Private security in the UK still has a way to go to reach the pay and status of its equivalent on the Continent; but it’s getting there, writes Mark Rowe.
A few days ago I was in conversation with a former senior Securitas UK man who recalled seeing a mobile patrol by the Swe-dish firm in Norway. The patrol officer was a graduate; in Scandanavia, such a job is seen as unremarkable for a graduate, partly because of the fewer police, partly because of the greater esteem that society has for private security (reflected in the wages, higher than in the UK).
It was a reminder that the hopes held out for the Security Industry Authority have not come to pass, when it held its launch conference in London 241 months ago; to close the connection, a senior Securitas man spoke at the launch and held out the prospect in ten or 15 years (in other words, to happen before now) of higher pay for officers under an SIA-regulated regime. Also in the 2000s, the industry talked interminably about the ‘policing family’ or ‘police family’ that some in the contract guarding sector dearly wanted to make happen, whether because of the social cachet or the hoped-for work.
A couple of experiences lately each beside the Thames in London suggest that the UK’s private security has indeed reach the fabled ‘police family’ – needless to say, without political debate to ask if society wants it, or any protocols or policies written so that police and private security alike know where they stand. Last autumn as featured in the December print edition of Professional Security Magazine, I took the Tube to the new Northern line terminus at Battersea and walked around the re-generated power station, now high-end retail and apartments. While I did see a Met Police car patrol slowly along a traffic-controlled road around the power station, the routine guarding is by Bidvest Noonan.
I saw similar open-air patrolling last week one evening as I walked away from the IFSEC show in London Docklands to digest the day’s work. I came to Royal Wharf, a dozen streets of apartments of various heights including a school, between West Silvertown and Pontoon Dock on the DLR (Docklands Light Railway) and beside the north end of the Thames Barrier. The memorial to the 1917 Silvertown mu-nitions factory explosion has been thankfully re-located to the estate (pictured). Numerous signs say the estate is private property. It has a busy-looking concierge; restaurant; and a Sainsbury’s convenience store. Around 6.30pm mainly young people were in a steady stream returning to the estate from the DLR. Prices start at £405 a week to rent and £400,000 to buy a one-bed flat; naturally, you can pay seven figures for a property. It has private security patrollers. As I watched a pair of patrollers were in something of a stand-off with two men who had parked a car on double yellow lines outside the Sainsbury’s. The officers walked away after one took a picture with his phone of the offending car. The men did a quiet shop inside the store and when I left, the car had gone. The community – the land is still not fully built upon – is not gated, and it has a 241 bus service running through it; but for the signs, it looks like public space.
Private security has become routine in shopping centres, hospitals, college and university campuses, railway stations and elsewhere so that security officers, SIA-badged or in-house, far outnumber police. The last stage is for private security to be on public streets, as they already are in places, patrolling high streets as hired by business improvement districts, something I have sought to make a speciality of featuring; most recently Coventry’s in the March print magazine.
Another scheme in between private security and policing is CSAS (community safety accreditation); over the Bank Holiday in south Derbyshire, CSAS-badged people in uniform are directing traffic into and out of the Bearded Theory festival. The long-held though dormant wish for private security to somehow be on a par with the uniformed police and to have society’s respect (and money at a high margin, ideally) is a paradox in that at the same time it implies a climb towards a summit of achievement, and that the aim of having private security do police-like work would become an unremarkable routine, as it already appears to be at Royal Wharf.
