Author: Adam White
ISBN No: 9780 230 24 29
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 216
Publisher: Palgrave
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Of the hundreds of books I have reviewed in a decade or more, Adam White’s book The Politics of Private Security is the most significant, writes Mark Rowe.
Readers may have heard Adam White – now a lecturer in public policy at the University of York – speak at the SIA and Skills for Security annual conferences in 2009. Some of his insights (for his doctorate in politics) are in the book. Briefly, he’s covered how private security – mainly contract guarding – has sought to gain respect and a place in the UK, which (after much debate) turned out to be licences and the Security Industry Authority, White terming the 2000s ‘the era of regulation’. By taking private security seriously, White aids the industry efforts to have itself taken seriously by customers, the police and the state. Just to mention two of the fact-nuggets dug up by White: first, the 1950 letters by RD Godfrey, MD of a guarding firm called Night Guards to the then Met Police Commissioner.
Exchange in Lords
On the face of it, Mr Godfrey was only asking to recruit ex-police; however, White uncovers the police’s ‘aggressive policy stance’ against private security, so aggressive that police chiefs thought about arresting uniformed guards for ‘usurping the duties of the police’, under a 1936 Public Order Act. Much nearer the present, in interview the former BSIA chairman David Cowden told White of a revealing exchange with Conservatives in the House of Lords, just before the Private Security Industry Act became law in 2001. The Tory Lords assumed the BSIA would be against regulation by the state, as interference with business. Cowden flummoxed the lords; the BSIA was in favour of regulation, as the way for the guarding sector to be recognised and able to work in prisons, airports, military bases and so on.
Up in the air
White has interviewed key BSIA and SIA and political players and put private security under the microscope from 1945 to spring 2010. In other words, the new Coalition government’s throwing up the SIA in the air – with no timetable for when it will land, let alone in what shape – came too late for White’s book. Here’s the catch. Why the (seemingly, at least so far) sudden and drastic new ‘phase’ of regulation, that makes no sense to SIA staff, its supporters and, I understand, White himself? Because there are two (at least) forces at work, and a security industry drive for regulation by the state is only one. A consistent body of opinion inside and outside the guarding sector is indifferent or hostile to regulation, as an unnecessary cost. Whether you approve of that body of opinion or not is beside the point. Who is regulation for, anyway? The suppliers of the service, or the customers, who – as White does set out – regard security as a grudge purchase? A useful comparison would not be with security guarding in foreign countries, but related services in the UK, such as health and safety, which had its Act of Parliament in 1974, with mixed results since. Last issue, Mark Button of Portsmouth University warned that the Coalition would put the security industry back to 1995 – that is, before the Labour government that led to the 2001 Act. Another comparison date, I suggest, is 1979 – with the Coalition like the neoliberal Thatcher government, that hailed markets, and sought to relieve businesses of the ‘burden’ of state regulations and quangos. So any consensus over regulation or the SIA is not as firm as the surface crust of industry representatives fronting the sector might project. I question the ‘strong and wide-ranging consensus’ that White speaks of, leading to the 1999 White Paper that led to the 2001 Act. The contest continues, between those that see good in the state and its creations like the SIA, and those that resent the state for getting in the way of business. However, I would hate to leave you with any sour impression of this well-researched, important and insightful book. White can hardly be at fault for not seeing into the future (or indeed for the prohibitively high price of his book). As Prof Martin Gill says at the start of the book, it has trodden new ground. It deserves to be quoted for many years. By putting private security on the map, White has put himself on the map.
