Who has the Power to Police Britain?:
The Politics of Private Security1
Adam White
1. The Police and the Private Security Industry
Histories of policing in Britain suggest that over time the institutional agencies
responsible for exercising policing powers have tended to oscillate between the
private and public spheres.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for
instance, policing was mostly undertaken within the private sphere on a localised
level, with centralised state institutions generally intervening only in times of mass
political unrest (Johnston 1992, pp.7-8). From the late eighteenth century onwards,
however, policing powers were very gradually – and often controversially –
concentrated within the centralised state apparatus, in the process establishing the
modern public police forces (Reiner 1999, pp.171-172). This process of centralisation
served to eclipse private security operations which “did not form part of the idea of
policing that was being constructed” (Rawlings 2000, p.61). As a consequence, by
the mid-twentieth century the public police forces had accumulated something
approaching a monopoly over the legitimate exercise of policing power within
Britain, and private security had been cast into exile.
Yet contrary to much popular belief, this particular institutional arrangement has not
assumed an immutable status. In postwar Britain, the private security industry has
once more emerged as an important player within the policing sphere. The purpose of
this short paper is to explore some of the processes by which the private security
industry has actively carved out a space for itself to again legitimately exercise
1
This paper was presented as part of the ‘Perspectives on Power’ Conference run by Quest and
sponsored by the AHRC. This article is from Issue 4 of Quest which contains the proceedings of
the conference. It, and the other papers presented at the conference can be downloaded from
http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/QUEST/JournalIssues/
1
policing powers within Britain. More specifically, this paper will examine the way in
which the industry has engaged in political negotiations with the British state in an
attempt to capture some of the state‟s long-established legitimacy in undertaking
policing functions. This examination will be divided into two sections. The first
section will consider the period 1950-1979 in which the state successfully defended
its monopoly over legitimate policing power against the strategising of the private
security industry. The second section will then analyse the period 1979-2001 in
which the private security industry finally appropriated some of the state‟s legitimacy
within the policing sector. It should be noted from the outset, however, that these
negotiations certainly do not represent the only way in which the private security
industry has gained legitimacy over the past fifty years, rather they simply constitute
one dimension of the industry‟s growth patterns and therefore should be viewed in
combination with other dimensions (for a useful review of these see Kempa et al
2004).
2. The State-Centric Era, 1950-1979
We must first analyse the position of the private security industry within the
immediate postwar era.
At this time, the industry was in its infancy and was
competing within a sector dominated, indeed virtually monopolised, by the public
police forces. Furthermore, there seemed to be a general belief amongst the majority
of security consumers during this period that the state ought to monopolise policing
powers (Reiner 2000, p.10). These factors represented considerable material and
ideational constraints upon the expansion of the private security industry. As a
consequence, the larger security companies reasoned that they needed to capture some
of the state‟s legitimacy within the policing sphere in order to challenge the
2
dominance of the public police. In this section we will investigate three (ultimately
unsuccessful) strategies for achieving this end.
First, it is informative to look at Securicor‟s initial strategy for capturing Police
legitimacy during the 1950s, which centred upon an attempt to develop an openly
public relationship with the Metropolitan Police. They sought to do this in various
ways. For example, they attempted to employ former Metropolitan Police Special
Branch and C.I.D. Officers for their recently established investigative services
branch;2 they requested that Metropolitan Police officials submit articles to the
Securicor house magazine;3 and they informed potential customers, often without
foundation, that they operated in close collaboration with the Metropolitan Police.4 It
can be argued that these public relations strategies were designed to forge a
connection between Securicor and the Metropolitan Police in the British public
consciousness – the logic being that this would in turn give Securicor more legitimacy
in the eyes of the average security consumer. The Metropolitan Police certainly
interpreted these strategies in this manner and contrived to undermine all of them by
refusing to cooperate with Securicor, thereby protecting the state‟s dominance over
policing powers.
Following the same logic, many security companies then began to implement a
second strategy during the 1950s and early 1960s. They started supplying „mock‟
police uniforms to their staff in an attempt to blur the distinction between private
2
This process takes the form of three letters sent between June and August 1950 from the
Managing Director of Securicor, Mr. R. D. Godfrey, to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
These letters can be located in Metropolitan Police File MEPO 2/8739, „Metropolitan Police, Office of
the Commissioner, Correspondence and Papers Concerning Securicor‟.
