The Politics of Private Security: Regulation, Reform and Re-Legitimation (Crime Prevention and Security Management)

The Politics of Private Security

Crime Prevention and Security Management Series Editor: Martin Gill Titles include: Mark Button DOING SECURITY Critical Reflections and an Agenda for Change Bob Hoogenboom THE GOVERNANCE OF POLICING AND SECURITY Ironies, Myths and Paradoxes Kate Moss SECURITY AND LIBERTY Restriction by Stealth Adam White THE POLITICS OF PRIVATE SECURITY Regulation, Reform and Re-Legitimation Forthcoming: Joshua Bamfield SHOPPING AND CRIME Paul Ekblom THE 5IS FRAMEWORK FOR CRIME PREVENTION AND COMMUNITY SAFETY

Crime Prevention and Security Management Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–01355–1 hardback 978–0–230–01356–8 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

The Politics of Private Security Regulation, Reform and Re-Legitimation Adam White University of York, UK

© Adam White 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–24294–4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data White, Adam, 1981– The politics of private security : regulation, reform and re-legitimation / Adam White. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–24294–4 1. Private security services—Great Britain. 2. Police, Private—Great Britain. I. Title. HV8291.G7W45 2010 363.28 90941—dc22 2010027590 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents

Acknowledgements

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Series Editor’s Preface

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Part I Theory and Context 1 Introduction

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2 Structure, Agency and Security

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Part II The Politics of Private Security in Britain 3 Emerging Agendas (1945–59)

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4 The Regulation Debate (1960–9)

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5 Parliamentary Pressure (1969–79)

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6 The Neoliberal Experiments (1979–96)

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7 New Labour, New Legitimacy (1997–2001)

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8 The Era of Regulation (2001–10)

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Part III Comparisons and Conclusions 9 Towards a New Social-Scientific Understanding

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgements

This book has been five years in the making. Over this time I have been helped along the way by many, many people and I would like to take this opportunity to mention a few of them. I would first like to thank Martin Smith, who has been a constant source of support and inspiration. I am also indebted to Craig Berry, Matthew Flinders, Richard Hayton, Mike Kenny, Mike Neu, Ben Richardson and many others at the University of Sheffield with whom I have had the great fortune to discuss various aspects of my research. Rob Collins and Sarah Cooke have also played an important role in getting my research ideas off the ground and I am very grateful to them. Outside of Sheffield, I would especially like to thank Joel Migdal and Tim Newburn, both of whom have been influential in shaping my arguments. Many thanks also go to Mark Button and Imogen Hayat, each of whom has helped me to move various aspects of my research forward at important moments. I would like to thank Martin Gill for being an extremely supportive, enthusiastic and insightful series editor. I would also like to thank Philippa Grand, Jon Lloyd and Olivia Middleton for their first class assistance and input during the publication process. I owe a big thank you to Budd, Steve and Porter, whose sofa beds have been an integral part of my transient research life away from Sheffield. I would also like to acknowledge the generous financial support I have received over the past five years. This has included an ESRC 1 + 3 doctoral studentship, an ESRC research grant, a Security Industry Authority research contract and a scholarship from the Worldwide Universities Network. Lastly I would like to thank my family. My parents have always been very supportive of my academic career and I would like to sincerely thank them for their enthusiasm and advice. I would like to thank my dog, Noel, for keeping me company through the numerous all-nighters which have been part of the writing process (and for sensibly chewing some of my more problematic passages to pieces). And finally I would to thank my wife, Hannah, who has been beside me at all times, always making me happy and always believing in me – this book is dedicated to you.

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To date, the history of private security has typically been discussed as a sideshow to the history of the police. Where it has been discussed there has, as Adam White shows, been more of an emphasis on the economics of private security at the expense of accounts of the political context in which private security has developed. This book is different; it focuses on the politics of the security sector, charting its development and its uneasy relationship with policing organs of the state from 1945 to the present day. It differentiates itself from almost all other texts in focusing on what Adam calls the ‘political economy of private security’. In marking new ground, Adam sets out the need for new concepts. These include the ‘reform’ agenda, which has been geared towards defining a role for private security that ensures that it acts in the interests of the ‘public good’, and the ‘re-legitimation’ agenda, which is premised on making private security credible. For Adam, the role of ‘regulation’ – the road to which he analyses in great detail – combines the reform agenda of the state with the re-legitimation agenda of the security industry. It is this political context that affords new insights into changing perceptions of private security, both from outside agencies such as the police (who have long remained sceptical) and the Home Office, as well as the industry’s view of itself. Adam traces the vicissitudes of private security through the political contexts of different eras, showing how each shaped the road to regulation, and ultimately the form of regulation that emerged. He argues that the type of regulation that was incorporated into law and then into practice (through the Security Industry Authority [SIA]) was always destined to fall short of meeting the expectations of the main political players. This was in part due to political expediency, but also because the SIA made unrealistic claims that it would transform the industry, something it was not set up to do and that was in any case beyond its remit. Adam’s analysis enables us to understand the evolution of private security, its relationship with the state and its route to being seen as a (more) credible partner for the police. As a consequence we are more fully able to address, as Adam does for us, key issues such as how private security companies have become so prominent, what motivates them, ix

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what their relationship with the state now is, how they can be controlled, and what the future will hold for security companies and for security provision in society. For all those interested in the political context of how decisions about private security have shaped its destiny, its strengths and weaknesses, this text will become essential reading. Moreover, Adam has laid the foundation for thinking about private security through new lenses and in so doing offers new possibilities not only for future researchers, but also for current policy makers charged with the narrower aim of improving private security regulation and the broader aim of facilitating a more informed debate about how policing can be better understood and rendered more effective. MARTIN GILL

Part I Theory and Context

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1 Introduction

Over the past 50 years the private security industry has been on a remarkable trajectory. Not long ago, private security companies were confined to the periphery of most domestic security sectors, where they were generally disdained by the police, mocked by the media and dismissed by everyday citizens. Today, however, private security officers outnumber police officers in most industrial countries and undertake a range of frontline law and order functions such as protecting critical infrastructure, policing mega-events and conducting anti-terrorist surveillance activities. In the space of just five decades, then, the private security industry has gone from relative obscurity to worldwide prominence. This trajectory has prompted many to observe that in recent decades there has been nothing less than a global transformation in the nature of domestic security provision, from a ‘monopolistic’ model in which state actors assume exclusive responsibility for the provision of security to a ‘networked’ or ‘pluralistic’ model in which both public and private actors engage in the delivery of this core social function (see Shearing and Stenning 1983; Jones and Newburn 1998; Bayley and Shearing 2001; Johnston and Shearing 2003; Loader and Walker 2007). The objective of this book is to explore the political dimension of this transformation – the ‘politics of private security’. Despite the fact that over the past few years the transformation of domestic security has received an ever-increasing amount of academic attention (for reviews, see Shearing 2006; Loader and Walker 2006; Jones 2007; Hoogenboom 2010), the politics of private security has so far been largely overlooked. For the most part, academics have focused primarily upon the economic dimension of this transformation, in particular the shifts in supply and demand which have facilitated the expansion of private security provision – the ‘economics of private security’. The 3

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The Politics of Private Security

argument of the book is that while this economic dimension is of central importance, it does not reveal the whole story about the rise of private security. Security is no ordinary commodity and the marketisation of this fundamental public good has been a deeply contested political process. Politicians and police officers have not been content to stand back and witness the gradual penetration of the market into what they generally regard as the foundational sovereign domain of the modern state, and have frequently intervened in the commercial practices of the industry so as to shape and control its activities. In response, the executives of successful private security companies have been forced to act not only as astute businessmen quickly responding to shifts in supply and demand, but also as skilled political strategists, carefully guiding their companies through the complex political terrain of the contemporary security sector. Without an indepth understanding of these distinctly political processes, it is not possible to fully comprehend the rise of private security in the post-war era. However, the purpose of this book is not simply to tell the untold story of the politics of private security, fascinating though it often is. It is also to enhance our social-scientific understanding of domestic security provision. Developing a greater comprehension of this political dimension allows us to advance a new set of answers to a number of key conceptual and empirical questions which have been posed in recent years by a range of factions within the social sciences, from political scientists, economists and historians to criminologists, sociologists and socio-legal theorists. How have private security companies become so prominent? What motivates them? What is their relationship with the state? How can they be controlled? And what does their increasingly ubiquitous presence in twenty-first century society tell us about the future of security provision? In putting forward new, politicallyminded answers to these questions, the book attempts to shed new light on numerous areas of contemporary social science research into the changing nature of domestic security provision. The book will be divided into three parts. Part I – which comprises this introductory chapter and Chapter 2 – will map out the conceptual and theoretical foundations for examining the politics of private security. To begin with, this chapter will lay out more clearly the conceptual distinction between the ‘economics’ and ‘politics’ of private security. This is an important distinction to make because it serves to elucidate how and why the analysis advanced over subsequent chapters constitutes a genuinely new and original avenue of enquiry. At present the economics of private security serves as the default academic narrative for

Introduction

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both understanding the rise of private security provision and formulating answers to the key research questions posed above. So, by developing an entirely new analytical starting position in this research area – the politics of private security – this book makes a significant conceptual advance in the study of domestic security. Chapter 2 will then set down the book’s theoretical framework, which is termed the ‘political economy of private security’. This is a new framework which has been specifically designed to give expression to the complex political processes under examination in this book. It must be acknowledged, however, that while this framework is new, it is nevertheless explicitly built upon a critical engagement with three already existing theoretical frameworks in this research area: the monopoly, nodal governance and anchored pluralism models. Part II – which comprises Chapters 3 to 8 – will then proceed with a detailed empirical investigation of the politics of private security in Britain from 1945 to the present day. Britain represents an excellent case through which to study the transformation of domestic security because in comparative terms the pluralisation of the British security sector has been especially pronounced. In the immediate post-war decades, for instance, private security companies occupied only a very marginal position within the security sector, functioning almost completely in the shadow of the highly esteemed public police. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, these companies have become a major force. The industry is more than double the size of the police, it is endorsed and licensed by the British state and operates in partnership with a number of public institutions, often in the provision of highly visible frontline law and order functions. In short, the post-war history of the security sector in Britain represents one of the clearest examples of the transition from a monopolistic to a pluralistic system of security provision anywhere in the world. The focus on the British case also means that the book is primarily concerned with one particular mode of private security provision – that is, security delivered by large multinational companies which specialise in contracting out private security products and services. This focus is not determined by any a priori considerations about which modes of private security provision are most worthy of detailed academic analysis, but rather by the empirical fact that this is where the politics of private security takes place. Political controversy has followed these particular companies to a far greater degree than any other mode of private security provision (the reasons for which will be explored later). As such, these companies and their interactions with the British state form the empirical focus of this book.

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The Politics of Private Security

Finally, Part III – which comprises Chapter 9 – will offer some conclusions and comparisons about the politics of private security. This chapter will first draw upon the analysis of the British case in order to directly answer each of the key research questions set out above. These answers will demonstrate exactly how and why the politics of private security makes a significant new contribution to the study of domestic security. The last few pages of the book will then examine the extent to which the answers derived from the British case can be generalised to other countries. Importantly, it will be shown that, on the surface at least, there are number of commonalities across a wide range of countries. This in turn demonstrates that the politics of private security is not unique to post-war Britain, but is rather a worldwide phenomenon. The book will accordingly end with a rallying call for the development of a comparative agenda for studying and promoting the politics of private security on a global scale.

The economics of private security This section will introduce the conventional way of charting the rise of domestic private security provision, which comes in the form of a distinctly economic narrative centred around changes in supply and demand in the post-war security sector. Throughout the book, this narrative will be referred to as the ‘economics of private security’. It is important to introduce the economic narrative at this stage because it serves to delineate the limits of existing scholarship in this field. And it is only by appreciating where these limits currently lie that we can see more clearly where new avenues of enquiry should begin, specifically in the form of the politics of private security. In order to critically examine the arguments of those academics whose work collectively makes up the economics of private security, it is first necessary to understand in general terms how they view the economic conditions which preceded the post-war expansion of private security. This involves briefly turning our attention towards the middle decades of the twentieth century, which are often viewed as the historical zenith of state security provision across the globe. During this period, the heightened demand for domestic security in many countries was usually met with a commensurate increase in the supply of state policing, thereby generating a relatively stable equilibrium in which the state tended to dominate security provision. As Braithwaite (2000, p. 49) notes, for instance, ‘[u]nder the ideology of Keynesianism, the response to every outbreak of disorder was to increase central state

Introduction

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policing resources’. Ayling, Grabowsky and Shearing (2009, p. 2) similarly observe that ‘[r]esources were less of a problem in those days as governments were fairly generous with the police’. Proponents of the economic narrative argue that the significant consequence of this monopolistic arrangement was that demand for private security provision was only ever nominal at best, because the state tended to satisfy the majority of any given population’s security needs. Importantly, it is the breakdown of this monopolistic arrangement in subsequent decades which forms the bedrock of the economic narrative. This breakdown is usually attributed to some combination of shifts in supply and demand within the post-war security sector. One prominent group of scholars, the so-called fiscal constraint theorists, favour supply side factors in their economic analysis (see Jones and Newburn 1998, pp. 98–104). These theorists – who are often informed by and form part of the neoliberal school of thought – argue that during the 1970s states throughout the world were faced with two irresistible pressures which forced them to downsize public service provision. The first pressure was an adverse international economic climate which caused many national economies to slump into an era of recession and budgetary constraints (see Marglin and Schor 1991). The second pressure was the unsustainable growth of public service provision during the high-point of the post-war Keynesian welfare state, which in turn resulted in state ‘overload’ and a corresponding period of public service cutbacks (see Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki 1975; King 1975). For the fiscal constraint theorists, these pressures meant that many states were no longer endowed with sufficient resources to meet the rising demand for domestic security with a commensurate increase in the supply of state security provision. This reduction in supply had the effect of fostering a demand for private security provision which, according to these theorists, the executives of private security companies were quick to exploit (for example, see Bowden 1978; Pyle 1995; Forst 1999). The strength of this line of reasoning is its simplicity. It offers a parsimonious supply side explanation for the rise of private security in the post-war era. However, it rests upon empirically unstable foundations, for although many public services were indeed downsized in the context of global recession and state overload, policing was generally not among them. Braithwaite (2000, p. 53) notes, for instance, that between 1970 and 1990 the number of state police officers in Britain and the USA actually increased by 35 per cent and 64 per cent respectively. He accordingly comments that: ‘[w]hile the welfare state is wound back, the punitive state is not’ (2000, p. 53). Against this backdrop,

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The Politics of Private Security

recent years have seen the emergence of an economic corrective centred around the observation that, contrary to the arguments of the fiscal constraint theorists, state security provision and private security provision have actually been expanding in tandem during the post-war decades, not at the expense of one another (Jones and Newburn 1998, pp. 99–100; 1999a, p. 102). Importantly, though, far from undermining the validity of the fiscal constraint theorists’ account, advocates of this corrective have pointed out that for the supply side explanation to retain its analytical purchase, it simply needs to be considered alongside concomitant shifts in demand side factors. This involves acknowledging that while there may have been substantial increases in state security provision in recent decades, these increases have still not been able to keep pace with the exponential rise in demand for domestic security. This corrective thus leads to a modified economic narrative in which demand for domestic security still outstrips supply – thereby creating market opportunities for private security companies – but the relationship between the two is slightly more complex than the fiscal constraint theorists would have us believe. However, this prompts the following key question: why has the demand for domestic security escalated so rapidly in recent times? The economic narrative provides three interrelated answers to this important question. First, there is the most obvious answer that crime rates in most industrial countries have increased significantly over the past few decades. In Britain, for instance, the number of offences recorded by the police rose from about half a million in 1960 to approximately five and a half million in 1990 (Maguire 2007, p. 256). Notwithstanding the changes in data collection methodology which have served to artificially amplify this trend (see Maguire 2007), this is an enormous increase, and one which would understandably stimulate the demand for private security in lieu of a commensurate state response. In addition to this, some have also argued that not only has the demand for domestic security increased over recent decades, but that it has also become more disaggregated, thereby making it more difficult for the police in particular to satisfy. Reiner (1992), for example, argues that the pluralisation of socio-economic relations along the lines of class, gender, ethnic identity and religion in the postmodern era has served to stimulate the demand for security in multiple directions. He continues by stating that public police forces, which developed in an era characterised by relatively straightforward class-based social relations, simply do not have the resource capacity or institutional knowledge to cope with the complexity of these emergent trends, hence the increase in demand

