Recently numerous guarding company chiefs and related police and public sector figures met in mid-July, as they did late last year, with a view to take forward ‘integrated policing’. What’s in it for the police? Mark Rowe asks.
The impetus has come from the private security industry, and it’s easy to see why – private security’s work since the ‘austerity’ of the 2010s has nudged into what was once the police’s domain, protection of public space; it’d be good manners, let alone sound practice, to coordinate. Integration, more intangibly, would imply recognition; that private security was worth a literal and metaphorical place at police’s top table. Gone is the talk of the 2000s when guard firms sought to become members of the ‘police family’ (or ‘policing family’). After responding to terror incidents as much in the front line as cops, and managing public events such as Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral and the covid pandemic, private security does not need to go cap in hand to those in authority; private security has proved itself.
Finances
In a word, police are open to ‘integration’ because of finances. In her report to the British Transport Police Authority in June, BTP chief constable Lucy D’Orsi said ‘we will deploy fewer police officers and PCSOs in 25/26, compared to the start of the last financial year’, and that to best deploy resources, ‘we have carefully balanced crime and incident demand with our expansive geography.’ BTP officers will be proactive (patrolling) for 20 per cent of their working time; except that, as D’Orsi admitted, the ‘ambition’ was 28pc.
Resources
Saying the same thing a different way, police have far more to do than their resources that they can afford. It’s not hard to hear from retail and other businesses in city centres and indeed outwardly posher county towns, and building managers talk of ‘chaos’; buskers, beggars, on-street traders, mamba and other drug-takers, let alone thieves, making for a sense that public space is out of control; because police have, in the main, become a fire brigade-like emergency service, responding to what door and other security staff alert them to (and have to handle in the first instance, let alone for longer).
Election
Even the relatively privileged can feel unprotected. “The police have a vital role in defending democracy, and this needs to be carried out proactively, not just reactively,” said a report by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC) of MPs reviewing the July 2024 general election. The report called the abuse, harassment and intimidation seen at the general election ‘totally unacceptable and antithetical to our democracy’. Candidates for election must be able to go door to door and speak in public without fear, the PACAC MPs said. As they also recalled, the police put Operation Bridger in place beforehand, that offered ‘all candidates basic security during the campaign and access to a dedicated, named, police contact in every force to raise concerns or report threats’. Yet afterwards, an Electoral Commission survey found that 55pc of respondents suffered some kind of harassment, intimidation, or abuse and 13pc reported serious problems. Some, 44pc of all candidates said they avoided campaigning on their own, rising to most, 66pc of female respondents. In other words, police were unable to deter or prevent crime and nuisance (or, not necessarily the same, fear).
Increased demand
Quite often police have discretion, whether to attend, record or investigate something – road accidents, burglaries (commercial or domestic), theft from shops, frauds (real world or, mainly, online) and antisocial behaviour (ASB). According to the latest British Transport Police annual report, BTP attended 9pc more immediate and priority incidents of ASB in 2024/25 (up from 9,917 to 10,856). The force’s overall incidents of ASB were up by 24pc (from 32,272 to 40,034). The report admitted: “Antisocial behaviour continues to be the number one concern highlighted by passengers across the network.” That chimes with Labour’s stress on ‘taking back our streets’ while it campaigned before the July 2024 election and promised to ‘crack down’ on antisocial behaviour, ‘with more police’. According to a survey of rail staff quoted in the BTP report, most, 66pc disagreed that BTP officers were available to them when needed, ‘highlighting the challenge of visibility across BTP’s jurisdiction’, according to the report.
Rail report
The BTP annual report, published in March, admitted to ‘increased demand’; BTP recorded 15.7pc more fatalities in BTP’s jurisdiction in 2024-25 than in 2023-24 (an increase from 381 to 441), and a 7pc increase in the number of ‘police related disruption incidents’. Anti-social behaviour, and trespass by children and young people are the most frequent types of incident. Despite joint working with the rail industry (which funds the force), the amount of ‘primary delay minutes per incident’ has increased from 25.4 to 28.1 (an all-important metric for the railways, meaning trains are delayed). As for sexual crimes and nuisance behaviour, the report admitted that ‘a true baseline of unwanted sexual behaviour continues to be challenging to estimate’.
Efficiency impact
Labour once in power last year urged ‘efficiency’ of the public sector more generally. BTP efforts at ‘efficiency’ are in terms of buildings (BTP’s move of its headquarters from Camden to Victoria in central London means about 40 per cent less floorspace) or ‘efficiencies in policing outcomes’, such as through BTP’s roll-out of laptops ‘which support officers to do more while on the move’. That might also mean they don’t have a local station any more; in April BTP bases in Carmarthen, Grimsby, Middlesbrough, Southport, Stoke and Taunton shut. In July 2025, Bromley, Gatwick, Richmond, Lancaster and Dumbarton were due to shut, and BTP expects further closures in the coming 12 months: Luton and Stevenage will merge at a new station in Hitchin; Milton Keynes will reduce from 24-hour coverage to 19 hours after Hitchin opens; Dundee will merge with Kirkcaldy, and Perth with Stirling. To state the obvious, BTP chief constable Lucy D’Orsi admitted this ‘will impact’ service delivery. We can say that ‘efficiency’ sounds like cuts.
The backdrop, then is a familiar one; of services asked to do more, with less. Hence, as aired in the BTP report, ‘successful pilots of Integrated Security and Policing’. A second phase of the project became ‘business as usual’ in March as (in the jargon of policing) ‘an adaptable, scalable toolkit’ to be launched across over 60 locations. BTP hosts monthly stakeholder meetings with train operating company partners and BTP internal embedded supervisors to identify upcoming events that could cause disruption and to debrief and ‘problem solve’ with partners. The force also works with the Rail Delivery Group of train companies, and through multiple working groups across the rail network to prepare for football weekends on the most important lines of route. Speaking at the June meeting of the BTP Authority, which has oversight of the force, Lucy D’Orsi said of the integrated project that she saw ‘scope for rail security partners to focus on lower end crime types to allow warranted officers to focus on the higher end’.
Summer plan
The country’s leading policeman, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, in a report to the London Policing Board in June spoke of a summer plan ‘heavily focused on targeting and precision: focusing in on high crime hotspots, on key crime types that are of concern at a local level and being bolder in our approach with partners’. As an example, he spoke of how in the last two years ‘Croydon has seen an increase in shoplifting averaging of 40 per cent. In response, this year, we are introducing a four-point retail plan which will target those committing offences, including those handling stolen goods and the organised criminal enterprises driving the criminality. This includes targeting 26 wanted offenders committing the most crime by working with retailers and Community Safety Partnerships’.
Tough Choices
Under the ominous heading ‘Tough Choices’, Sir Mark said that since October 2024 the Met ‘have been recruiting police staff to enable us to release police officers back to the front line’. Rather than making blanket cuts to services, Sir Mark said, ‘we have made strategic choices to protect emergency response, neighbourhood policing and public protection’. He lapsed rather into jargon when he told board members that the Labour Government’s Spending Review meant ‘a reduced spending envelope’, that ‘will necessitate pragmatic decisions on our spending priorities’. As a sign of how a change in a related criminal justice field can affect the police, Sir Mark noted that the recent Independent Sentencing Review, by the former Conservative minister David Gauke, would mean less use of custody for criminals (owing to what Gauke called ‘a crisis in prison capacity’), which would ‘undoubtedly generate a lot of work for police to protect communities’.
Photo by Mark Rowe: Euston station.