3
This request again took the form of a letter sent by Mr. R. D. Godfrey on 28 th January 1953,
this time addressed to Metropolitan Police Commander of C.I.D. This letter can also be located in
Metropolitan Police File MEPO 2/8739, „Metropolitan Police, Office of the Commissioner,
Correspondence and Papers Concerning Securicor‟.
4
Evidence that this was happening can be found in a series of internal Metropolitan Police
documents dated between February and March 1959. These documents can similarly be located in
Metropolitan Police File MEPO 2/8739, „Metropolitan Police, Office of the Commissioner,
Correspondence and Papers Concerning Securicor‟.
3
security guards and police officers, in the process creating the impression that these
security guards were endowed with the same legitimacy to exercise policing powers
as the public police forces. This caused the Home Office to promptly set in motion
legislative measures designed to counteract this strategy, which were swiftly passed
and enforced as Section 52(2) of the Police Act 1964.5 Although the security
companies were again temporarily frustrated in their efforts to capture police
legitimacy, they soon embarked on a third and more ambitious strategy, which was to
define negotiations for years to come.
During the mid-1960s, some of the larger security companies – including Securicor,
Security Express and Factory Guards – started to collectively lobby the Home Office
for the introduction of statutory legislation to regulate the industry. They did this
because such a system of regulation would inevitably entail issuing Home Officestamped licences to private security employees in order to demonstrate that they
complied with statutory requirements. The security companies considered such a
system to be extremely beneficial to their cause, since the process of displaying this
license to any security consumer would serve to disseminate an official linkage
between the industry and the state, in the process allowing the security companies to
capture a degree of police legitimacy. Reading the implications of this regulation,
Home Office civil servants strongly opposed this scheme and instead instituted a
system of voluntary self-regulation in which official linkages between the state and
the security industry were minimised.6
5
Internal documentation concerning the establishment of this legislation can be found in Home
Office File HO 287/626, „Private Police General‟.
6
Correspondence and internal documentation relating to this lobbying process can be found in
the following sources: Home Office File HO 287/626, „Private Police General‟; Home Office File HO
287/1477 „Private Police and Security Organisations, Working Party on Security Organisations,
Minutes 1965-1967‟; Home Office File HO 287/1478 „Private Police and Security Organisations,
Working Party on Security Organisations, Minutes, 1969‟.
4
If during this period the Home Office-Police alliance had been negotiating with the
private security industry alone, then these political processes would be relatively
simple to conceptualise, with the former political grouping clearly dictating terms to
the latter. However, the negotiations were also influenced by a third bargaining
position, here termed the „Reformists‟. The Reformists were a group of MPs and
peripheral state institutions such as the County Councils Association who were
concerned about the poor levels of professionalism within the private security
industry and consequently wanted to see the industry „reformed‟ using statutory
regulation. Their position therefore stood in direct contrast to that of the Home
Office-Police alliance and rather paradoxically, but very significantly, complemented
the private security industry agenda.
Although the Reformists were unable to
undermine the institutionally powerful anti-regulation alliance during the 1960s and
1970s, they did manage to generate much sympathy for the pro-regulation cause in
this period, perhaps most prominently within the Parliamentary forum created by the
Committee on Privacy during the early 1970s (Committee on Privacy 1972). This
served to lay important foundations for the power-shift in negotiations which was to
take place in the subsequent two decades.
3. Market Ascendancy, 1979-2001
At the turn of the 1980s, the private security industry was still reluctantly locked into
the system of voluntary regulation established by the Home Office-Police alliance
during the mid-1960s, yet it nevertheless remained persistent in lobbying the state for
the implementation of statutory regulation. Importantly, over the subsequent two
decades the industry actually started to gain momentum within these negotiations and
the Home Office-Police anti-regulation agenda concomitantly weakened. It could be
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argued that this power-shift was largely attributable to the changing politicaleconomic context of the 1980s, in which the pro-market neo-liberal policy approach
of the Thatcher Governments started to replace the more state-centred politicaleconomic paradigm advanced by the preceding „postwar consensus‟ Governments. In
various and often indirect ways, this transformation served to both loosen the
structural constraints on the private security industry and impose new constraints on
the Home Office-Police alliance.