Introduction

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for private security (Reiner 1992, pp. 775–9; see also Johnston 2000, pp. 18–28). Second, there are those who contend that as public police forces and private security companies attempt to satisfy these rising demands for security, they both actually generate yet more demand for security, thereby triggering a never-ending spiral of soaring security demands. Zedner (2003, p. 163) explains this trend with reference to the ‘deep irony that, by alerting citizens to risk and scattering the world with visible reminders of the threat to crime, it tends to increase subjective insecurity’. As such, she observes, ‘[s]omething akin to a security race ensues with both public and private providers competing to assert their superior ability to offer security services, demand for which they have jointly fostered’ (p. 162). By this logic, once private security companies establish even a minor foothold in the security sector, their ongoing expansion assumes a kind of self-perpetuating momentum as they continually generate more demand for their own services (see also Jones and Newburn 2006, p. 8). Whether or not the perpetuation of this insecurity is a deliberate strategy employed by private security executives and officers so as to maintain a healthy demand for their services is a matter of debate. While some argue that it can indeed be seen as a conscious business strategy (Neocleous 2008, pp. 145–60), it is likely that such insecurity is equally as much an unintended consequence of private security provision. Third, there are those who contend that shifting property relations in recent decades have enhanced the ability of citizens to choose between public and private security provision. Of particular relevance here is the emergence of what Shearing and Stenning (1981, 1983) have famously termed ‘mass private property’ (see also Kempa, Stenning and Wood 2004). This term refers to expansive tracts of private property which are used predominantly as public spaces, such as shopping centres, industrial complexes, gated communities and so on. Proponents of the mass private property thesis have observed that landlords of such spaces have the legal right to employ private security officers to secure their boundaries, thereby creating a latent demand for private security. The manner in which this latent demand is actualised varies in line with the landlord’s security preferences and, according to these theorists, must therefore be ‘empirically mapped’ (Wood 2006, p. 218). Sometimes an increase in demand may relate to a straightforward escalation in crime rates. Other times it may result from the disaggregation of localised social relations and a concomitant desire to construct a more particularistic – or ‘neo-feudal’ (Shearing and Stenning

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1983, p. 503) – social order. Either way, the enhanced capacity to choose between different modes of security provision is, for these scholars, a key factor in comprehending the rising demand for private security services in recent decades. Taken together, these supply and demand side factors form the main contours of the economics of private security. While there is debate over the relative weighting of these factors (see Hope 2000), there seems to be a virtual consensus within the extant literature that the task of mapping out the rise of private security requires little more than pulling together some combination of these trends (see Jones and Newburn 2006; Jones 2007). Furthermore, there also seems to be a virtual consensus that in order to address each of the key research questions set out above, all you need to do is to extrapolate from this narrative, which leads to the following answers. How have private security companies become so prominent? They have responded to common shifts in supply and demand which have occurred within domestic security sectors across the world. What motivates them? To maximise profit by doing whatever is demanded by their customers, so long as this does not involve contravening the prevailing legal framework. What is their relationship with the state? The state is both a competitor in the security sector (i.e., the police) and a source of business (i.e., government contracts). How can they be controlled? States can externally impose the public good upon these market actors through various forms of statutory regulation. What does their increasingly ubiquitous presence in twenty-first-century society tell us about the future of security provision? Private security provision signals the beginning of a new (postmodern) era of pluralised security arrangements which is rapidly replacing the previous system of monopolistic security provision. With this line of reasoning, the economics of private security has become the default framework for analysing contemporary developments in private security provision. The objective of this book is to illustrate that while the economics of private security is extremely important, it neither tells the whole story about the rise of private security in the post-war era nor does it generate a comprehensive social-scientific understanding of the transformation of domestic security provision. The main problem is that it disregards the political context of the security sector. As we will see in later chapters, this sector is uniquely structured by deep-rooted normative expectations about how security ought to be delivered. There is a widespread sense among domestic populations across the globe that only state actors ought to be legitimately engaged in the provision of domestic security. This in turn means that the security sector

Introduction

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is characterised by an ongoing political battle in which both public and private actors are compelled to structure their operations in line with these state-centric normative expectations, even if they want to do the very opposite. The result is a complex game of political manoeuvring which, it is significant to note, serves to distort the basic laws of supply and demand in the security sector. The economics of private security is, in other words, permeated by a distinctly political logic. It is therefore misleading to regard politicians and police officers as disinterested actors who are content to stand back and watch the security sector become steadily colonised by the market, for they are frequently motivated to fiercely protect this supposedly sovereign domain from commercial interests, both for their own good and for the good of the public. It is similarly misleading to portray the executives of private security companies as one-dimensional economic actors whose decision-making processes are guided by little more than a strategic reading of security sector market signals. In order to take advantage of these shifts in supply and demand, these executives are also forced to behave as skilled political strategists, charged with the responsibility of negotiating their companies through the complicated political terrain of the security sector. The argument of this book, then, is that the expansion of private security in the post-war era has been both an economic and a political process, and for this reason we need to complement the economics of private security with the politics of private security.

The politics of private security This section will introduce the concepts and arguments which, taken together, constitute a new and interesting line of enquiry for examining the rise of private security in the post-war era: the ‘politics of private security’. Put simply, this term refers to the political processes by which private security and state actors have entered into negotiations with one another over the composition of the post-war security sector – a sector which for well over a century has in many countries been almost the exclusive domain of the state and, on the surface at least, has been almost entirely free of private actors and private interests. The argument of this book is that it is these political processes which, alongside the aforementioned economic shifts in supply and demand, account for the expansion of private security in recent decades. The conceptual and empirical development of these political processes is the key theme which runs through all the subsequent chapters and it also represents the book’s original scholarly contribution to this subject area.

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The Politics of Private Security

This is not to say, however, that all extant literature completely disregards this political dimension – that would be a misrepresentation. Indeed, there are repeated references to a multitude of political processes throughout this literature. But most of the time these references are only very brief explanations of the political processes involved in the marketisation of security provision (see, for example, Draper 1978; South 1988; Johnston 1992a, 1992b; George and Button 2000; Button 2002). The intention of these references appears to be little more than to provide some basic political context for the primary task of either mapping out the economics of private security or describing the latest institutional developments in the security sector. This is not to criticise these writings as such, for these aims are very important ones, but generally speaking none of this literature passes as focused political analysis. As a consequence, it does not directly contribute towards the task of mapping out the politics of private security and is of limited substantive value to the objectives of this book – though later chapters do occasionally draw upon observations from this literature where appropriate. However, it is crucial to note that there is one very important exception to this trend: the writings of Loader and Walker. These commentators do advance a theoretically informed analysis of the state-centric political norms which structure the actions of state and private security actors in the security sector (see especially Loader 1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 1999; Loader and Walker 2001, 2007). This body of work does therefore contribute towards the empirical and (especially) conceptual development of the politics of private security. It is thus important to engage with these writings so as to situate this book within the relevant academic literature. However, the key connections between these writings and the arguments and concepts in this book are primarily theoretical in nature and are developed in Chapter 2, which deals at length with a number of theoretical issues relating to the politics of private security. For now it is sufficient to note that this work represents a significant lone exception within a literature which is otherwise principally concerned with the economics of private security, not with the politics. Importantly, then, because the politics of private security is for the most part uncharted academic territory, there are few pre-existing concepts and propositions which can be used to construct an initial guide to this field of research. As such, the remainder of this section will introduce three new concepts which have been formulated specifically for this task. These concepts are: reform, re-legitimation and regulation. It is important to note that while these concepts are developed here with specific reference to the British case, they can be generalised in

Introduction

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their more abstract form across a number of different cases, as will be demonstrated towards the end of the book.

Reform The concept of ‘reform’ characterises the British state’s dominant political approach towards the private security industry in the post-war era. The central feature of this concept is the desire of state actors to control private security companies by actively bringing their operations in line with the public good. In subsequent chapters, the individuals and institutions that pursue this goal are called the ‘reformers’ and the set of arguments they employ to this end are collectively termed the ‘reform agenda’. However, it is important to note from the outset that while this agenda has been the dominant state approach during the period covered by this book, this dominance has been neither immediate nor total. In some branches of the state the reform agenda has been outright rejected, while in others it has been accepted only partially. Nevertheless, at this early stage it is useful to introduce the reform agenda in more or less ideal-type terms, since this provides a common logic against which to understand the different permutations of reformism covered in later chapters. The origin of the reform agenda can be traced to the monopolistic approach to domestic security provision which has prevailed throughout modern history. While the British state never actually exercised a true monopoly over security provision, it came close enough in its institutional arrangements during the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century to give the general impression of one. Furthermore, the rhetoric of public intellectuals and political leaders during this period frequently drew upon the normative idea of a state monopoly in order to justify the state’s activities, and this rhetoric often served to reinforce the general impression (Shearing 1992, p. 402). As a consequence, over time substantial sections of the British population have come to expect that the state can and should monopolise security provision and, by extension, that any institution which threatens this monopoly is immoral or unethical and should be countenanced by the state (Garland 1996, pp. 448–9). Importantly, this expectation or political norm – which will be examined in much greater detail in Chapter 2 – structures the terrain on which the state encounters the private security industry. Because private security companies threaten this monopoly, there is a widespread expectation that the state ought to intervene in the security sector marketplace so as to maintain the impression that it continues to exercise

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The Politics of Private Security

a kind of monopoly over security provision. In this sense, this mode of intervention has an almost ‘dramaturgical’ quality – it is a symbol of monopoly (see Manning 1999, 2001). Crucially, though, it is this expectation which in large part accounts for the emergence of the reform agenda. In other words, this agenda is to a significant degree driven by the state’s desire to reproduce and perpetuate the idea of the traditional state monopoly in the security sector. However, to say that the reform agenda is determined by this political norm and nothing else would be wrong, for it has also been developed in response to a number of political preferences which come from within the British state. Among certain public officials, for instance, there has been a genuine altruistic desire to protect the British citizenry from the negative externalities of private security provision – such as localised malpractice and the deepening of social inequality – by reforming the industry. To borrow a phrase from Loader (2006), these public servants can be usefully described as the ‘plutonic guardians’ of the public good. It is important to acknowledge, however, that the reform agenda has also been shaped by self-interested state actors driven more by a desire to protect their professional domains from the competition of private security companies than by altruistic sensibilities (see Buchanon 1978; Dunleavy 1991). Yet despite this unevenness there is one highly significant feature common to all strands of reformism: that all reform objectives can be best realised through some form of state-directed, statutory regulation. Indeed, there has been a consensus among reformers of all colours that regulation constitutes the ideal institutional mechanism through which the state can exercise control over the activities of private security companies. This coupling of reform and regulation is key to understanding the state agenda which runs through the politics of private security.

Re-legitimation The concept of ‘re-legitimation’ characterises the dominant political approach taken by private security actors towards the British state in the post-war era. The objective of this approach is to enhance the legitimacy of the private security industry – which has traditionally been lacking in this key resource – in an effort to make it more attractive to security purchasers. In subsequent chapters, the individuals and institutions that pursue this objective are called the ‘re-legitimators’ and the set of arguments which they employ to this end are collectively termed the ‘re-legitimation agenda’. However, it is important to note that the

Introduction

15

re-legitimation agenda does not capture the range of political preferences expressed throughout the industry. Over the past half-century, this agenda has been articulated most assertively by the ambitious executives of the (mostly) larger private security companies who have seen commercial benefits in enhancing the legitimacy of their operations. Other private security executives, especially those managing smaller and more localised companies, have often been indifferent to this agenda. Yet, unsurprisingly, the political voice of big business has been by far the loudest and as a consequence the re-legitimation agenda has over time assumed a position of dominance in the period covered by this book. In mapping out the conceptual contours of the re-legitimation agenda, the most significant feature to note is that it is influenced by the exact same political norms which shape the reform agenda – that is, the political norms which stem from the average British citizen’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered. However, the implications of these political norms are rather different for the private security industry than they are for the state. In the industry’s case, they have the effect of de-legitimating the activities of private security companies and thus act as a kind of barrier to entry into the security sector. In order to understand the logic here, it is necessary to explain more precisely what is meant by legitimacy. There are three dimensions to this complex concept – legal, instrumental and normative – each of which impacts upon the industry differently. Legal legitimacy, which relates to any activity conducted in accordance with an accepted legal framework (Beetham 1991, p. 16), has not generally posed a problem for private security companies, since their operations have tended to derive legal acceptance from either private property rights or government contracts. Instrumental legitimacy, which relates to the effectiveness of an organisation’s outputs (Tyler 1990, pp. 3 and 21; Scharpf 1999, pp. 6–11; Crawford 2008, p. 128), has not traditionally posed a problem for private security companies either. This is because measures of effectiveness are relatively objective and tend to reflect the effectiveness of private security companies to the same degree as any other security institution. Indeed, due to the consciously forward-looking, risk-based orientation of most private security products and services (see Johnston and Shearing 2003, pp. 75–97), it may even be the case that such indicators privilege the instrumental legitimacy of private security companies over state institutions (which are often more backwards-looking and punitive). In short, we are not concerned here with either legal or instrumental legitimacy because they do not constitute barriers to entry into the security sector. Normative

16

The Politics of Private Security

legitimacy, by contrast, does pose a serious problem for private security companies. Normative legitimacy relates to ‘beliefs current in a given society about what is the rightful source of authority’ (Beetham 1991, p. 17). In the security sector, where institutions must frequently resort to the exercise of physical force, there tends to be a shared feeling among the population with regard to who should and should not be undertaking this social function. Those institutions which, from the population’s perspective, should be engaged in security provision generally foster a sense of safety and tend to be endowed with higher levels of normative legitimacy. Those institutions which, from the population’s perspective, should not be engaged in security provision often cultivate a sense of insecurity and tend to be endowed with lower levels of normative legitimacy. This kind of legitimacy has posed a major problem for private security companies in the post-war era. This is because, as has previously been explained, over time the majority of the British population has come to expect the state to monopolise security provision and this expectation has served to confer normative legitimacy almost exclusively upon the public sector. The important byproduct of this process has been that private security provision has come to be regarded as normatively illegitimate, since its existence has the effect of eroding this state-fostered sense of security and safety. This state-centric expectation or political norm is thus a significant constraint upon private security companies because it inhibits the population’s desire for private security services. It is for this reason that private security executives have sought to accrue greater levels of normative legitimacy for their companies. Importantly, the primary strategy employed by these executives in order to achieve this objective has been to capture this key resource from the legitimacy-rich state. In order to understand this process of capture, however, it is important to mention that normative legitimacy is not a zero-sum resource which can simply be transferred between state and private security institutions as if it were a discrete object. Instead, it has to be created and constructed, often by appealing to people’s sensibilities about how they think the world ought to be structured (see Sparks and Bottoms 1995). As such, the political processes by which private security companies have sought to capture legitimacy from the state have not been straightforward, but complex and drawn out. Crucially, though, over time one particular strategy has taken precedence above all others – that legitimacy can be captured from the state through statutory regulation. This is because state-directed regulatory mechanisms allow

Introduction

17

private security executives to communicate to the average British citizen that their companies are not purebred market actors functioning in accordance with the logic of profit margins and private goods, but are rather state-deputised actors operating in line with the population’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered. Regulation thus represents an effective method of aligning private security operations with the deep-seated political norms which structure the security sector. This coupling of re-legitimation and regulation is central to understanding the private security agendas which run throughout the politics of private security.

Regulation As we have now seen, the concept of ‘regulation’ – specifically statutory regulation – unites the different strands of the politics of private security, for it represents the institutional vehicle through which the objectives of both the reform and re-legitimation agendas can in principle be realised. For the reformers, regulation provides a mechanism through which to shape the activities of the private security industry. For the re-legitimators, regulation provides a mechanism through which to capture the much-needed resource of legitimacy from the state, thereby enhancing the attractiveness of their services in the security sector marketplace. Regulation can therefore be regarded as the linchpin around which the politics of private security in Britain revolves. Indeed, the passing of the Private Security Industry Act 2001 – which created a regulatory framework for the industry – represents perhaps the key moment in the politics of private security in post-war Britain. Given this significance, it is important to briefly examine other scholarly interpretations of regulation, since they provide a useful context to the arguments presented in the following chapters and also serve to highlight once again the original contribution of the book. Extant interpretations can be categorised into two schools of thought: state-centric and economic. The state-centric school of thought is largely informed by the writings of Button and George, who over the past two decades have commented upon and campaigned fiercely for private security regulation.1 Button and George’s analyses have two key characteristics. First, they argue that the state’s regulatory regime should be top-down, widely-drawn and rigorous, or what they term the ‘Comprehensive Wide’ model of regulation (George and Button 1997a; Button and George 2006). Second, they tend to chart the political negotiations which resulted in the

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The Politics of Private Security

passing of the Private Security Industry Act 2001 against the backdrop of their ideal-type model for private security regulation, which means that their analyses only tend to focus upon those aspects of the negotiations which slot into their model (George and Button 1998, pp. 2–4; 2000, pp. 174–81; 2002, pp. 5–8). So, while their analyses are certainly insightful and influential, they are also politically underdeveloped, for although they give expression to the state’s reform agenda – which does fit in with their normative ideals – they generally overlook the re-legitimation agenda, which has limited bearing upon their top-down, state-centred project. As a consequence, there is virtually no indication throughout their work that private security actors have actively lobbied for regulation. And in missing this process, they essentially disregard one of the most fascinating and important aspects of private security regulation: that instead of protesting about state regulation – as most commercial sectors do – many sections of the private security industry have actively welcomed state regulation. In short, Button and George’s state-centric analysis of regulation is partial because it does not fully comprehend the politics of private security. In contrast, the economic school of thought does provide an explanation for why these private security actors have sought regulation, but offers little more than this. A concise statement of this explanation is given by Zedner (2006, p. 281), who suggests that the regulation lobby has been driven by a group of powerful industry executives acting in accordance with the following three-part calculation: i) that their companies can absorb the costs of regulation; ii) that many smaller companies will go bankrupt as a result of regulation; iii) that their companies can accordingly expand their operations by capturing the market share left over by the disappearing smaller companies. Like the other dimensions of the economics of private security, there is no doubt a great deal of analytical purchase in this explanation and it should thus be viewed as an important part of the economic backdrop to subsequent chapters. However, this explanation also remains partial for two now familiar reasons. First, there is no recognition that regulation was used by private security executives as a political strategy to re-legitimate the industry. Second, there is no acknowledgement that regulation was also part of a state-based strategy to control the industry. This explanation therefore reproduces the problematic assumptions which run through the economics of private security. The analysis of regulation advanced in the following chapters, then, is very distinct from the interpretations in the extant academic literature. In this book, regulation is viewed as a concept which amalgamates in

Introduction

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one political melting pot the preferences of both state and private security actors. It not a one-dimensional mechanism which delivers either state-control or regulatory capture; rather, it is a multi-dimensional bridging mechanism, endowed with both symbolic and institutional power, which brings together what ostensibly appear to be two completely divergent agendas: the state’s reform agenda and the industry’s re-legitimation agenda. It is only by comprehending regulation in this way that we can begin to understand the complex and contested path which leads to the Private Security Industry Act 2001. Moreover, it is only by analysing the connections between regulation, reform and re-legitimation that we can, in more general terms, properly comprehend the rise of private security in the post-war era. This chapter has now illustrated how the politics of private security offers a new avenue of enquiry for understanding the post-war transformation of domestic security provision. Not only does it generate an interesting new narrative about the rise of private security – one in which both state and private security actors are involved in complex political machinations over the composition of the post-war security sector – but it also allows us to formulate an entirely new set of answers to the key research questions posed at the beginning of the book. How have private security companies become so prominent? They have sought to capture legitimacy from the state so as to enhance their public standing in the security sector. What motivates them? To maximise profit margins by appealing to the average citizen’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered. What is their relationship with the state? They are seeking to outmanoeuvre the state by appealing to these public expectations, yet the only way in which they can successful accomplish this is (rather paradoxically) by developing close and publicly identifiable connections with the state, for example through regulation. How can they be controlled? Through a combination of both ‘internal’ state regulation (i.e., encouraging these companies to voluntarily act as state-deputised security providers operating in line with the public good) and ‘external’ regulation (i.e., imposing regulation upon them so as to forcefully align their operations with the public good). What does their increasingly ubiquitous presence in twentyfirst-century society tell us about the future of security provision? While the industry appears to a harbinger of an emergent (postmodern) era of pluralised security arrangements, it is also attempting to reconcile itself with the state-centric structures and norms about domestic security provision which emerged out of the Enlightenment – as a consequence, the industry provides a window into both the future and the past.

