The prime shopping streets of the West End of London have a footfall and resources that are the envy of other places. But with those advantages come a variety of challenges.
The New West End Company is the body that runs various services including Red Cap patrollers and on-street CCTV, for Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street. Mark Rowe visited their offices on Regent Street.
Come out of Oxford Circus, whatever the time, and it’s busy. Shoppers, tourists, sandwich-board people. That is how the retailers and others in the West End like it; and the New West End Company (NWEC) is there to keep the place profitable. It’s a BID (Business Improvement District) that had itself renewed by ballot last year. So, so far so good. The view from their office windows is of a grand Regent Street façade across the road; the background noise is of traffic. All the meeting rooms are full, so Sally Humphreys and Calvin La Cock take me to the next door coffee shop. She is the no-nonsense head of operations; he is the crime intelligence manager, previously a Red Caps superviser, who came to this country from South Africa for the 2002 World Cup. Sally warned that if Calvin said anything wrong, she would kick him under the table, but from sitting between them I am able to report that no kicking took place. From talking with them for an hour it becomes plain that if in retail nothing ever stands still, it’s even more true for these shopping streets. For one thing, there’s always something changing, whether the police set-up, new contracts to go to tender, or the economic health of the high street. Sally reports that the West End is bucking the trend; footfall is holding up.
It’s easy to think of Oxford Street as the premier street for flagship chain stores, Selfridges and so on. Calvin makes the point that businesses there range from the department stores to jewellers to the small newsagent. What matters in security and loss prevention to a jeweller – one of the free London papers later in the day had a headline ‘Yet another scooter gang hit’ as ‘smash and grab burglars’ stole designer handbags – is different to, say, a DVD retailer. "How do you deliver a service to all those members?" Calvin asks.
He explains the information-sharing agreement with police: "We get a copy of the police briefing, exactly what the police have been briefed; that probably helps because we have a police sector that’s co-terminus with the BID area. We get the intelligence from all the stores coming into our office; we pass it to the [police] sector intelligence officer. He will put it in briefings." The NWEC will not send out the most sensitive intelligence, but will let businesses know of convicted offenders, which offenders are known to be violent and dangerous; at least once a fortnight. "The two things that retailers want," Calvin adds: "They want information, and information timely. If it’s two months old, what use is it?" The NWEC can make use of the criminal justice secure email, a portal for the police and others to send emails securely. The advantage is that it cuts down on the inputting of incident reports, which adds up when you have hundreds a month, even if it only takes a few minutes to type one into the Hicom system. So analysis of the data can be that much quicker, which is what retailers want.
Sally says of the Red Caps. "They have a dual role; they are ambassadors and to an certain extent eyes and ears of the police; but they don’t have any powers." The patrollers will go into the stores to get the briefings signed off, which is a good chance for Red Caps and stores to communicate." Such a visible presence is a typical product of a BID, because it’s what retailers, when surveyed, typically ask for: bobbies or someone else on the beat. Sally describes how the BID gives more ‘authority’ than an ordinary business crime partnership – if trying to get police to do something about a particular set of crimes, for instance. Significantly, something may well start to budge after a senior retailer with a position in the BID collars a senior police officer at a dinner, say. Sally mentions a quarterly meeting of London boroughs with crime partnerships. Besides the West End, there are BIDs running in Kingston upon Thames, Heart of London (around Leicester Square, whose City Guardians were featured in Professional Security in December 2006), and London Bridge. More may follow. It’s the way forward, Sally suggests, given that councils and the police may expect businesses to look after themselves more. For one thing, a BID can call on four or five times the money of a crime partnership that relies on paying members. While retailers will say they support partnerships, in truth some even quite big names on the high street won’t pay unless they have to, in a BID. And to be fair (and as Sally and Calvin say) if a national chain has a couple of hundred of crime partnerships asking for perhaps £500 or more for membership, that adds up.
Any partnership or BID has to show value. For instance, if a retailer is detaining mostly young thieves, too young to prosecute, what to do? NWEC will say, give us your data, we will pass it on to Youth Offending Teams: "Something happens about it. That’s probably the crux of it," Calvin says. The Red Caps predated the BID. A question now is their role: is it ambassadorial, or security? A brochure I snaffled shows the sheer variety of the patrollers’ ‘results’: moving on buskers or preachers; being there to give first aid or help reunite children with parents; moving on beggars, particularly aggressive beggars; and (working out at about daily) reporting illegal trading, such as music CD sellers. Historically, their role has been security; they have been outsourced, from a guarding contractor. But under a new contract, the balance between security and ambassador may be different, if only because times have changed. Now there are PCSOs, whereas originally there were only Red Caps and police. Or: Westminster Council has its own wardens; might NWEC care to fund those wardens?
The five-year BID does provide some guarantee for budgets, to allow planning. Take the public space CCTV as another example. Similarly, it has developed over the years. The BBC documentary in 2000, Shops Robbers and Videotapes, showed the Oxford Street cameras, when monitored by Marylebone police, tackling pick-pockets. More on-street cameras are due to go in, in Bond Street and Regent Street. Oxford Street’s cameras are still owned by Streeteye, the name of the street’s crime reduction partnership. Now the monitored from the Trocadero, those cameras are one fairly small ingredient in the 200-camera Westminster local authority CCTV system. There are pros and cons: besides cost: might it be better for the NWEC to have its own control room operators, who can get to know the store detectives better? And maybe the Red Caps could have more to do with the CCTV, to vary their job? To repeat, nothing on these streets stands still, except maybe the people sitting on the pavement tables outside the coffee shops – except on the March day I meet Sally and Calvin, it was too cold to sit outside. The last point Sally makes – next appointment is with the police – is to agree with the Encams message as given at the AABC conference (see separate article). Chewing gum, graffiti and the like make an area look uncared for and are thus a security and business issue. "We don’t want the West End to look grotty," Sally says.
