Complaints of ‘Austerity 2.0’ after the Autumn Statement by Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt, a cost of living crisis …. what might it mean for private security? Will it share in a recession, or fare relatively well? Mark Rowe continues a series of articles, by looking at a potential – and not at all new – way of making security budgets stretch, crime reduction partnerships. The trouble is, precisely when partnership work is most needed, police and high street businesses alike have least money to spare for it.
Britain has a patchwork of BCRPs and related business improvement districts that stitch together the security and other work by retailers and other property owners downtown. That may reflect the patchy reality of urban geography. Some places, Stafford for one, have edge of town new developments that have attracted high-end and big-name retail, only for the existing town centre to be largely shuttered. Nottingham, long a major shopping destination for the Midlands, has similarly major development around the bus station, and two minutes’ walk away empty shops and broken, unrepaired windows (pictured).
The police’s National Business Crime Centre (NBCC) recently released a 20-page report by the criminologist Prof Emmeline Taylor of City, University of London, on the work of BCRPs and others in crime reduction, as a ‘value-add’ to their business members. To introduce BCRps briefly, they’ve been about for a generation and national accreditation standards came in 2019 – a breakthrough because national retailers, wondering whether or where to pay to join a BCRP now could have confidence that accredited BCRPs did good things – processed data legally, for example. BCRPs meanwhile knew what they had to do, rather than rely on individual managers, no matter how spirited or experienced.
The review document shows where we stand with BCRPs. Most relevantly, high streets have ‘suffered considerable retraction in recent years, and this will have an impact on revenue for the BCRP’.
In a word, the document found some ‘confusion’ – we’re far from sure how many BCRPs the UK has (‘over 250’, the document says). That’s fewer than business improvement districts (329, according to a trade body, British BIDs). Some BCRPs have merged into their local BID, which offers security and other services. As someone interviewed for the review put it, it’s ‘messy’. In some places, the BCRP and a local BID are (in my experience also) rivals, because if a retailer has to pay towards the BID, might it feel less like subscribing to a BCRP too?
BCRPs make sense all round – rather than each retailer try to combat crime as best they can, by banding together they can ban known offenders (who invariably target various shops, not just one). What’s in the way of partnership working? According to the document, plenty. Accreditation is under the umbrella of the UK police company PCPI (two not for profit bodies, the NABCP, National Association of Business Crime Partnerships; and National Business Crime Solution, have permission to assess BCRPs); the national standards board that oversees BCRP accreditation doesn’t have a chair; regular meetings need to be reinstated; which implies a lack of policy direction for BCRPs. That matters if data protection law (for example) changes.
The document also recommends a guide, as a checklist for how a BCRP can become accredited, and an assessment tool like an MOT vehicle assessment. Most practically, for most of those BCRPs that have not folded under the wings of a BID, ‘funding remains an issue’. The document recommends that local police and crime commissioners ‘support’ BCRPs – with money, that is. Otherwise, how can BCRP staff, forever scrambling to make ends meet (and pay their wages) year to year, do any longer-term planning? Yet (as the document doesn’t point out) PCCs have been around for ten years – haven’t they twigged onto the merit of BCRPs yet, beyond warm and cliched words in most (not all) PCCs’ business plans?
As the document pointed out, a BCRP might have to go county-wide to justify money from a PCC, like PABCIS (Partnership Against Business Crime in Staffordshire) which arose out of the long-standing BCRP in Stoke-on-Trent.
An advantage that BIDs have over a BCRP is that a BID is voted for every five years (and most, not all, do get voted in again), meaning in the review’s words ‘a sustainable funding model’ – budget is known for some years, which allows some continuity in staff and operations. But the review identified that a BID might not regard what it does on the anti-crime side as a BCRP and wouldn’t go to the expense and trouble of seeking police accreditation.
What’s in a name – or a logo? Is the term BCRP too clunky? Four years into the launch of BCRP accreditation (Professional Security Magazine was there, at Stoke-on-Trent in spring 2018), many when asked by the review did not recognise the BCRP accreditation logo. If BCRPs aren’t understood, how can they show their value, no matter how ready retailers are to support them? Because as featured in the December print edition of the magazine, the 25th anniversary conference of Retailers Against Crime in Glasgow heard from Tesco, a user of RAC and BCRP services, to better protect staff and stock against travelling criminals. The message; even the biggest retailers conclude that they’re stronger in crime reduction terms by partnering with their competitors.
The document concludes that BCRPs are (still) ideally placed, ‘to deliver strategically-focused, evidence-based, and coordinated crime reduction’. The authorities have made some progress; but the bottom line is that police resources deployed against the volume of business crime are ‘limited’. Accreditation alone has not made BCRPs effective and sustainable; the work has to go on.