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The Politics of Private Security

With these interesting and significant answers in mind – to which we will return in much more detail in Chapter 9 – it is important to once again reiterate the core argument of this book: the politics of private security must be considered alongside the economics of private security if we are to develop an indepth understanding of the radical global transformation which is currently taking place in the nature of domestic security provision.

2 Structure, Agency and Security

Chapter 1 introduced the key concepts and arguments which give shape to the politics of private security. This chapter will address the theoretical assumptions on which these concepts and arguments ultimately rest. As they stand, these concepts and arguments take for granted a number of basic assumptions. These include: i) that there are state-centric political norms about how security ought to be delivered which serve to structure the actions of state and private security actors; ii) that there are a series of economic forces centred around shifts in supply and demand within the security sector which serve to structure the actions of state and private security actors; iii) that state actors have a significant degree of political agency in their interactions with the private security industry; and iv) that private security actors have a significant degree of political agency in their negotiations with the state. Each one of these assumptions feeds directly into the complex political processes which are examined in this book. With this in mind, the purpose of this chapter is to put together a theoretical framework which elaborates upon these assumptions, thereby situating the politics of private security on solid theoretical terrain. However, it should be emphasised that these assumptions cannot be given an absolute, objective grounding, for they are – like all theoretical assumptions – value-laden and subjective. But they can be better understood, and it is the process of better understanding these assumptions through the lens of a purposebuilt theoretical framework which serves to steer the politics of private security towards stable theoretical territory. In constructing this framework, the chapter follows a two-part logic. To begin with, the three most prominent models for understanding the dynamics of the domestic security sector – the monopoly, nodal governance and anchored pluralism models – will be critically reviewed so as to capitalise upon the 21

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The Politics of Private Security

important theoretical research which has already been conducted in this field. The chapter will then integrate the most valuable elements of this research into a new model – the ‘political economy of private security’ – which has been specifically designed for studying the politics of private security.1

Monopoly Different theoretical frameworks for understanding the composition of the security sector provide different insights into the nature of the four assumptions set out above. These insights are usually reflective of the historical context and ideological spirit in which the framework has been constructed (see Cox 1986; Kuhn 1996). This is certainly the case with the monopoly model, which emerged at a time when many European states were steadily monopolising their national law and order institutions and were generally supported in this project by the social and political thought of the Enlightenment. As such, this model depicts a domestic security sector in which the prevailing political norms and economic forces are aligned in a manner which serves to simultaneously privilege state agency and marginalise private security agency, in the process conceptualising something like a state monopoly over security provision. It is immediately obvious, then, that this model is outdated, for it more accurately reflects that period of history which preceded the rise of private security, when the state was usually able to meet the rising demands for domestic security with commensurate increases in the supply of security provision, and private security was accordingly relegated to the backwaters of the security sector. As a consequence, the model is of limited value to the present task. Nevertheless, it is important to critically examine the monopoly model for two reasons. First, a crucial reading of this model does help us to better understand the nature of the state-centric political norms which structure the actions of state and private security actors today. Second, it is also the theoretical framework against which more recent models of the security sector are almost always defined and thus serves as a kind of stepping stone to the other models examined in this chapter. Finding a clear starting point for mapping out the core propositions of the monopoly model is not as straightforward a task as one might imagine. This is because the model has so dominated the analysis of security provision in the modern era that it can be found in countless scholarly publications which span a period of more than 300 years. In approaching this difficult task, this section will follow in the

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tradition of those who in delineating the contours of the monopoly model have repeatedly turned to one historical source in particular: Hobbes’s seventeenth-century work Leviathan (see, for instance, Zedner 2009). The reason why this work has proved to be such a popular starting point is not because Hobbes was the sole originator of the core propositions set down within the monopoly model – indeed, he was reacting to the ideas of his contemporaries and the turbulent political events of his lifetime (see Ryan 1996) – but rather because more than 350 years after its publication, Leviathan still represents one the clearest articulations of the fundamental logic underlying this model. For present purposes, Hobbes’s line of reasoning in Leviathan can be divided into three basic propositions. The first is that that any population in which each individual attempts to enforce his own personal (or private) conditions for security will descend into chaos. This is because it is human nature that each individual will have a different set of priorities in life. Thus, when a multiplicity of private security regimes are constructed in accordance with these divergent sets of priorities, conflict will inevitably ensue. In Hobbes’s words (1996, p. 66), ‘[c]ompetition of riches, honour, command, or other power, inclineth to contention, enmity, and war: because the way of one competitor, to the attaining of his desire, is to kill, subdue, supplant or repel the other’. The second is that in order to transcend this violent chaos, these individuals must move away from a dependence upon private security arrangements and instead move towards a collective arrangement in which security is delivered in line with the public good. This could only be achieved, Hobbes reasoned, if each individual relinquishes the resources which he invests in his private security arrangements and transfers them to a single public institution: the Leviathan (or modern state). The Leviathan will then ‘use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and common defence’ (1996, p. 114, emphasis in original). The third is that for this collective arrangement to have any legitimacy and longevity, each individual must transfer his ‘strength and means’ to the Leviathan of his own free will. The resulting ‘social contract’ is, Hobbes writes: made by covenant of every man with every man, in such a manner, as if every man should say to every man, I authorize and give up my right of governing myself, to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner. (1996, p. 114, emphasis in original)

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The Politics of Private Security

Hobbes’s complete institutional formula can therefore be read as follows: private security arrangements are illegitimate and result in anarchy, whereas public security arrangements are legitimate and lead to peace and stability. In Hobbes’s time, this monopolistic, state-centred institutional arrangement was far from being a physical reality, for seventeenthcentury Britain was still characterised in large part by private, informal and localised forms of security provision (Johnston 1992b, pp. 6–18). Leviathan was thus much more a work of abstract philosophy than an explanatory model of real-life institutional arrangements. Yet Leviathan did capture the beginnings – and indeed informed the development – of a real-life trend over the subsequent three centuries, as many European and colonial states invested more and more resources into the project of bringing security provision (and other law and order functions) into the public sphere. Importantly, alongside this process of monopolisation, a wide range of scholars began to steadily develop Hobbes’s normative model into a more explanatory model of the security sector, in the process concretising the idea of a state monopoly over security provision in both intellectual and government circles (for some famous examples, see Weber 1991, p. 78; Hobhouse 1964, p. 78; Hayek 2006, pp. 19–20; Dahl 1970, p. 12). To be sure, a number of significant modifications were made by these more contemporary thinkers, reflecting new developments in political theory and practice. For instance, the power of the modern state to legitimately proscribe the activities of individuals in order to maximise collective security was usually limited by a formal constitution in subsequent formulations. And few now believe that the concentration of executive powers in the modern state can be justified with reference to a tacit and hypothetical social contract, arguing instead that it must be legitimated through a democratic mandate. These modifications aside, however, the modern manifestations of the monopoly model have continued to reproduce the same basic propositions set down in the Leviathan, even though they now tend to be more explanatory than normative in their formulation. Yet, as mentioned earlier, even these modern manifestations are now outdated, for the rise of private security over the past few decades has served to transform the composition of most domestic security sectors across the world. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the monopoly model does still help us to better understand the nature of the state-centric political norms which continue to structure the actions of state and private security actors within the security sector today. This is due to the fact that while this model no longer gives

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expression to anything like an actually existing institutional arrangement, it has over the centuries articulated and helped to perpetuate a common way of thinking about security. This is because Hobbes and other monopoly theorists, together with countless state actors over the past three centuries, have collectively helped to make the idea of a state monopoly over security provision one of the most pervasive political norms in the world today (Migdal 2001, 2007). Through their discourse, this simple idea has permeated the consciousness of populations across the globe, profoundly influencing how everyday citizens think about security. Reiner (2000, p. 1) has usefully termed this phenomenon ‘police fetishism’. This term does not imply that members of a given population are necessarily familiar with the philosophical rationales behind a state-centred mode of security provision, but rather that they have been persuaded by public discourse that state institutions ought to monopolise crime control. To be sure, this fetishism is not universally shared, as Marxist and revisionist analyses of repressive police behaviour demonstrate (Hall et al. 1978; Cohen and Scull 1983). Yet enough people do believe in the monopoly idea, especially in contemporary Britain, to give this fetishism an intersubjective quality – to make it a generalised political norm. Significantly, this norm helps to explain why state actors today are compelled to intervene in the security sector in order give the impression of a state monopoly (the reform agenda) and why private security actors have been so concerned with developing links with the British state in order to enhance their legitimacy (the re-legitimation agenda). This is because, in the majority of people’s eyes, the state is the only actor with the requisite legitimacy to undertake security activities. So, to summarise, it is argued here that the monopoly model does not necessarily betray a physical reality, but it has served to produce and reproduce a distinct political norm which is a central component of the politics of private security today.

Nodal governance One of the major theoretical attempts to reconceptualise the ‘postmonopoly’ security sector is the nodal governance model, which has been gradually constructed over the past 25 years or so by a number of criminologists and socio-legal theorists including Bayley, Dupont, Johnston, Shearing, Stenning and Wood. Once again, the historical context and ideological spirit in which these academics have been writing are central to understanding the development of this model.

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The Politics of Private Security

Historically, they have been writing in a context in which the rapid expansion of private security provision across the globe has become increasingly apparent. Ideologically, they have come to pragmatically subscribe to a position which regards the market – as opposed to the state – as the most effective means of distributing resources and services throughout the security sector. This combination of history and ideology has in turn led them to produce an economically (or market) driven model which conceptualises how recent shifts in supply and demand have served to facilitate the movement of private security providers right into the centre of the security sector. As such, this model makes an important contribution towards the present theoretical discussion, for it helps us to better understand three of the key assumptions outlined above relating to economic structure, state agency and private security agency. Significantly, the foundations of this model are inextricably linked to the economics of private security, which is unsurprising given that it is centred around a pro-market ideological position. The model gains its impetus from Shearing and Stenning’s observations regarding the close relationship between the emergence of mass private property and the expansion of private security provision. As they note: ‘Whenever one finds a shift in property relations toward such large geographically connected holdings of private property one also finds a shift towards private policing initiatives’ (1981, pp. 228–9). Furthermore, according to these theorists, not only has this transformation in the economic context of the security sector endowed landlords with an enhanced ability to choose between private and public security provision, but it has also given them a choice between powerful private security actors and constrained state actors, thereby often making the private option the more attractive one. For instance, Shearing and Stenning comment that ‘[w]hile modern private security guards enjoy few or no exceptional law enforcement powers, their status as agents of property allows them to exercise a degree of authority which in practice far exceeds that of their counterparts in the public police’ (1983, p. 497). This observation regarding the relationship between shifting economic forces and the relative weighting of state and private security agency is central to the composition of the nodal governance model. In constructing the model, the nodal governance theorists contend that following the emergence of mass private property, the actors and institutions responsible for directing security strategies (auspices) and delivering security services (providers) have become privatised to

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varying degrees (Bayley and Shearing 2001, p. 3). As a result, they contend, it has become increasingly necessary to conceptualise auspices and providers in a flexible manner, with no set boundaries between the functions of state and private security actors within the security sector. For instance, Bayley and Shearing note that ‘[a]uspices may be either public (governmental) or private (non-governmental); so, too, may providers’ and as a consequence ‘they may be combined in four ways – public/public, public/private, private/public, private/private’ (2001, p. 3). They also argue that these combinations should be conceptualised within networks defined by power dependence (Dupont 2004; see also Rhodes 1997; Rhodes and Marsh 1992; Smith 1993). This means that all actors in the security sector network, regardless of whether or not they are public or private, are dependent on one another for the realisation of their objectives – no single actor, in other words, has the capacity to exercise a monopoly over security provision. For the nodal governance theorists, the security sector is thus characterised by contestation and alliance building between state and private security actors (Wood and Shearing 2007, p. 28). Furthermore, it is with regard to the process of conceptualising security networks that the nodal governance theorists advance perhaps their most important point. They argue that when examining the constitution of these networks it must not be presupposed that state actors have any special analytical priority over private security actors. Put differently, it must not assumed that, although private security actors clearly occupy an increasingly prominent position within the contemporary security sector, they must still as a matter of principle be positioned hierarchically below state actors in the final analysis (Johnston and Shearing 2003, p. 22). According to these theorists, to make such statecentric assumptions would essentially mean taking a step back towards the monopoly model which they are explicitly attempting to transcend. Instead, they stipulate, it is important regard the composition of security networks as ‘empirically open questions’, free from the distorting legacy of the monopoly model (Shearing and Wood 2003, p. 404; Wood 2006, p. 218). As asserted earlier, this theoretical framework is significant because it helps us to better understand the above theoretical assumptions concerning economic structure, state agency and private security agency. It enables us to comprehend how the changing economic forces of supply and demand in the post-war era have served to equalise the agency of state and private security actors within the security sector. This is a critical theoretical observation because it allows us to

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The Politics of Private Security

see how private security companies and state institutions have been engaged in reciprocal (or power-dependent) negotiations with each other within the post-war British security sector network. As such, it is important to highlight that the politics of private security is partly informed by the theoretical advancements made by the nodal governance theorists. However, despite these advancements, it is also essential to note that the nodal governance model nevertheless suffers from notable limitations. In particular, it provides little guidance on how to approach the state-centric political norms which continue to structure the actions of state and private security actors within the contemporary security sector, which is obviously a substantial problem when studying the politics of private security. This is because in an effort to distance themselves both historically and ideologically from state-centred analyses of the security sector – such as those embodied in the monopoly model – the nodal governance theorists have removed from their model any reference to the traditional state monopoly over security provision (see Shearing 2006, pp. 29–30). There is, for instance, no reference whatsoever to the state-centric expectations – or political norms – about security provision which have over time evolved out of the rhetoric and reality surrounding the monopoly model. This is a problematic omission because, like the economic shifts in supply and demand, these political norms serve to structure the actions of state and private security actors within the security sector. As the previous section illustrated, they directly inform the political agendas which guide state and private security actors in their interactions with one another. By explicitly removing these political norms from their theoretical framework, then, the nodal governance theorists have essentially ended up conceptualising a glut of undirected agency. They tell us that state and private security actors will enter into negotiations with each other, but fail to indicate what their respective agendas might be. What motivates and guides their actions? To be sure, in response to this criticism it could be argued that the precise motivations of these actors should be regarded as empirically open questions and should not therefore be subject to a priori theorisation. However, given that the political norms in question have become so firmly embedded within the collective consciousness of populations across the globe (and especially within the British national consciousness), it is contended here that they should be explicitly incorporated into any theoretical framework of the domestic security sector, especially when the purpose of the framework is to investigate the politics of private security.

