in our grants from government’, so nationally Labour in power is scrabbling to make ends meet. Hence in the Autumn Budget in 2024, Labour gave billions more to the NHS, while (like Conservative PM Rishi Sunak earlier) making plain that the NHS would have to (somehow) use tech to be smarter; to meet (ever growing) demand for services while resourcing didn’t keep pace. Likewise in East Sussex FRS, it’s one thing to have outsourced IT; those in authority are now asking what value they can get, from the IT equipment, to give better service and make savings or avoid costs (an example – answer basic queries by chatbot, and keep control room operators for the more complicated calls that require a human input).