One instructive example of this transformation was the contracting out of security
arrangements for the recently privatised Royal Ordnance Factories during the mid1980s (HCDC 1984). This policy-making process, which was viewed by Ministry of
Defence Ministers as a standard neo-liberal stream-lining exercise (HCDC 1984,
p.22), impacted upon the private security negotiations in two significant ways. First,
it had the effect of considerably elevating the bargaining position of certain private
security companies since they were now engaged in a partnership with the state and
were being trusted with the protection of sensitive military sites by the Government.
This both released the industry from its position of exile and provided it with the
opportunity to voice more assertively its pro-regulation agenda. Second, it served to
invigorate and expand the Reformist lobby, which now argued that if private security
companies were going to receive Government contracts then it was even more
imperative to enhance levels of professionalism within the industry though the
implementation of statutory regulation (HCDC 1984, p.254). Indeed, between 1986
and 1994 there were seven Private Member‟s Bills introduced into the House of
Commons to this effect (see George and Button 2000, p.179). Although none of these
Bills made it past the first Parliamentary reading, they were at least openly supported
by many private security companies, which in turn had the important effect of
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strengthening the rather disjointed but politically significant alliance between the
private security industry and the Reformists.
This neo-liberal political-economic context therefore made it increasingly difficult
for the Home Office-Police alliance to defend its anti-regulation agenda. The first and
probably most destructive manifestation of this difficulty occurred in 1988 when the
Association of Chief Police Officers officially reversed its position from an antiregulation to a Reformist perspective (ACPO 1988). This high profile volte-face
served to weaken the anti-regulation agenda and also provided an opportunity for the
industry and Reformists to pressure the Home Office into following ACPO‟s
example. Although the Home Office managed to resist this pressure for a time, their
justifications for opposing statutory regulation became increasingly inconsistent and
lacking in conviction. The untenable nature of the anti-regulation position finally
became apparent in 1995 when the Home Affairs Committee conducted an enquiry
into the cases for and against regulating the private security industry (HAC 1995).
During this enquiry, the Reformists and security industry representatives argued
strongly in favour of regulation, in turn persuading the Committee to recommend the
implementation of a system of statutory regulation. One year later, this decision
ultimately forced the Home Office to fall in line with the increasing number of
political groupings arguing in favour of statutory regulation (HAC 1996).
From this point onwards, the route to statutory regulation was relatively swift and
straightforward. While in opposition New Labour were strong advocates of the
Reformist position – which broadly complemented their vision of state reform – so
once in Government they were eager to translate the recently established proregulation consensus into law.
In May 2001, the Private Security Industry Act
eventually received Royal Assent, and crucially set out in Section 9(1) the private
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security officer‟s “obligations as to the production and display of the license”. In
crucial respects, therefore, this Act represented the realisation of the licensing system
which private security companies had been attempting to bring into existence for the
past fifty years.
It can therefore be argued that this legislation constituted an
important victory for the industry which had now finally succeeded in securing an
official linkage between the private security companies and the British state, in turn
substantially increasing their powers to police Britain.
4. Conclusion
Throughout modern history policing powers in Britain have tended to oscillate
between the public and private spheres. While in the immediate postwar era policing
powers were virtually monopolised by public policing institutions, the ascendance of
private security over the last fifty years means that today we are confronted with a
hybrid public-private institutional arrangement. However, the transfer of power from
the public to private sphere depicted in this paper does not resemble the more
conventional patterns of privatisation witnessed in the utility or transport sectors, nor
does it approximate the numerous public-private partnerships created during New
Labour‟s period in Government. What makes it different is the complex question of
legitimacy. Unlike in other sectors, those institutions operating within the policing
sector are often required to employ physical force while carrying out their everyday
activities. This is a very controversial power and one that is granted to institutions
only with great caution by the citizens of any society. It is only by appreciating that
such legitimacy has been concentrated within state institutions since the nineteenth
century that we can comprehend the uniqueness and complexity of the public-private
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institutional arrangement which has emerged within the policing sector over the past
half century.
References
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(London: HMSO, 1984).
House of Commons Home Affairs Committee (HAC), The Private Security Industry,
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House of Commons Home Affairs Committee (HAC), Government Observations on
the First Report From the Home Affairs Committee Session 1994-1995: The Private
Security Industry, Second Special Report, 1995-1996 Session, HC 744 (London:
HMSO, 1996)
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