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Anchored pluralism The anchored pluralism model – which has been developed over the past decade by the criminology and socio-legal theorists Loader and Walker – in many ways represents an attempt to reconcile the problematic disjuncture between the monopoly and nodal governance models by bringing the influence of state-centric political norms back into the fold. Like the nodal governance theorists, Loader and Walker acknowledge the importance of the economic forces which are partly responsible for driving the rise of private security. However, unlike the nodal governance theorists, they adopt an explicitly state-centric ideological position as opposed to a market-orientated one. The knock-on effect of this ideological position is that, rather than excluding the state-centric political norms which serve to structure the actions of state and private security actors within the security sector, they emphasise them – or, more accurately, they over-emphasise them, as this section will demonstrate. This (over-)emphasis means that while Loader and Walker make an extremely important contribution towards the present theoretical discussion by helping us to better understand each of the four assumptions set out at the beginning of this chapter, it is contended here that these theorists ultimately place too much analytical weight upon the newly-reinstated political norms, which in turn has the effect of skewing the connections between these assumptions. The central argument of this section, then, is that the anchored pluralism model does bring us closer to arriving at a complete theoretical framework for studying the politics of private security, but not quite all the way.2 Given the clear political orientation of this model, it is unsurprising to discover that its origins can be traced not to the economics of private security (though this certainly looms in the background) but rather to a series of socio-political observations about the nature of public and private security provision in contemporary Britain. Central to this model, for instance, is Loader’s (1997a, p. 153) observation that despite increasing crime rates during the 1980s, the police – who in most people’s eyes are primarily responsible for combating such crime – have nevertheless remained ‘an institution possessing a great deal of symbolic power’. This is because, he argues, the positive cultural feelings and attitudes towards this institution ‘create an underlying reservoir of support upon which the police can rely’ (1997b, p. 11). As such, ‘the police’s entitlement and capacity to speak about the world is seldom challenged. They start from a winning position’ (1997b, p. 3). In contrast, he continues, ‘privately employed officers lack what one might call the “symbolic aura”

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The Politics of Private Security

of the public police’ (1997a, p. 152). Essentially, then, private security providers start from a losing position in relation to the public police. These important observations about the relative weighting of state and private security agency are then employed by Loader and Walker as the basis for the anchored pluralism model. The first step in the construction of this model takes place on a more concrete level, with Loader showing how the political and cultural superiority of the police can be traced back to its established iconography – something which private security in Britain does not possess. For instance, he observes, while police officers are fitted with almost universally recognisable uniforms, hats, truncheons, badges and so on, private security officers only have access to inferior copycat versions of these notable symbols. As a consequence, people generally have a stronger cultural attraction towards the public police than towards private security (Loader 1997a, p. 152). However, for Loader and Walker, a superficial familiarity with these symbols does not illuminate the underlying reason behind the ‘winning position’ of the police – these symbols are merely concrete signifiers of a much deeper social meaning which has come to be attached to this institution. Significantly, it is precisely in examining these deeper cultural categories that Loader and Walker start to explore the structural influence of state-centric political norms upon the actions of state and private security actors on a more profound level. On this deeper level, then, Loader and Walker argue that the underlying reason for the police’s symbolic power can be found in the strong and enduring cultural connection between the police and the Hobbesinspired ideal of a universal, state-protected social order. For instance, they write that: [a]s an institution intimately concerned with the protection of the state and the security of its citizens, one that is deeply entangled with some profound hopes, fears, fantasies and anxieties about matters such as life/death, order/chaos and protection/vulnerability, the police remain closely tied to people’s sense of ontological security and collective identity, and capable of generating high, emotionally charged levels of identification among citizens. (2001, p. 20) This suggests that the police are for many people the representatives of the Enlightenment project to vanquish ‘death, chaos and vulnerability’ and maximise ‘life, order and protection’ through the establishment of a state monopoly over security provision. And, crucially, the police today continue to draw their symbolic power and legitimacy from

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this connection. They start from a ‘winning position’, in other words, because their existence resonates with people’s normative beliefs and expectations about how security ought to be provided – or, as Loader and Walker (2007, p. 44) put it, the police harmonise with our ‘social imaginary . . . the most basic grid of meaning through which we see the world’. So, because the majority of the British population believe that security ought to be provided only by the state, they are predisposed towards accepting the activities of the police (and other state institutions). This political norm, then, has the effect of facilitating and legitimating the agency of the police (and, it must be added, the agency of other state institutions operating within the security sector). However, according to the anchored pluralism theorists, we find the exact opposite scenario with private security. For instance, Loader (1997c, p. 381) writes that ‘the logic of market allocation offends against the social meanings that have come to be attached to security in liberal democracies’. By challenging the notion of a universal and state-protected social order and instead promoting a more atomised and particularistic vision of the security sector, private security has a tendency to grate against the state-centric idea of security provision which so many British citizens seem to believe in. Significantly, this grating creates cultural resistance, as Loader (1997b, p. 6) comments: ‘[r]endering the police symbolically less important to the maintenance of social order may for many require a significant re-organisation of the self’. This is because accepting private security provision involves the transformation of a world view – or ‘social imaginary’ – which is now so ‘established and sedimented in our everyday understanding, it is treated as natural and unremarkable’ (Loader and Walker 2007, p. 44). What Loader and Walker are arguing, then, is that while the political norms within the security sector serve to facilitate and legitimate the agency of state actors, at the same time they have the effect of curtailing and de-legitimating the agency of private security actors. This is an important conceptualisation which brings together insights from the nodal governance and the monopoly models and, in doing so, helps us to better understand each of the theoretical assumptions under analysis. Like the nodal governance model, this conceptualisation acknowledges that shifts in economic forces have served to endow both state and private security actors with agency in the security sector, and like the monopoly model (or at least the critical analysis of the monopoly model advanced above), it recognises the influence of the state-centric political norms which structure the actions of both state and private security actors in the security sector. This means that

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by using this model we can conceptualise how state and private security actors have entered into political negotiations with one another in post-war Britain and, at the same time, we can also draw a theoretical pathway to the different motivations driving these actors. In other words, it is possible to use the anchored pluralism model to illustrate both why legitimated state actors might seek to maintain a monopolistic influence in the security sector through the reform agenda and why de-legitimated private security actors might attempt to enhance their standing in the security sector through the re-legitimation agenda. However, although this model comes close to constituting a fully formed theoretical framework for investigating the politics of private security, this is not quite the case. The problem relates to the conceptual balance which has been struck between structure and agency in this model. As the preceding analysis has demonstrated, while shifting economic forces have served to enhance the political agency of private security actors relative to state actors, the influence of state-centric political norms have the exact opposite impact. They have the effect of constraining the political agency of private security actors relative to state actors. In order to conceptualise political negotiations between state and private security actors, then, an appropriate theoretical balance needs to be struck between these structures and agents – that is, a balance in which private security actors are endowed with enough (economic) agency to engage in meaningful negotiations with the state, but are also sufficiently constrained (by political norms) to be pushed towards a re-legitimation agenda during the course of these negotiations. The problem with the anchored pluralism model is that it overplays the constraining influence of the state-centric political norms, which in turn has the effect of placing too much of a theoretical straitjacket upon the agency of private security actors. This is due to the fact that although Loader and Walker do allocate some agency to private security actors – in the sense that their existence in the security sector is accepted – in the anchored pluralism model it seems almost predetermined that these actors will lose out to state actors in any political negotiations. Private security actors are not allocated enough agency to precipitate any real political change in the post-war security sector. They may formulate the re-legitimation agenda, but they will not be able to make any significant impact upon the composition of the security sector because they are destined to finish second to the state actors, who always win. This is obviously problematic when studying the politics of private security, which is centred around meaningful negotiations between state and private security actors in

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which both can influence the course of history. It is for this reason, then, that the anchored pluralism model almost represents a fully formed theoretical framework for studying the politics of private security, but not quite.

The political economy of private security So far, this chapter has identified four central assumptions which underpin the politics of private security and has then investigated the content of and connections between these assumptions through a critical analysis of the three main models for theorising the dynamics of the security sector. While this discussion has certainly helped us to better understand the nature of these four assumptions, the task of putting together a fully formed theoretical framework for studying the politics of private security has not yet been accomplished. Completing this task is the objective of this final section. This will be done by setting out a new framework – the ‘political economy of private security’ – which draws upon the three models examined thus far, but also goes further by advocating a new balance between the four assumptions under examination – a balance which is specifically designed for studying the politics of private security. However, it should be noted once again that the purpose of this model is not to provide an absolute, objective foundation for the book, but simply to situate the politics of private security on solid theoretical ground. The first stage in constructing this new model is to explain its name. The model has been called the ‘political economy of private security’ in order to make explicit its close relationship with the theoretical movement promoted by the New Political Economy journal. Gamble et al. (1996, pp. 5–6) provide the definitive statement of this movement: The methodology of the new political economy rejects the old dichotomy between agency and structure, and states and markets, which fragmented classical political economy into separate disciplines. It seeks instead to build on those approaches in social science which have tried to develop an integrated analysis, by combining parsimonious theories which analyse agency in terms of a conception of rationality with contextual theories which analyse structures institutionally and historically. As the following discussion will demonstrate, the political economy of private security has a great deal in common with – and draws inspiration

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from – this theoretical agenda. To begin with, it is not a ‘parsimonious’ model based upon a singular conception of social reality, but is rather an ‘integrated’ model, which takes the most valuable insights discerned from the monopoly, nodal governance and anchored pluralism models and brings them together in a manner which gives maximal expression to the theoretical assumptions underpinning the politics of private security. Furthermore, during this process of integration, agency and structure, and states and markets are regarded not as dichotomised concepts, but rather as interweaving concepts which constantly impact upon and transform one another. Finally, within this model the economics and politics of private security are not viewed as discrete and independent phenomena which belong to different academic disciplines, but are instead seen as overlapping processes, both of which are needed in order to develop a full and nuanced appreciation of the transformation of the domestic security provision in the post-war era. Against this theoretical backdrop, it is now time to turn our attention towards the main body of the model, which is designed to help us better understand the content of and connections between the four theoretical assumptions introduced at the beginning of the chapter. Assumption 1) that there are state-centric political norms about how security ought to be delivered which serve to structure the actions of state and private security actors. As the early part of this chapter demonstrated, the monopoly model is integral to enhancing our understanding of these extremely important political norms. This is because the long-term trajectory of this model provides a valuable window into their historical development. It illustrates how the origins of these political norms can be found in the early Enlightenment political thought of Hobbes and his contemporaries, and how these norms then evolved through the public discourse of nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectuals and statesmen, eventually taking root in the collective consciousness of domestic populations across the globe. In other words, it has been through this drawn-out process that an abstract philosophical blueprint for the domestic security sector has very gradually been transformed into a popular expectation about how security ought to be delivered today. However, due to its historical and ideological context, the monopoly model does not provide any indication about how this political norm might connect to the composition of the contemporary security sector – for this we must turn to the anchored pluralism theorists. This is because it is in the writings of Loader and Walker that these political norms are properly connected to the actions of state and private security actors. Most importantly, these theorists show how these political norms have a

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different structural impact upon the actions of public and private actors: while they serve to facilitate and legitimate the agency of public actors, they simultaneously serve to constrain and de-legitimate the agency of private actors. Moreover, this differential structural influence helps to explain why state actors have been inclined towards to the reform agenda (which aims to defend the state monopoly) and why private security actors have been compelled towards the re-legitimation agenda (which aims to capture legitimacy from the state). It is because each set of actors is interpreting this political norm in a slightly different way (in accordance with their own preferences). Beyond the writings of Loader and Walker, however, it is important not to over-emphasise the structural influence of these political norms. They should be used to set down a theoretical pathway towards the development of the reform and re-legitimation agendas, but they should not be employed to conceptualise a security sector in which state actors are forever legitimated and private security actors are eternally de-legitimated (as Loader and Walker have a tendency to do). In other words, it is necessary to avoid any political determinism and to leave room for other structures and agents. Assumption 2) that there are a series of economic forces centred around shifts in supply and demand within the security sector which serve to structure the actions of state and private security actors. The central insights regarding the conceptualisation of these economic forces can be drawn from the work of the nodal governance theorists, who illustrate how shifts in supply and demand have served to equalise the agency of state and private security actors within the post-war security sector. Within this ascendant economic context, these actors are seen to exist in a postmonopoly security sector network which is characterised by mutual power dependence. This is an important theoretical insight because it encourages us to search not only for state agency within the post-war security sector, but also for private security agency. It encourages us to look for two-way political negotiations between state and private security actors, as opposed to unidirectional, state-centred determinations (as the monopoly model inclines us to do), and this is obviously essential when studying the politics of private security. However, beyond the nodal governance model, it is critical not to over-emphasise the influence of these economic forces and completely disregard the political norms which also serve to structure the actions of state and private security actors within the post-war security sector. Both economic and political structures need to be balanced alongside one another if we are to better understand how and why state and private security actors have

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entered into political negotiations with each other over the composition of the post-war security sector. Assumption 3) that state actors have a significant degree of political agency in their interactions with the private security industry. This assumption refers to those state actors, both on an individual and institutional level, who act consciously in order to influence the course of the politics of private security. To better understand the nature of this political agency, it is necessary to draw selectively upon both the nodal governance and anchored pluralism models. It is first important to take note of the economic forces identified by the nodal governance theorists, which serve to diminish the political agency of state actors relative to the political agency of private security actors. In other words, within the nodal governance model, state actors continue to represent a powerful political force in the contemporary security sector, but they no longer dominate private security actors as they once did. The distribution of power between these public and private actors has essentially been equalised. At the same time, however, it is also necessary to follow the anchored pluralism theorists in their stipulation that, despite the reduced agency of state actors, they are still empowered by the political norms which structure the security sector (although it is significant to note that this empowerment comes with the side constraint that they are expected to maintain the impression of a state monopoly over security provision which, depending upon the context, could also be cast as a constraining factor). In summary, then, state actors do have a significant degree of political agency in the interactions with the private security industry, but they are not the dominant force they once were, for their political agency is at once constrained by the economic context and facilitated by the political context in roughly equal measure. Assumption 4) that private security actors have a significant degree of political agency in their negotiations with the state. This assumption refers to those private security actors, both on an individual and institutional level, who act consciously in order to influence the politics of private security. In order to better understand this political agency, it is again necessary to draw selectively upon both the nodal governance and anchored pluralism models. To begin with, it is crucial to recognise that when the same economic forces identified by the nodal governance theorists are viewed from the opposite side of the public/private divide, they serve to elevate the political agency of private security actors relative to state actors. This is because, in essence, they give the private security actors far more economic resources to invest in their political machinations. At the same time, however, it is also vital to

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acknowledge that when the state-centric political norms identified by the anchored pluralism theorists are viewed from the opposite side of the public/private divide, they serve to constrain the political agency of private security actors relative to state actors. This is due to the fact that these actors are operating against the grain of the prevailing statecentric beliefs about how security ought to be delivered which are so widely held by domestic populations across the globe (and especially in post-war Britain). Taking these insights together, then, it is possible to conclude that private security actors do have a significant degree of political agency in the interactions with the state, but that this agency does not allow them to dominate the terms of engagement. While their political agency is facilitated by the economic context, it is at the same time constrained by the political context in roughly equal measure. At the beginning of this chapter it was asserted that the concepts and arguments which give shape to the politics of private security take for granted (at least) four basic theoretical assumptions. With this in mind, the objective of this chapter has been to develop a better understanding of these assumptions so as to situate the politics of private security on solid theoretical ground. The ‘political economy of private security’ has now (it is hoped) accomplished this objective. As such, it is now time to move on to the theoretically informed empirical examination of the politics of private security in post-war Britain, which forms the centrepiece of this book.

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Part II The Politics of Private Security in Britain

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3 Emerging Agendas (1945–59)

At first, the politics of private security in post-war Britain was a relatively low-key affair. For the most part it involved only two actors – Securicor and the Metropolitan Police – and was conducted within a rather informal institutional environment. This was unsurprising given that the basic composition of the security sector had not been seriously reconsidered within government circles since the mid-nineteenth century, when Robert Peel’s new police institutions were accepted into the higher echelons of the British political system (McLaughlin 2007, pp. 4–5). Indeed, the actual negotiations between Securicor and the Metropolitan Police, which lasted for almost a decade, amounted to little more than a series of polite letters and some back-room machinations. No face-to-face contact was made, no ultimatums were issued and no media statements were circulated. Yet, despite this lack of ceremony, these exchanges are extremely revealing and important, for they chronicle the initial, rudimentary formation of the reform and re-legitimation agendas which would come to dominate these political negotiations over the next 50 years. They also glimpse the beginnings of the processes through which private security executives began to slowly and steadily augment the power and legitimacy of their companies within the post-war security sector. This chapter will chronologically trace the development of this early phase of the negotiations.

Core and periphery From the outset, it is important to set down some contextual information about the Metropolitan Police and Securicor in the immediate post-war era, with a particular emphasis on the way in which the uneven political terrain of the security sector served to facilitate and constrain 41

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the operations of these two actors. Post-war British culture was characterised by a very strong attraction towards state-directed solutions to social problems. It is often remarked that following victory in the Second World War, a profound sense of national pride and a belief in the virtues of the British state permeated the majority of the population. For instance, Le Grand (2006, p. 4) comments that: ‘[the] fact that the country had not only survived the war but had emerged on the winning side was widely ascribed to a spirit of national unity and a selfless dedication to the common cause’. As a consequence, the majority of the British population in the 1940s and 1950s – prompted in no small part by the government and the media (see McLaughlin 2007, Chapter 1) – seemed to be drawn towards the idea of a stable and universal social order guaranteed by the benevolent British state. Indeed, this idea formed a central component of what has since been widely termed the ‘post-war consensus’ (Kavanagh 1985, 1992). Significantly, the police were commonly considered to be the flagbearers of this national dedication to a common cause. Reiner (2000, p. 48) captures this status when he writes that ‘by the 1950s the police had become not merely accepted but lionized by the broad spectrum of opinion. In no other country has the police force been so much a symbol of national pride’, and, he continues, despite their necessary recourse to coercion, the police ‘were purported to be accountable through an almost mystic process of identification with the British people’ (p. 55). To be sure, it is important to note that this attraction to the police institution was not – and indeed never has been – universal. Loader and Mulcahy (2003, p. 52), for instance, emphasise that sentiments towards the police have certainly never been homogenous, but have rather been ‘structured by such axes of division as class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and age’. Yet at this point in post-war British history, such divisions were relatively minor, and within this context the Metropolitan Police, as the most distinguished and best resourced police force in the country, was endowed with extremely high levels of power and legitimacy. The circumstances of Securicor and the nascent private security industry at this time could not have been more different. Securicor has always been widely regarded as one of the pioneering private security companies in Britain. For instance, in their analysis of the British private security industry, George and Button (2000, p. 26) comment that Securicor ‘marked the beginning of the first “modern” security companies’. Draper (1978, p. 19), another commentator on the industry, reinforces this assertion when she writes that Securicor ‘can claim to be the precursor of the modern guard company in England’. Yet in 1945

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Securicor – or Night Guards Ltd as it was known at the time – employed only two security guards, who patrolled their clients’ premises on bicycles (South 1988, p. 21). This simple observation serves to illustrate very effectively just how small the industry was within Britain immediately after the War. Indeed, the fact that there appear to be no estimates of the size of the private security industry in 1945 itself suggests that its status was so insignificant and its operations so fragmented that no one considered it worthy of measurement. Moreover, in addition to its diminutive size, the private security industry was experiencing considerable public relations problems. The flipside of the British population’s attraction towards a state-directed, universal social order was a deep-rooted cultural resistance towards the very idea of private security provision, which seemed to grate against the general public’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be provided. Tom Clayton (1967, p. 12), for instance, remarks that during the early days of Night Guards the ‘[p]ress, public and police were uniformly hostile to the idea of private night watchmen’. This was because the notion of atomised and particularistic security provision, which has historically been evoked by the presence of the private security industry, did not sit comfortably with the concepts of national unity and a common public cause. So, while in the years immediately after the War the police were endowed with a huge amount of power and legitimacy, and were accordingly able to dominate the core of the security sector, private security actors were noticeably lacking in these attributes and were confined to the periphery. In short, private security was considered to be a distinctly ‘un-English’ institution during this phase of post-war history. Given the contrasting positions of the police and the private security industry, it would be fair to assert that the security sector during this period more closely resembled the set of institutional arrangements depicted in the monopoly model than in any of the other models examined in the previous chapter. This is because it seems that the economic forces and political norms structuring the security sector at this time were certainly aligned in a manner which privileged the agency of state actors and marginalised the agency of private security actors. The major economic shifts in supply and demand in the security sector which helped to facilitate the rise of the private security industry were yet to take effect. Phenomena such as rising crime rates, public fiscal constraints, security fetishism and the emergence of mass private property belonged to later decades. That said, there were soon signs that this monopolistic arrangement was not going to persist forever, for

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the activities of Night Guards throughout the 1950s illustrate that the politics of private security was nevertheless in the ascendance.

First contact Despite being confined to the margins of the security sector, by the early 1950s the private security industry was clearly beginning to expand. By 1951, Night Guards employed 170 security officers who were primarily engaged in the protection of industrial facilities, such as the Vauxhall Motors spare parts depot in Barnet, North London (Underwood 1997, p. 18). Furthermore, one estimate suggests that total private security industry sales within Britain at this time amounted to approximately £5 million (Randall and Hamilton 1972, p. 67), which indicates that there were now numerous other private security companies populating the security sector alongside Securicor. Indeed, drawing upon the 1951 census data, Jones and Newburn (1999a, p. 102) observe that there were no fewer than 46,950 individuals officially working in ‘Security occupations’ at this time. This certainly seems to confirm that Securicor was at the beginning of the 1950s just one of many private security companies (and also suggests that the £5 million estimate was very conservative). However, it must be recognised that not all of these individuals were employed in activities associated with the private security industry. In the 1951 census, the category of ‘Security occupations’ included those working as tidesmen, signalmen, meteorological reporters, park rangers and coast guards, to name but a few (General Register Office 1956, p. 111). This discrepancy is symptomatic of wider problem: as Jones and Newburn (1995) note elsewhere, it is extraordinarily difficult to obtain consistent and reliable information on the growth of the industry. Nevertheless, it is safe to assert that the early 1950s was certainly a period of growth. Yet because these companies were expanding from such a modest base and were experiencing such acute public relations difficulties resulting from their perceived lack of legitimacy, their impact upon the security sector as a whole remained extremely limited. Radzinowicz (1972, p. 13) has remarked, for instance, that at this time ‘the private security industry had barely gained a foothold in Britain’. It is within this context of small-scale growth and public relations difficulties that Night Guards first initiated contact with the Metropolitan Police, in the process laying down the beginnings of what would become the re-legitimation agenda. This contact came in the form of three letters sent between June and August 1950 by the Managing Director of Night Guards, R.D. Godfrey, to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan

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Police and one of his Captains. In these letters, Godfrey informed these high-ranking police officers that Night Guards had recently started an ‘Investigations Branch’ run by an ex-Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and Special Branch officer and, in order to expand this new service, he wanted to employ more ex-CID officers. Godfrey then enquired whether the Metropolitan Police would be willing to offer any assistance in this recruitment strategy (TNA: PRO MEPO 2/8739).1 Given that this correspondence represents the first recorded instance of any private security actor contacting one the of the core state institutions within the British security sector, it is important to examine the rationale behind these seemingly innocuous letters in some detail. To start with the obvious, Godfrey’s request could simply be taken at face value – it could be interpreted as nothing more than a means of optimising Night Guards’s recruitment strategy, for these ex-police officers would probably require less skills training compared to someone recruited from a non-security background. However, it could also be conjectured that Godfrey was seeking to employ ex-police officers because they represented a direct link to the key resource of legitimacy within the post-war security sector. In other words, by employing these particular individuals, Godfrey could have initiated the process of establishing a visible and relatively official-looking connection between Night Guards and the Metropolitan Police. And this in turn would serve to communicate to the average British citizen that Night Guards was actively integrating former professional representatives of the public good into its operations, thereby appealing to the widely-held statecentric expectations about how the security ought to be provided. To be sure, Night Guards would remain a private organisation, but if it employed ex-police officers then it would at least have a degree of ‘stateness’ incorporated into its services. Furthermore, if these individuals were recommended by high-ranking Metropolitan Police officials, then this ‘stateness’ would appear to be even more concrete. As such, if Godfrey’s correspondence is viewed as a strategy to capture legitimacy from the Metropolitan Police, this suggests that at this early stage he was laying down the foundations for the re-legitimation agenda. However, in order to give this interpretation more credibility, it is important to demonstrate how this legitimacy could then be translated into a commercial advantage, since as a commercial organisation Night Guards was ultimately driven by the imperative to increase its profit margins. Indeed, it is especially important to demonstrate this given that the early 1950s was a period of growth within the private security industry. What was the advantage, then, of investing time and resources

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into an attempt to capture legitimacy from the Metropolitan Police if an adequate customer base already existed? There are two convincing answers to this question. The first relates to the frequently made observation that security consumers often regard private security services as a ‘grudge purchase’ (Button 2008; George and Button 2000; Gill 2006). This involves recognising that, in accordance with their state-centric expectations about how security ought to be provided, the majority of the British population would generally prefer their security demands to be satisfied by the police and it is only when this is not possible that they turn towards private security provision (though it must be mentioned that the security stipulations of insurance companies also play a role in these consumer patterns). This attitude is touched upon by Goold, Loader and Thumala (2010, p. 11), who in their research into the consumption patterns of security discovered that ‘there seems to be relatively little “joy” to be found in whatever shopping for security takes place and little satisfaction to be derived from the process of seeking security. This, it seems, is grudge spending’. It is also described by Livingston and Hart (2003, pp. 160–1) when they write that: In common with another equally old and well-established profession, it [private security] has often provided a service considered somewhat shady and unsavoury – regardless of the size of demand – rarely something to be paraded publicly and certainly not as an icon of public integrity. This prevailing attitude means that private security companies such as Night Guards were encountering a customer base which was unwilling to pay high prices for private security services, and as a result profit margins were being forced downwards – indeed, this remains an industry-wide phenomenon today (see White and Smith 2009). From the perspective of these companies, then, the process of enhancing their legitimacy and public standing through the employment of ex-police officers could be viewed as a way of placating this attitude, in turn allowing them to charge more for their products. The second answer to this question relates to expansion opportunities. The industrial facilities protection sub-sector in which companies such as Night Guards were primarily operating in the 1950s represented only a very small proportion of the entire British security sector. During the 1940s and 1950s in particular, the majority of this sector was dominated by the police, and this dominance constituted a very significant barrier to entry. In those areas where the police were

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long-established as the main security provider, the widespread expectation that the state ought to be the only legitimate provider of security was especially strong, since the actual presence of the police served to constantly reinforce this political norm. In order to penetrate these state-dominated sectors of the security sector, private security companies such as Securicor were thus even more compelled to capture the key resource of legitimacy from the state, since this was one of the most effective means of unlocking the barrier to entry into these new markets. Both of these answers, then, support the argument that Godfrey was indeed pursuing a strategy of capturing legitimacy from the Metropolitan Police. However, as we will now see, at this time the Metropolitan Police was unwilling to share its legitimacy. Prior to Godfrey’s correspondence, the Metropolitan Police was certainly aware of the growth of the private security industry and had already developed the beginnings of a policy stance towards these organisations. For instance, a letter sent by the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to the Chief Constable of Birmingham in the early 1950s stated that: In 1948 . . . the question was considered of taking action against these firms under S. 10 of the Police Act, 1919 (covering uniform) and S. 2 of the Public Order Act, 1936 (usurping the duties of the police), but the Director of Public Prosecutions considered there to be insufficient evidence to support a prosecution but recommended they should be closely watched and the Home Office informed as to their activities. (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739) This letter demonstrates that the emergence of the private security industry greatly troubled the Metropolitan Police. In considering the application of section 10 of the Police Act 1919, which made it an offence to intentionally impersonate the appearance of a police officer, it was clearly concerned that British citizens might mistake a private security officer for a police officer, thereby undermining the status of the police. However, the issue of mistaken identity actually seemed to represent only the shallow end of the problem from the perspective of the Metropolitan Police. The fact that there was also concern that companies such as Night Guards could be interpreted within the remit of section 2 of the Public Order Act 1936, which proscribes the activities of any non-state groupings ‘organised or trained or equipped for the purpose of enabling them to be employed in usurping the functions of the police or of the armed forces of the Crown’, points to a much deeper

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problem. Interpreted in these terms, Night Guards was essentially being depicted by the Metropolitan Police not as a group of police impersonators, but rather as a private army seeking to overthrow the universal social order guaranteed by the state. The slight historical irony regarding this more grave interpretation is that the Public Order Act 1936 was passed in response to the violence and public disorder resulting from the growing fascist movement during the inter-war years (Reiner 1998, p. 42). This means that the Metropolitan Police was coming close to interpreting private security companies as possible accomplices of the fascists. In fact, however, the exact opposite was true, for at this time these companies were being employed by London’s wealthy elite to defend the status quo. As Bowden (1978, p. 253) remarks, ‘[t]he private police were in effect a precautionary measure to protect the penthouse set should disturbances spill over from their focus on London’s East End’. With this in mind, then, it could be contended that, taken together, private security companies such as Night Guards, the police and the Public Order Act 1936 actually represented complementary public and private sector responses to the same order-destabilising events. This historical nuance made no impression on the Metropolitan Police, however, which was inclined towards an aggressive policy stance in relation to the private security industry. Yet, as the Assistant Commissioner’s letter asserted, it did not have the legal authority to shut down private security companies using either the Police Act 1919 or the Public Order Act 1936. As a consequence, it decided instead upon the less aggressive strategy of simply ostracising the private security companies so as to avoid conferring any legitimacy upon their operations. This policy stance was exemplified by the fact that Godfrey received no response to his three letters. At this juncture, it is important to consider the logic behind these attempts to exclude companies such as Night Guards from the security sector. It is apparent that the actions of the Metropolitan Police do not fall directly into the reform agenda. This is because, in seeking first to shut down parts of the private security companies and subsequently to freeze them out of the security sector, it was not so much attempting to keep up the impression of a state monopoly over security provision as it was ensuring the reality of a state monopoly by removing the industry from the picture altogether. Importantly, the Metropolitan Police could pursue this hardline strategy with some degree of anticipated success at this time because, as the previous section made clear, in the years immediately after the War, the economic forces and political norms structuring the security sector were configured in such a manner

Emerging Agendas (1945–59) 49

as to massively privilege the agency of state actors and completely marginalise the agency of private security actors, thereby providing an incentive for state actors to actively monopolise the security sector. However, the seeds of the reform agenda were nevertheless embedded within this viewpoint, as events soon made clear. As the realignment of supply and demand within the security sector steadily began to feed the agency of private security actors over subsequent years, this monopolisation agenda soon started to transform into the reform agenda. This was because various state actors started to recognise that attempting to maintain an actual state monopoly in the face of an expanding private security industry was simply not a viable strategy, and that the reform agenda of controlling the industry so as at least to give the impression of some kind of state monopoly was in fact a much more achievable, pragmatic and attractive option. And, of course, the reform agenda also enabled the state actors to encounter the private security industry more on terms of their own choosing, which was something that the ‘freezing out’ strategy did not necessarily accomplish. Returning to 1950, however, what was clear from the first contact between these private security and state actors was that they were from the outset entering into political negotiations over the constitution of the security sector from very different standpoints. Furthermore, at this point the state actors were clearly winning these negotiations, in the process successfully reproducing something approaching a monopolistic set of institutional arrangements within the security sector. As we will see, however, during subsequent exchanges this winning margin gradually started to reduce as both the politics and economics of private security began to take hold within the security sector.

Channels of communication This chapter now moves forward three years to 1953, when the next phase of negotiations between Securicor and the Metropolitan Police took place. However, before proceeding with this analysis, a couple of important contextual points first need to be made. During the early 1950s, Night Guards became known to the British public as Security Corps. In response, the Home Office banned the company from trading under this name so as ‘to pacify those who alleged the company was little more than a private army’, which in turn resulted in the establishment of Securicor – an amalgamation of name Security Corps – on 1 January 1953 (Underwood 1997, p. 18). This sequence of events is interesting for two reasons. First, it demonstrates again that there was a

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clear expectation within sections of the population that the state should intervene in the security sector in order to control the activities of private security companies, thereby pointing once more to the political norms structuring the security sector. Second, it shows that the Home Office was sufficiently motivated by these state-centric expectations, together with the growing presence of companies such as Securicor – which had doubled in size over the previous two years (Underwood 1997, p. 19) – to step into the political arena so as to control such seemingly trivial matters as the company’s trading name. This willingness to engage with – and to shape the activities of – the industry hints at the latent reform agenda residing inside the Home Office, although this was not to be properly witnessed in full for another decade, as this government department did not become embroiled in the politics of private security until the early 1960s. This context aside, however, in 1953 Godfrey was still pursuing his strategy of attempting to capture legitimacy from the Metropolitan Police, though with a slight change in tactics. Given his apparent failure to provoke a response from the Commissioner, Godfrey switched targets and instead sent a letter to another high-ranking police official – the Commander of the CID. In this letter, he explained that Securicor was publishing a coronation issue of its in-house magazine called Securicier and optimistically mentioned that: ‘We are very anxious to include an article on Scotland Yard by somebody of repute’ (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739). It is contended here that this seemingly innocuous request can again be interpreted as part of a strategy to create a link between Securicor and the state, a link which could have been used to communicate to the British public that the Metropolitan Police was endorsing Securicor’s services, in the process infusing the company with the ‘stateness’ which was considered so essential for legitimately operating within the British security sector. Like his attempts to gain employment referrals from the Commissioner, then, this strategy illustrates how Godfrey was interpreting the political norms which structure the security sector to mean that if commercial organisations were to legitimately and effectively operate alongside state institutions in this traditionally sovereign domain, then they would have to somehow publicly demonstrate some kind of affiliation with the state. In other words, this strategy can be viewed as a further stage in the ongoing development of the industry’s re-legitimation agenda. Records show that the Commander neither ignored this letter nor provided a direct response, but instead referred Godfrey’s request to

Emerging Agendas (1945–59) 51

the Metropolitan Police’s Public Information Department. From there, the Department’s secretary dispensed the following advice to one of the public information officers a few days later: An article by somebody from Scotland Yard on the work of Scotland Yard in the Coronation number of Securicier would, no doubt, help indirectly to publicise the work of Securicor Ltd, and in view of the correspondence in these files [of the Office of the Commissioner] it would not appear to be the desire of the Police to associate themselves too closely with this organisation. (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739) Concurring with the secretary’s advice, the public information officer wrote on the same day: I think that the inference might be drawn from the publication of such an article that there was some association between the company and this force; or at least approval of the company by the Commissioner. I agree that we should send a polite refusal. (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739) Records reveal that a ‘polite refusal’ was accordingly sent to Securicor four days later. Significantly, then, these internal notes reveal the gradual consolidation of the Metropolitan Police’s policy stance regarding private security companies such as Securicor, which was now consistently being viewed by the Metropolitan Police as an undesirable intruder into the security sector, representing a threat to the status quo. This is evidenced in the attempts made by the Metropolitan Police to actively dissociate itself from Securicor so as to avoid the possibility of conferring any ‘publicity’ or ‘approval’ upon the company. However, it is also important to recognise that while the negotiations were still clearly proceeding in accordance with the Metropolitan Police’s attempts to maintain some kind of state monopoly in the security sector, there was slightly more reciprocation in this episode when compared with the previous exchange between these two institutions. While in 1950 Godfrey’s letters received no response whatsoever from the Metropolitan Police, during this round of correspondence his communications were at least rewarded with a ‘polite refusal’. To be sure, this was only a very nominal concession and hardly signified the emergence of any relationship of power dependence between the two sets of actors in some kind of security network. Nevertheless, it did demonstrate that the Metropolitan Police was now willing to acknowledge the

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presence of private security companies within the security sector and, moreover, that it was ready to set a precedent for a two-way relationship to develop between them. This therefore indicates a further stage in the gradual formation of the reform agenda, in which state actors were recognising the activities of private security companies, but at the same time were attempting to control them in various ways in an effort to maintain the impression of a state monopoly over security provision and to dictate the terms of engagement.

Fabricating legitimacy This section now moves forward again to 1959, which proved to be an eventful and decisive year in the ongoing negotiations between Securicor and the Metropolitan Police. Before investigating this phase of negotiations, however, it is again important to introduce some contextual information. By the end of the 1950s, Securicor had once more doubled in size, now employing 650 guards (Underwood 1997, p. 21). Furthermore, many other private security companies also appeared to be expanding successfully. For instance, Plant Protection – the company which later turned into Factoryguards and then into Group 4 – had by now moved from offices above a grocers shop in Macclesfield into the Birmingham market, where it was employing some 200 security guards (The Times, 2010). This again suggests that despite their notable public relations problems, some private security companies were successfully extending their operations, thereby pointing to the changing economic context of the security sector. But, as we will see, regardless of this organic economic growth, it was equally clear that these companies were still actively pursuing their political strategy of capturing legitimacy from state institutions. Therefore, they still clearly viewed their opportunities for long-term expansion to be dependent upon the realisation of the re-legitimation agenda. In addition, it is also important to note that two years previously, in 1957, Sir Philip Margetson retired from his position as Assistant Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police to become a board member of Securicor (Clayton 1967, p. 21). Margetson’s police contacts were then utilised in subsequent years to increase Securicor’s leverage in its interactions with the Metropolitan Police. This signifies the beginning of another aspect of the re-legitimation strategy which continues to this day – that is, the appointment of former high-ranking police officers onto the boards of private security companies so as to both symbolically blur the distinction between public and private security provision

Emerging Agendas (1945–59) 53

and also to enhance the bargaining position of the industry by tapping into the ‘old boy’ police network (Bunyan 1977, p. 241). Yet, despite this notable addition to Securicor’s ranks, the political negotiations in 1959 were not directly initiated by the company. In early 1959 the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police received a letter from a security manager employed by Crown Agents – the public company which represented the interests of British colonial administrations – enquiring about Securicor. In an effort to win the contract for guarding Crown Agent’s head office, Securicor had informed this security officer that its employees ‘work in close liaison with Scotland Yard’ (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739). As a consequence, the security officer wanted to discover the nature of this ‘close liaison’. To begin with, this exchange is interesting because it demonstrates that in order to promote its services within the post-war security sector, Securicor was again not content to simply market its services as ‘Securicor products’, but was rather compelled to advertise a connection between itself and prominent state institutions such as the Metropolitan Police. This connection served to give the appearance that its operations were endowed with the essential quality of ‘stateness’. In other words, it represented another stage in the development of the re-legitimation agenda. Furthermore, the fact that this strategy had attracted the attention of the Crown Agents security officer seems to suggest that it was actually working to some extent. On this occasion, the Commissioner delegated responsibility for dealing with this enquiry to Assistant Commissioner ‘A’, who in turn appeared to be perplexed by the company’s claims of any close liaisons with Scotland Yard. In an internal communication to Assistant Commissioner ‘D’, for instance, he asserted that ‘the organisation . . . has never received any police approval, and it cannot be said that the liaison between us amounts to any more than the normal relationship between Police and other privately employed watchmen’ (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739). In the same communication he then proceeded to speculate upon the source of this seemingly unfounded claim. He wrote that: At the recent exhibition of diamonds at Christie’s Sale Rooms . . . Securicor were engaged on the internal security and on this occasion, because of the great value of the exhibits, arrangements were made for a direct telephone line to be installed between Christie’s and West End Central Police Station and for guards to telephone the station at half hourly intervals during the time the exhibition was closed. This

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was an additional security measure and would have been afforded to any firm responsible for the security arrangements on such an occasion. This instance would hardly be grounds to the claim of working in close liaison with Scotland Yard. (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739) Taking this exhibition to be the foundation of Securicor’s specious claim, a couple of weeks later a letter was accordingly dispatched to the Crown Agents security officer, denying the existence of any ‘close liaison’, thus bringing to a close this minor episode in the politics of private security (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739). Though brief, this episode is nevertheless illustrative of the evolving agendas of the private security and state actors. Securicor was pursuing the re-legitimation agenda with ever more determination, resorting to fabricating links with core state actors so as to capture more legitimacy. At the same time, the Metropolitan Police was now committing more time and resources to the task of combating this agenda, in the process demonstrating that it was taking the activities of companies such as Securicor more seriously than ever before. Before moving on to the next episode in Securicor’s ongoing interactions with the Metropolitan Police, which took place during the second half of 1959, it is worth briefly examining further the significance of this diamond exhibition. In an interview conducted by the reporter Tom Clayton during the mid-1960s, Sir Philip Margetson was asked to pinpoint those key moments when Securicor’s operations really started to thrive. He response was: ‘On the day that de Beers, the diamond people, awarded us the contract to guard the Ageless Diamond Exhibition at Christie’s showrooms in January 1959. For fifteen days we had diamonds worth over five million pounds in our care’ (Clayton 1967, p. 21). Indeed, Clayton comments that the diamond exhibition contract ‘gave security companies a new status, both business and professional’ (p. 21). So, regardless of whether or not this exhibition was the basis for fabricated claims of cooperation between Securicor and the Metropolitan Police, and regardless of the Metropolitan Police’s continuing efforts to suppress the private security industry’s status, it appears that successful private security companies such as Securicor were still performing well within the sector, in the process allowing them to accumulate more resources with which to augment their power in their ongoing negotiations with the Metropolitan Police. In other words, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the economics of private security was serving to augment the agency of private security actors in their political negotiations with state actors, as the next section will demonstrate.

Emerging Agendas (1945–59) 55

Terms of engagement This section now moves on to the second half of 1959, when the final series of exchanges between Securicor and the Metropolitan Police took place. These exchanges began with a now-familiar strategy. After Securicor’s foiled attempts at fabricating legitimacy, Godfrey subsequently returned to the approach he first adopted in 1950 – that is, writing to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in an effort to obtain an official endorsement from the most prominent police institution in the country. In July 1959 Godfrey sent another letter – which, significantly, was co-signed by Sir Philip Margetson, now a Director of Securicor – to the Commissioner to inform him that Securicor was establishing a new ‘mobile patrol’ service. He also asked in this letter if the Commissioner would care to comment upon this new service and, in what can certainly be construed as an attempt to influence the nature of any such comment, subsequently remarked that: ‘I might add that something similar is in being in the Birmingham area and is, I believe, well received by the local police’ (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739). Two important points stem from this letter. First, in expanding its operations into the mobile patrolling sub-sector, Securicor was clearly still finding new opportunities for economic growth, once again indicating the background presence of the economics of private security. Second, in a manner very similar to its earlier expansion into the investigative services sub-sector, it wanted these new operations to be approved by the Metropolitan Police so as to endow them with a greater degree of legitimacy than otherwise would have been the case, since this would in theory make these new operations more attractive to potential customers. As we have seen, this endorsement-seeking strategy represented a now relatively standard component of Securicor’s re-legitimation agenda. Yet this strategy was especially important in this instance when it is considered that mobile patrol services had traditionally been closely associated with the actual concrete operations of the police and had therefore been imbued with an especially strong sense of ‘stateness’. In other words, the population’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered were particularly pronounced in this region of the security sector. State-endorsed legitimacy was thus a central resource in this projected expansion of Securicor’s operations. Significantly, the Commissioner did not disregard Godfrey’s letter as he had done on previous occasions, but instead delegated the matter to one of his Assistant Commissioners and maintained his own involvement throughout. Two weeks later, Assistant Commissioner ‘A’ wrote

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The Politics of Private Security

the following internal communication to Assistant Commissioner ‘C’ with regard to Securicor’s new ‘mobile patrol service’: The extension of the activities of Securicor to visiting various premises, involving as it must do movement through the streets by car and, no doubt, the examination of the exterior of premises, raises the problem of whether they are likely, because of the similarity in uniform, to become identified with the police in the eyes of the public, and in this respect it seems to be a most undesirable development. (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739) Here again, then, we come across one of the key components of the Metropolitan Police’s policy stance with reference to Securicor – that is, an acute concern that the British population might begin to connect the operations of the company with those of the police, thereby blurring the public/private boundary which was so central to its high levels of legitimacy and power. This latest development in Securicor’s re-legitimation strategy clearly represented an ongoing concern for Assistant Commissioner ‘A’, for soon afterwards he soon submitted the following internal communication to the Commissioner regarding Securicor’s proposed ‘mobile patrol service’: The Midland Bank has already instituted a system to visit and check their own premises. The patrols wear bank messengers’ uniform which could not be mistaken for police uniform. It is one matter, however, to look after one’s own premises, but a different proposition when a body of uniformed security agents is maintained to be hired out to any firm prepared to pay for them. (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739) This communication is significant not only because it once again reinforces the Metropolitan Police’s ongoing portrayal of private security companies as something approximating a ‘private army’, but because it also specifies more clearly what type of private security provision falls into this particular category. This specification involves making a distinction between what has subsequently been termed ‘in-house’ and ‘contract’ private security. In-house private security refers to the internal recruitment of private security officers by organisations, both public and private, whose primary business is not security provision, as the Midland Bank was doing in the above quote. In contrast, ‘contract’ private security refers to the

Emerging Agendas (1945–59) 57

recruitment of private security officers from external companies which specialise in security provision, such as Securicor. As the Assistant Commissioner’s comments illustrate and as subsequent evidence suggests, in-house private security operations were – and still are – considered to be less problematic than contract private security operations within government circles. This viewpoint seems to be in part influenced by the fact that while the everyday operations of in-house private security officers generally include many non-security functions such as public relations and reception duties, the operations of contract private security officers are more closely aligned with the activities of conventional state security provision (Jones and Newburn 1998, p. 56). This means, first, that they are more likely to directly compete with state actors within the security sector and, second, that there is a higher probability that they will resort to the use of physical force during the course of their work – both of which concern the state. It is important to note at this stage, then, that the remainder of this book is mostly concerned with contract as opposed to in-house private security companies, for it is these organisations which have been more openly contesting the constitution of the security sector and, by extension, have been implicated in the politics of private security. Returning now to the undertakings of Assistant Commissioner ‘A’ in July 1959, it appears that his concerns regarding Securicor’s new ‘mobile patrol’ operations were sufficient for him to reconsider the Metropolitan Police’s former policy of attempting to close down the most threatening parts of the industry. In a manner reminiscent of the police’s aggressive reaction to private security companies in 1948, he suggested to the Commissioner in a further internal communication that the Metropolitan Police should resurrect the idea of undermining the legal basis of private security companies using section 10 of the Police Act 1919 and section 2 of the Public Order Act 1936. Furthermore, in order to execute this legislation more effectively, he raised the possibility of involving the Home Office for the purposes of reinforcement (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739). Rather than pursuing the (already once rejected) strategy outlined by his Assistant, however, the Commissioner opted instead for a far more measured course of action, replying that: I am still in doubt about this whole project. There is the question of similarity of uniforms . . . and there are other grounds for objection we could put forward. I think we might as well see the writers [Godfrey and Margetson] now and give them our views and objections. I would prefer to adopt this procedure and to keep H.O. [Home Office] out

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of it at this stage. They can always be informed later if necessary. (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739) Importantly, there is no evidence that any such meeting between Godfrey, Margetson and anyone from the Metropolitan Police ever occurred – indeed, records suggest that no face-to-face meetings between private security and state actors were to take place until the mid-1960s. Instead, it appears that the Commissioner was content to write a letter to Godfrey a week later, explaining that Securicor could proceed with its new ‘mobile patrols’, but that the company must acknowledge the proscriptions set down in section 10 of the Police Act 1919 and section 2 of the Public Order Act 1936. In addition, he also firmly requested that the company continue to provide the Commissioner’s Office with updates of the scheme’s progress (TNA: PRO, MEPO 2/8739). This exchange highlights some significant developments in the political negotiations between Securicor and the Metropolitan Police. To begin with, Godfrey’s ongoing attempts to enhance the legitimacy of his company by establishing official connections with the Metropolitan Police were now being met with an increasingly cooperative response. While high-ranking officials within the Metropolitan Police were clearly still harbouring substantial reservations about engaging with Securicor – as evidenced in the revived proposals to enforce the Police Act 1919 and the Public Order Act 1936 – the Commissioner eventually, though rather reluctantly, consented to Securicor’s expansion into the ‘mobile patrol’ sector. This reluctant consent can hardly be described as an endorsement of Securicor’s operations and did not serve to transfer any great degree of legitimacy from the Metropolitan Police to the company. However, it did mark a more concerted shift away from the ‘freezing out’ policies which the institution had implemented towards the beginning of the decade and it also had the effect of setting down a more reliable channel through which Securicor could continue to engage with the Metropolitan Police. By the end of the decade, then, an increasingly clear set of agendas was beginning to emerge in the politics of private security. On one side, Securicor’s re-legitimation agenda was becoming ever more crystallised, for the company’s managing director, R.D. Godfrey, was clearly and consistently interpreting the population’s state-centric expectations about security provision to mean that if he could somehow create a link between Securicor and the Metropolitan Police, then he would succeed in enhancing the company’s status within the security sector. Furthermore, with the economic shifts in supply and demand during the 1950s,

Emerging Agendas (1945–59) 59

which were gradually serving to augment the position of the private security industry within the security sector, the company was able to pursue this agenda with ever higher chances of success, as evidenced by the Commissioner’s reluctant acceptance of the new mobile patrols service toward the end of the 1950s. One the other side, key members of the Metropolitan Police, such as the Commissioner, were increasingly turning towards the reform agenda, for they were recognising that it was no longer possible to simply disregard the growing presence of private security companies within the security sector, and that the police would instead have to accept them. Yet the police would not accept the expansion of these companies passively since these reformers, influenced by the same state-centric expectations about security provision, together with their own desire to uphold the status of the police institution, sought to control the private security companies in various ways so as to maintain the impression that the state monopolised the security sector and to dictate the terms of engagement with the industry to some extent. By the end of the decade, this was achieved in the rather rudimentary manner of simply warning Securicor about the proscriptions set out in the Police Act 1919 and the Public Order Act 1936, as well as stipulating that Securicor must provide the Commissioner’s Office with updates of its activities. It is significant to emphasise, then, that at this early stage in the political negotiations, the re-legitimation and reform agendas were pitched in a relatively antagonistic relationship. This was because neither the private security nor state actors had yet connected their political preferences with the issue of regulation. Once this started to happen, as later chapters will demonstrate, the politics of private security slowly began to take on a different character as both the re-legitimators and the reformers found some common ground.

4 The Regulation Debate (1960–9)

In the second phase of the negotiations, which took place during the 1960s, the elementary re-legitimation and reform agendas set down over the previous few years became steadily more concretised within the political arena as they were assimilated into a broader set of institutions, most notably the British Security Industry Association and the Home Office. This in turn catapulted the politics of private security out of the informal environment of politely written personal correspondence and into the corridors of Whitehall and the national press. Moreover, during this era the negotiations increasingly came to revolve around a single issue: the statutory regulation of the private security industry. However, far from regulation serving as a rallying point for the forging of political alliances between private security and state actors – as it would do in subsequent decades – during the 1960s it remained for the most part a divisive issue, causing tension both between and within these two camps. This chapter will chronologically chart this second – and often highly discordant – phase of the politics of private security.

Uniforms and regulation In the first phase of the politics of private security, the interests of the British state were represented almost exclusively by the Metropolitan Police. During the 1960s, however, a collection of civil servants working in F Division of the Home Office entered into the political arena and soon started to dominate the state’s agenda. They also brought with them the considerable political resources of their department, which in turn served to change the complexion of the politics of private security by raising the profile of the negotiations and channelling them towards more concrete policy outputs. These civil servants entered into the 60

The Regulation Debate (1960–9) 61

negotiations during one of the Central Conference of Chief Constables – an assembly which came together biannually under Home Office chairmanship – meetings in 1962, when it was decided that a Working Party on Mock Uniforms and Vehicles should be established so as to facilitate discussion between Home Office officials and senior police officers about the private security industry (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). As the title of the Working Party indicates, the main purpose of this new forum was to address the problems resulting from the appropriation of key state symbols (police uniforms and vehicles) by private security officers during the course of their work. But given that this particular problem had certainly been on the Home Office’s radar since the late 1940s, when the Director of Prosecutions was asked to consider whether or not section 10 of the Police Act 1919 could be applied to private security officers, why did Home Office civil servants decide that 1962 signified the right moment to engage with this issue? Official records provide no clear answer to this important question. However, two plausible reasons can be put forward. The first relates to the ongoing economic expansion of the private security industry. For instance, in 1960 Securicor was purchased by Kensington Palace Hotels Ltd, a move which substantially increased the volume of financial investment pumped into the company’s operations (Underwood 1997, p. 22). Furthermore, in the same year De La Rue International, the world’s largest commercial banknote printer and paper manufacturer, founded the company Security Express, which was to become another market leader within a decade (Clayton 1967, p. 22). Indeed, against the background of these expansions, Clayton (p. 22) argues that ‘[i]t was in 1960 that industrial security began to emerge as Big Business in its own right’. Shifts in supply and demand within the security sector were therefore putting an increasing number of private security companies on the map. And it is more than likely that this growing economic presence served to draw the Home Office’s attention towards the industry during the early 1960s. The second factor relates to changes in the institutional arrangements between the Home Office and the police during the early 1960s. In historical terms, relations between these state actors had always been very close. In 1829 the Metropolitan Police was established by Robert Peel ‘as quite literally a sub-department of the Home Office’ (Abbeydale 1983, p. 24). Furthermore, in 1919 F Division of the Home Office was set up specifically to develop policy for and liaise with the various police forces of England and Wales (Emsley 1996, p. 161). Yet despite this closeness the police were generally given a sizeable degree of independence

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from the Home Office on the grounds that decentralised policing would serve to protect the liberty of the population by preventing the establishment of a single, all-powerful centralised police force (Emsley 1996, pp. 162–3). However, 1960 marked an important turning point in this institutional set-up because it signified the beginning of what Emsley terms ‘the steady march of centralisation’ (p. 160), in which the territorial police forces were gradually brought more directly under the control of the Home Office following the recommendations of the high-profile Royal Commission on the Police. While many of the Commission’s recommendations were not formally implemented until the Police Act 1964, the shift in attitude marked by the Commission could certainly be viewed as another contextual factor causing the Home Office to not only follow the Metropolitan Police into the negotiations in 1962, but to dictate them. However, regardless of the rationale, it was clear that in the early 1960s the Home Office was preparing to engage with the politics of private security. About a year then passed between the decision to establish the Working Party on Mock Uniforms and Vehicles and the forum’s first proper meeting, which eventually took place in May 1963. Significantly, it was a meeting for state representatives only – it was chaired by A.W. Glanville, a Home Office civil servant from F Division, and attended by six Chief Constables and one Chief Superintendent. This was because the purpose of the meeting was to set a clear state agenda for the forthcoming face-to-face negotiations with industry representatives (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). Importantly, the resulting agenda-setting process – which revolved around the issues of uniforms and regulation – represents an important stage in the development of the reform agenda. The first issue considered by the Working Party was the growing trend of private security officers wearing mock police uniforms. Thumala, Goold and Loader (forthcoming) have termed this phenomenon ‘symbolic borrowing’ and have described its function thus: ‘The use of uniforms, badges and vehicles that resemble those of the police (and are designed to do so) are all indicative of an attempt to secure legitimacy by association.’ It represents another strategy used by private security actors to imbue their private sector status with an air of ‘stateness’, thereby appealing to the majority of the population’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered. In other words, this strategy can be viewed as another part of the industry’s re-legitimation agenda. Significantly, ten years earlier it was thought by some senior officers in the Metropolitan Police that this symbolic borrowing might

The Regulation Debate (1960–9) 63

be serious enough to warrant shutting down the offending companies using section 10 of the Police Act 1919. However, within the context of the emerging reform agenda, in which the political objective was not to eliminate the industry but merely to exercise control over its operations, the Working Party judged that the optimal outcome was now simply to dictate the terms of this symbolic borrowing. This was due to the fact that this would give both the impression that the state continued to exercise some kind of monopoly in the security sector and would also allow these state actors to influence more effectively the terms on which they would be engaging with industry representatives in the future. The Working Party sought to accomplish this objective by proposing modifications to section 10 of the Police Act 1919, which would allow it to be more effectively employed to stamp out the practice of private security officers wearing mock police uniforms (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). The timing of these proposals could not have been better, for at that moment a new Police Bill was being drafted in Parliament in order to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Police. As a result, the proposals of the Working Party were swiftly incorporated into the drafting procedures through a House of Lords amendment and soon emerged as section 52(2) of the Police Act 1964, which read: Any person who, not being a constable, wears any article of police uniform in circumstances where it gives him an appearance so nearly resembling that of a member of a police force as to be calculated to deceive shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding £100. With the passing of this legislation, the Working Party members had, at least on the surface, successfully deployed their political and administrative resources to both advance their reform agenda and, at the same time, to keep in check the industry’s re-legitimation agenda. However, a distinction has to be made here between policy outputs (the concrete product of a policy-making process) and policy outcomes (the actual impact of that concrete product upon society). While this amended legislation was certainly a respectable policy output, subsequent experience suggests that it did not translate into a particularly successful policy outcome. Over a decade after the passing of this legislation, for instance, Bunyan (1977, p. 235) was able to write that ‘[m]ost [private security] firms use police or military-style uniforms’. This is because, he

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continued, offences which fall under section 52(2) of the Police Act 1964 are rarely brought to prosecution. Indeed, only a cursory examination today of the industry’s promotional material is enough to establish that private security officers continue to wear uniforms which closely resemble those worn by the police. This particular dimension of the industry’s re-legitimation strategy is still therefore being pursued almost 50 years after the Police Act 1964. Once the Working Party members had finished considering the issue of uniforms, they moved on to the issue of regulation. An internal communication written by Glanville, the Working Party’s Chairman, reveals that this particular matter was scheduled for debate primarily because the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police supported the introduction of private security regulation (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). Significantly, this was the first time that the idea of regulation had been directly connected to the reform agenda – the logic being that regulation would constitute a very effective institutional mechanism for controlling the private security industry, thereby establishing the primacy of the state within the security sector. However, the minutes of the meeting show that the Working Party disagreed with the Commissioner’s assessment: The Working Party were not in favour of registration or licensing of commercial security organisations, which would involve, or appear to involve some official guarantee of probity, if not efficiency and would lay the registration authority open to criticism for misdeeds of the firms. (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626) This is an extremely important judgement, for the members of the Working Party seemed to recognise that the consequences of regulation would indeed be completely different from those of an amended section 10 of the Police Act 1919. This is because while legislation on the use of mock police uniforms would allow the state to control the activities of the industry from a distance within the context of a very impersonal command and control relationship, the introduction of regulation would bring the state and the industry closer together in a legally grounded and official-looking relationship, which could in turn have the unintended effect of conferring state legitimacy upon the regulated private security companies. This point was succinctly reiterated by Glanville a few months later, when he wrote in an internal communication to Graham-Harrison, the Deputy Under-Secretary of State in charge of F Division, that ‘the words “approved by the Home

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Secretary” would provide the companies with a valuable piece of propaganda’ (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). In other words, then, although regulation would contribute towards the reform agenda by establishing a very effective mechanism for controlling the industry, it would at the same time unwittingly advance the re-legitimation agenda by conferring some kind of state approval upon the activities of the industry. And it seems that members of the Working Party, unlike the Commissioner, did not regard this as a worthwhile trade-off. This decision was significant for two reasons. First, it clarified how the Home Office and police actors were going to address the issue of regulation in subsequent political negotiations with industry representatives. Second, it also pointed to an emerging split between different camps within the reform agenda – that is, pro-regulation reformers and the antiregulation reformers. This would prove to be an important internal division within the Home Office over subsequent years, for the antiregulation reformers who were attempting to dictate the reform agenda were pitching themselves against both the industry and a powerful enemy within.

The enemy within With the swift and successful passage of the amended legislation on police uniforms, the Working Party on Mock Uniforms and Vehicles had succeeded in accomplishing its primary objective. However, the issue of regulation was deemed to be sufficiently important to justify keeping the forum alive under the new guise of the Working Party on Private Security Organisations. Indeed, an indication of just how significant the issue of private security regulation was becoming was the fact that members of this Working Party, especially Glanville, conducted another round of agenda-setting talks on this issue before finally inviting the industry representatives to Whitehall for a face-to-face meeting. These talks revolved around a twin set of objectives, both of which served to consolidate the anti-regulation reform agenda: first, that a mechanism of controlling the private security companies must be found which would not involve regulation or any other institutional mechanism which might serve to confer legitimacy upon the industry; second, that the Home Office and the police must be united and resolute in their rejection of regulation as a means of reforming the industry. This section will examine these two dimensions of the agenda-setting discussions in turn. In the autumn of 1964 Glanville began laying the foundations for the first meeting of the Working Party on Private Security Organisations.

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The specific rationale for holding this meeting was neatly articulated by him in the following internal communication: Perhaps the main justification for it would be that the development and multiplication of these organisations is a matter of public concern in which the Home Office is bound to be implicated and perhaps we should put ourselves in the position of being able to say that we have had discussions with their representatives. (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626) This rationale provides a clear delineation of the logic underlying the reform agenda, especially with regard to the way in which this agenda was being shaped by the political norms which structure the security sector. Glanville appears to be making the following four-part political calculation: i) the majority of the British population share an expectation that security provision ought to be monopolised by the state; ii) the expansion of private security provision clashes with this expectation, in turn creating ‘a matter of public concern’; iii) the public will in turn expect the state to address this concern by introducing mechanisms designed to control the industry, while in the process giving the impression that the state continues to exercise at least some kind of monopoly over security provision; and iv) introducing such control mechanisms will also allow the state actors to more effectively establish the terms on which they encounter industry representatives. The difficult question for Glanville at the time, however, was how to control the industry without resorting to statutory regulation. The solution to this difficult question was provided by GrahamHarrison, who suggested that the Working Party should ‘induce them [the private security companies] to form a central body, with which the police, and when appropriate the Home Office could discuss any problems that may arise’ (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). To be sure, this ‘central body’ would not form a proactive, forward-looking mechanism for controlling the industry, but it would at least allow these state actors to communicate to the population that some kind of control mechanism was already in place should any major problems relating to the industry need to be resolved. Interestingly, however, something similar to the envisaged central body did in fact already exist, namely the International Professional Security Association (IPSA), which was founded in 1958 with the aim of promoting professionalism within the industry (George and Button 2000, p. 42), but was apparently rejected by the Working Party as the foundation for the proposed central body.

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There are two possible reasons why these civil servants decided not to utilise this body in future consultations. First, IPSA was created specifically to represent small and medium-sized private security companies, so the large companies with which the Home Office and the police were principally concerned were not members of this organisation (George and Button 2000, p. 42). Second, and probably more importantly, it was evident that they wanted to influence the terms on which this central body was to be established so as to ensure that its members would conform as far as possible with the reform agenda, and this was far more easily accomplished by encouraging the construction of a new organisation as opposed to reshaping the existing terms of an already-established one. Indeed, David Cowden, who began working for Securicor in 1969 and later became Chairman of the Working Party-sponsored ‘central body’ – which was eventually called the British Security Industry Association (BSIA) – interpreted the Home Office’s decision-making process in precisely these terms: ‘The BSIA was set up as an organisation that would from time to time allow the government to have a dialogue, if only to defend the government’s position of it ever got attacked on the whole thing’ (private interview 2007). This observation would be confirmed at numerous points over the next few years. Critically, then, this solution in theory served to establish a control mechanism which successfully avoided the pitfall of regulation – that is, unintentionally conferring legitimacy upon the industry’s operations. However, this was not entirely the case. Glanville recognised that even this strategy would involve holding face-to-face discussions with industry representatives, in the process conferring some degree of legitimacy upon their activities. He wrote in September 1964, for instance, that: there is the danger that, merely by taking the initiative in arranging a meeting, we shall in practice have committed ourselves to developing increasingly close relationships with the organisations . . . Some measure of official recognition, guidance and help seems implicit in the invitation to join in talks. (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626) Glanville also presumed (rightly as it turned out) that the industry representatives would not pass up this opportunity to actively develop closer connections with the state by, for example, ‘seek[ing] more positive support for the international security exhibitions’, which was something they had attempted to do both in 1961 and 1963, although with no success (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). In Glanville’s view, however, these negative trade-offs appeared to be minor compared to those

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which would result from the establishment of a legally grounded regulatory regime, and he accordingly advised members of the Working Party that they might simply have to participate in such industry events so as to facilitate the construction of the central body, writing that: ‘in the context of attempting to persuade representatives of the organisations to cooperate with the police service and with the Home Office it might be difficult to withhold some degree of cooperation in these activities’ (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). This concession is particularly interesting because it signifies the moment when a genuine relationship of power dependence started to develop between the private security and state actors within a very basic security sector network, for key state actors were now prepared to exchange a limited degree of legitimacy in return for the industry representatives’ compliance in establishing a central body. This elucidates, then, how the constitution of the security sector was moving ever further away from the institutional arrangements depicted in the monopoly model and was becoming an increasingly contested domain characterised by the politics of private security. With the game plan for establishing the central body mapped out, Glanville then turned to the second part of the agenda-setting process: ensuring that in any future negotiations with industry representatives, the Working Party would present a united front against the idea of introducing regulation. This would prove to be a very complex political manoeuvre since it involved encountering the enemy within, namely the pro-regulation reformers inside the Home Office and the police, a number of whom held extremely high-profile positions. To begin with, there was the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who was in favour of statutory regulation on the grounds that it would provide a more effective legal mechanism through which to control the industry’s operations. In an internal communication written during the autumn of 1964 Glanville referred the Commissioner’s preference for regulation as ‘evidently a thorny problem’ (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). However, the situation was about to become even more complicated for Glanville, as a few months later Frank Soskice, the Home Secretary, developed both a sudden interest in private security and a disposition towards the pro-regulation reform agenda. In January 1965 Soskice asked Home Office civil servants for information on ‘Securicor and other private protection organisations’ and loosely contextualised this request by saying that ‘[q]uestions have been asked and I should know more than I do’ (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). He was immediately provided with a succinct briefing note, the final

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line of which read ‘our present view is that there is no immediate case for regulation’ (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). This concluding sentence was clearly intended to bring Soskice in line with the anti-regulation reform agenda, but he was not satisfied by this argument and responded thus: There is a feeling that services of this sort should only be undertaken by the police, and anything like ‘vigilantes’, or (although happily we are miles from this) private armies would excite extreme public resentment. But should anything occur like a fight between these organisations and gangsters there would be immediate disquiet. Has the time not come when if they are to operate they must be strictly publicly controlled? (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626) Soskice’s strategy for dealing with the problems presented by private security provision was therefore to implement a system of ‘strict public controls’ along the lines of statutory regulation – he was, in other words, clearly inclined towards the pro-regulation reform agenda. This prompted a more persuasively pitched anti-regulation briefing note, which was sent to the Home Secretary in April 1965. It read: The legend ‘Registered by the Secretary of State’, which would no doubt be used by firms in their publicity, might be taken by the public as carrying some guarantee, particularly in view of the nature of the services provided by these firms, and it might be suggested that the Secretary of State had some responsibility for making good any loss that might be incurred though inefficiency or negligence, or through mere failure to safeguard valuable property effectively. (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626) This effectively represented a restatement of the policy arguments developed during the Working Party on Mock Uniforms and Vehicles meeting, but was personalised so as to persuade the Home Secretary in particular of their magnitude. However, Soskice remained unswayed, communicating back to the Home Office that in his opinion private security companies ‘should in some way be put under police supervision, or license, or perhaps be embodied into some kind of auxiliary police organisation’ (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). It is interesting to note that the Home Secretary was at this time being lobbied by Raphael Tuck MP (Labour) into bringing private detective agencies under statutory control, which no doubt strengthened Soskice’s preference for the regulation of private security companies (TNA: PRO, HO 287/627). This also

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shows that the pro-regulation reformers were represented not merely by powerful actors within the Home Office and the police, but also by state actors in Parliament – indeed, over the subsequent decade the House of Commons was to become the main conduit for this division with the reform lobby. In a final bid to rescue the anti-regulation reform agenda, GrahamHarrison, the most senior Home Office civil servant involved in the preparations for the Working Party, arranged a meeting with Soskice in May 1965. This appeared to work, for Graham-Harrison sent an internal communication to Glanville a couple of days later to inform him that: ‘After some discussion S. of S. [Soskice] . . . said that in his view the objections to introducing any system of registration were in the present circumstances conclusive’ (TNA: PRO, HO 287/626). This meeting thus appeared to consolidate for the time being the anti-regulation reform agenda. Moreover, any lingering doubts over Soskice’s commitment to this agenda were soon allayed when in December 1965 he was replaced as Home Secretary by Roy Jenkins, who did not appear to take any direct interest in the issue of private security regulation. So, at the end of 1965 the agenda for the first face-to-face meeting with industry representatives was now set: the Working Party was to initiate a dialogue with key private security actors so as to encourage them to form a central body with which state actors could discuss (or more precisely control) issues relating to the industry; and, at the same time, the Working Party would also keep the controversial issue of regulation firmly away from the negotiating table.

Confronting regulation This section will analyse the first recorded formal face-to-face meeting between state and private security actors, which took place in October 1965 and marked a notable increase in the intensity of the politics of private security. Importantly, the opening session of this Working Party meeting was attended by state representatives only – that is, GrahamHarrison and Glanville from the Home Office, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and four Chief Police Constables – so as to once again clarify the Working Party’s carefully crafted agenda (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477). After this opening session, the private security representatives were finally summoned. Interestingly, the state officials chose to meet separately with representatives from the manned guarding side of the industry and representatives from the hardware side of the industry. It is important to clarify the purpose of this separation. The two

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sides of the industry have always had very different roles: the manned guarding side has generally been involved in the active protection of persons and property in a manner similar to the police, whereas the hardware side has mostly been concerned with far more passive and technical security solutions relating to alarms and locks. This means that while guarding companies were gradually penetrating the professional domain which had traditionally been claimed as the exclusive preserve of the state, the hardware companies were operating in a domain which has rarely come within the ambit of the state – they were, in a sense, simply selling ordinary commodities (see Goold, Loader and Thumala 2010, p. 18). This distinction, it seems, caused the Home Office and police actors to view these two groups in different lights, for the state actors generally seemed to be far less concerned with hardware companies (other than with the annoyance of false alarms taking up police time), since they posed no threat to their professional remit and did not serve to undermine the idea of security provision as a state-centred, universal public good. However, as we have seen, the Home Office and the police were greatly troubled by the manned guarding companies because their activities challenged the core state function of providing security as a public good. Unsurprisingly, then, we will focus here upon the negotiations between the Home Office, the police and the manned guarding companies, since this is where we find the politics of private security. First to enter the room were the representatives from the manned guarding companies, specifically two directors from each of the three largest companies: Securicor, Security Express and Factoryguards (which was to become Group 4 three years later). Despite the fact that these companies were now powerful commercial organisations, the resulting discussions closely followed the course anticipated by Glanville in his extensive preparations for this meeting. The minutes of the meeting reveal that both the state and private security actors agreed that it would be mutually beneficial for the large private security companies to establish a central body which could then be used as the primary channel of communication between the state and the industry in future years (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477). The other objective of steering the discussions firmly away from the issue of statutory regulation was similarly accomplished, though less smoothly. As predicted, the industry representatives did indeed lobby in favour of such a system, as the minutes reflect: ‘The representatives of the security organisations said that . . . it would seem desirable for the Home Office to undertake a system of licensing to prevent unsatisfactory firms from setting up

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in business’ (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477). The ostensible logic behind this request was that the industry’s poorly regarded status within the security sector was in part due to the existence of the increasingly large number of ‘cowboy’ operators, whose ‘unsatisfactory’ operations were serving to damage the reputation of the industry as a whole. So, by eliminating this cowboy element through statutory regulation, the overall status of the industry would be enhanced. To be sure, this was certainly an important consideration and would be reiterated at numerous points over the next few decades – and there was also the additional bonus that the newlyregulated companies would be able to pick up the contracts left behind by the eliminated companies. However, the fact that Securicor, Security Express and Factoryguards would also receive state-endorsed licences, which their security officers could then use to portray themselves as state-deputised security operatives functioning in line with the public good, was also clearly a substantial motivation for lobbying in favour of regulation. For these private security executives, then, regulation was becoming a key pillar of their re-legitimation strategy, for although this institutional mechanism would constrain the operations of their companies, it would also give their companies the quality of ‘stateness’ which was considered by the average British citizen to be so essential for the legitimate provision of security. However, given that many private security companies were rapidly expanding at this time without official state approval, why were these industry representatives so determined to enter into this trade-off? Indeed, by the mid-1960s, Securicor had almost 90 branches in the UK, employed over 6,000 uniformed guards and ran a fleet of approximately 600 armoured vehicles; Security Express employed 1,200 guards and ran a fleet of over 250 armoured vehicles; and Factoryguards also employed 1,200 guards but ran a slightly smaller fleet of 50 armoured vehicles (Clayton 1967, p. 23). The answer is that despite these developments in the economics of private security, the industry was eternally in the shadow of the police and continued to face serious public relations difficulties. Private security services remained, in large part, a ‘grudge purchase’, for most security consumers thought that security services ought to be provided by the state, not the market. This attitude was partly reflected in research conducted by the Royal Commission on the Police, which discovered that 80 per cent of the respondents considered the British police to be the ‘best in the world’ and that 83 per cent felt a ‘great respect’ for the police (Loader and Mulcahy 2003, p. 4). Significantly, it seems that this positive standpoint towards the police translated into an equally strong distrust of private

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security provision. This can be clearly identified in the following comments given by a private security industry public relations officer in the mid-1960s: People who say there is no such thing as bad publicity have never handled a security company’s account. One theft with built-in news value can cancel years of solid successes. One stupid incident involving a security guard can revive all the old canards about strong-armed men and private armies. (Clayton 1967, p. 12) This quote illustrates to great effect how private security provision grated against the expectations of the majority of the population that security provision ought to be monopolised by the state. It also demonstrates why there was indeed sufficient motivation for the private security representatives to lobby in favour of a system of statutory regulation – they clearly still needed to capture legitimacy from the state in order to consolidate and expand their operations, and to raise prices within the security sector. Returning now to the Working Party meeting: in accordance with their anti-regulation reform agenda, the Home Office and police actors immediately neutralised the industry’s request for statutory regulation and steered the course of the discussion back towards their pre-prepared objectives: The chairman [Graham-Harrison] said that it was unlikely that the Home Secretary would be willing to promote licensing legislation, but that it should be possible to achieve high standards in small firms as well as large by establishing a professional association with its own code of conduct, membership of which would be a guarantee of status and a guide to the public. (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477) For the Home Office and police actors, then, the only item on the negotiating table was the central body, nothing more. With this assertion, the first face-to-face formal meeting between state and private security actors was brought to a close. As a final observation on this meeting, it is interesting to note the political subtext running beneath the surface of these negotiations. To begin with, while we know that the state officials were demonstrating an acute awareness of the industry’s re-legitimation agenda – as evidenced in Glanville’s extensive agenda-setting activities – the industry representatives were similarly conscious of the state’s anti-regulation

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reform agenda. Reflecting back on these discussions, for instance, Jorgen Philip-Sorensen, one of the Factoryguards representatives attending this meeting, commented that: ‘They [the Home Office and the police] also felt that licensing would give us an imaginary form of authority so we could act and behave like policemen. A pseudo-police force. They were suspicious: you’re a private army’ (private interview 2007). Furthermore, it seems that although the industry representatives were clearly on the back foot throughout these discussions, this was perhaps nothing more than they expected. As Philip-Sorensen again remarks: ‘We knew we wouldn’t get statutory regulation straight away. So we started with selfregulation [i.e., the central body] to show that we could do it. That made it easier to get to the next step: statutory regulation’ (private interview 2007). It therefore appears as though the industry representatives were quite prepared to concede ground to the state’s demands in the short term, in the anticipation that in years to come they would be better placed to promote their pro-regulation re-legitimation agenda. That said, the meeting also delivered short-term benefits to the industry representatives in the sense that they could use the fact that the meeting took place at all as a starting point for a series of complementary re-legitimation strategies, as the next section will demonstrate.

A united front? Inside Whitehall, the Home Office and police actors certainly appeared to be dictating the terms of the political negotiations. Outside Whitehall, however, this was not the case. This was where the industry’s re-legitimation agenda came to life. To begin with, the industry representatives were quick to capitalise upon the proposals for a newlyestablished central body by communicating to the British public that a formal crime-fighting alliance was emerging between the industry and the state. For instance, an article in the Daily Telegraph during November 1965 reported on a speech made by Mr Cooper-Key – one of the Security Express representatives at the Working Party meeting – as follows: ‘A National Association of commercial security organisations to join in a “united front” with the Home Office, police and insurance companies in the fight against crime was called for yesterday’ (Daily Telegraph 1965). And in what seems to be a clear reference to the Working Party discussions, a representative of Factoryguards supplied the following quote to a Daily Express reporter a few months later: ‘I would like to see some sort of licensing system for security companies under the Home Office’ (Daily Express 1966). This demonstrates that while the private security

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representatives were forced to concede ground to the Home Office and the police’s anti-regulation reform agenda during the Working Party discussions, they were nevertheless able to use the fact that these discussions had taken place at all to contribute towards their re-legitmation strategy of developing public links between their companies and the state institutions. It also illustrates that even though regulation was not on the negotiating table at this point, simply publicising the idea of regulation and a ‘united front’ was deemed to enhance the industry’s status within the security sector. Thus, it seems that Glanville’s early concerns about initiating a formal dialogue with industry representatives turned out to be very well founded. However, this strategy took on new proportions when the industry representatives turned their attentions towards the process of actually setting up the central body. In April 1966 delegates from eight large private security companies came together in order to lay the foundations for the body which was to represent their companies from then on. The minutes of this meeting indicate that there was a consensus among the delegates in favour of establishing this body, which was to be named the British Security Industry Association (BSIA), reporting that: ‘It was finally resolved that the formation of the new Association should be proceeded with, all firms present agreeing’ (BSIA 1966). Rather than conveying this news to the Home Office and police actors, however, a representative from Chubb Group – one of the eight companies – informed Glanville at the Home Office that ‘the whole thing may fly apart by centrifugal forces’, and to prevent this from happening, he suggested that: It would be most helpful if Mr. Dunham [Managing Director of Chubb Group] could be seen to be received from someone in authority in the Home Office . . . would it be possible for Mr. Dunham to be invited to the Home Office to give some report of the progress being made, some modest publicity being given to this event? If this could be done it would greatly strengthen Mr. Dunham’s position and improve the chances of the Association being brought into operation. (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477) As such, this represented a ploy to bring about a high-profile meeting between industry and state representatives which would serve to confer greater legitimacy upon the membership of the newly-formed BSIA. Significantly, in their eagerness to facilitate the successful establishment of this central body, the Home Office civil servants did concede

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to this request by arranging for Dunham to meet with Sir Charles Cunningham, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, and the most senior civil servant within the Home Office. This scenario indicates, then, that parts of the industry had now entered into a genuine relationship of power dependence with the Home Office and the police. The companies were prepared to cooperate with the Working Party’s objectives, but only if they could draw more legitimacy from the process in return. However, despite this display of political power, when the Home Office and the police finally achieved their strategy of containing these private security actors within the confines of the BSIA, the industry’s momentum within the politics of private security began to falter.

The rules of the game Once the BSIA had been formed in 1966, the Home Office wasted no time in putting this central body to its intended function: controlling the large private security companies. This process began during the next Working Party meeting, which took place in August 1967. The opening session of this meeting was once again conducted in the absence of the industry representatives so as to set down a clear anti-regulation reform agenda. For instance, the minutes of the meeting show that in this opening session ‘the Working Party did not like the idea of state or police registration – mainly because such registration would inevitably imply that the operations and standards of work of a particular firm had official blessing’ (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477). The Home Office and the police were thus as troubled as ever by the idea of conferring any ‘official blessing’ – or legitimacy – upon the operations of the private security companies. With this in mind, the officials then met with the industry representatives. The resulting meeting is interesting because it marks the establishment of the new ‘rules of game’ which would come to characterise the political negotiations between the state and private security actors over the next few years. To begin with, it was agreed that the BSIA would function as the main institutional channel through which the Home Office and the police would from now on engage with the large private security companies (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477). This was the first rule of the game: the BSIA was the only line of communication between these state and private security actors – there would be no more impromptu meetings with the Permanent Under-Secretary of State. Next, it was decided that no further publicity should be given to the Working Party

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discussions (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477). This stipulation was probably a reaction to the national media coverage generated by the industry representatives over the past two years. Either way, it can certainly be interpreted as the second rule of the game: no more publicity. So, while the state actors were willing to provide the industry with some official publicity in the context of setting up the BSIA, once this objective had been accomplished, the resource of legitimacy was no longer to be exchanged. However, the rule-making did not end there, because following this face-to-face meeting, the Home Office and police actors then held another meeting among themselves, where it was further decided that ‘[t]he consultations . . . would generally be of a technical nature and would not alter the status of the private security firms in any way’. This decision was intended to allay ‘anxieties in the police service about the possibility of the private security firms developing into private police forces and encroaching upon the functions of the service’ (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477). This in effect set down a third rule of the game: discussions would be confined to technical matters only. This would in turn serve to limit even further the extent to which the executives of the large private security companies could advance their re-legitimation agenda, which was based not upon the resolution of technical matters, but upon the development of broad and ambitious connections between their companies and the state. This institutional environment then became even more unfavourable to the large private security companies during the course of the next Working Party meeting. The first problem for these companies was that the Home Office and the police did not begin preparations for the next meeting until September 1969, and in the intervening two-year period records suggest that no consultations had occurred between these actors. Clearly, this lack of engagement suited the Home Office and the police, but worked to the detriment of the private security industry. This was because while the Home Office and the police’s anti-regulation reform agenda was strengthened by a lack of contact between these actors, the industry representatives’ re-legitimation agenda was almost entirely dependent upon this contact. Then, when finally preparing for the next meeting, the Home Office civil servants sent a letter to the Secretary of the BSIA informing him that subsequent Working Party discussions would focus upon issues relating to the hardware section of the industry only (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477). This no doubt represented a significant blow to the BSIA, for the resulting dialogue would essentially bypass its membership, which was primarily composed of large

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manned guarding companies. While no explanation was given by the Home Office and the police for this decision, it seems reasonable to speculate that by orientating the discussions towards the uncontroversial hardware side of the industry, they were effectively minimising the possibility of conferring any further legitimacy upon these companies. All of the strategies used by the Home Office and the police in the late 1960s were thus essentially designed to halt the industry’s penetration into the security sector through political means. They were all created to minimise the extent to which the industry representatives could use their connections with the state to confer more legitimacy upon their companies. Moreover, the Home Office and police actors were both willing and able to enforce these new rules when they were challenged by the frustrated industry representatives. This was clearly demonstrated during the next Working Party meeting – which took place in October 1969 – where the BSIA representatives attempted to violate these recently established stipulations. For instance, the minutes of the meeting show that Mr Dunham – Managing Director of Chubb Group and a key BSIA representative – initiated the following discussion: To be effective the BSIA should be able to demonstrate that membership brought benefits. They wanted, Mr. Dunham said, something more than friendship from the Home Office; they wanted their sponsorship. They hoped that the police would accept that membership of the BSIA guaranteed high standards of technical competence and integrity and would recommend the members of BSIA to those who sought their advice of security. (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477) Here, then, Dunham was attempting to strengthen the links between the industry and the state – a strategy which clearly ran contrary to two of the new rules: first, that the BSIA was not to be utilised as a vehicle for influencing the status of the industry; and, second, that no public communications could result from the discussions between the Working Party and the BSIA. Significantly, the minutes show that the Chairman of the Working Party – now Mr Trevelyan of the Home Office – immediately enforced these rules with his response: The Chairman said that the Home Office had already given support to the BSIA and, indeed, had been involved to some extent in the setting up of the Association. Their confidence in the BSIA had been demonstrated by their suggestion that the BSIA supervise the industry. Note would be taken of what had been said. (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477)

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This response can be construed as a polite but firm enforcement of the now-established rules of the game in order to stymie Dunham’s requests – a pattern which characterised the remainder of the Working Party discussions. Records show, for instance, that the remaining three Working Party meetings were dominated by technical issues surrounding the hardware section of the private security industry, as the rules stipulated (TNA: PRO, HO 287/1477). Moreover, the last regular Working Party meeting took place in October 1972, after which point the formal dialogue between the Home Office, the police and industry representatives seemingly ground to a temporary halt. The initial success which the private security companies had experienced through their new, formalised institutional relationship with the central state institutions was therefore steadily diminishing as the Home Office and police actors increasingly imposed their anti-regulation reform agenda upon the negotiations. Yet, taken as a whole, the 1960s signified a notable leap forward for the private security actors, especially when compared with the relatively ostracised position of Securicor at the end of the 1950s. During this decade the executives of the large companies had engaged in face-to-face discussions with key state actors; they had established a central body to represent their collective views; and they had disseminated their message through the national media – all of which served to further advance their re-legitimation agenda and, by extension, to amplify the politics of private security. The next phase of the political negotiations, however, would signal a further intensification of the political manoeuvring within the security sector as the rift within the reform movement re-opened and gave birth to a brand new set of alliances within the politics of private security.

5 Parliamentary Pressure (1969–79)

The 1970s began in much the same way as the 1960s ended, with the large private security companies locked into the rules of the games set down by the Home Office and the police. However, this turned out to be only a relatively temporary arrangement, as over the course of this decade the politics of private security sparked back into life. The trigger for this third phase of the negotiations was the entry of numerous parliamentary actors into the political arena. The pro-regulation reform agenda shared by these actors interfered with the anti-regulation settlement reached by the Home Office and the police at the end of the 1960s, and accordingly brought these different parts of the state into conflict with one another over the issue of private security regulation. This conflict in turn created a window of opportunity for the executives of the large private security companies to manoeuvre their way back into the centre of the controversial debate over the composition of the post-war security sector. This chapter will chronologically map out this phase of the politics of private security.

Parliament, privacy and private security When key parliamentary actors began to engage with the politics of private security in the early 1970s, they seemed to have a predisposition towards a pro-regulation reform agenda. The previous chapter alluded to this predisposition with regard to Raphael Tuck’s efforts to influence the position of the Home Secretary, Frank Soskice, over the possible regulation of private investigators. However, the beginnings of this trend can actually be traced back a little further to the early 1960s, when Parliament began its decade-long fixation with the issue of privacy – a fixation which was instrumental in framing the next phase of the 80

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political negotiations. It began in 1961 when Lord Mancroft (Conservative) introduced his Right of Privacy Bill. Although the Bill itself was very broadly pitched, intending ‘to give to every individual such further protection against the invasion of his privacy as may be desirable for the maintenance of human dignity’ (HL Bill [1960–1] [35]), during the Bill’s second reading it became clear that its remit included, among other things, the licensing of private investigators (HL Deb [1960–1], vol. 229, col. 607). While the Bill did not progress beyond its second reading, it did generate a great deal of sympathy within the Lords and seemingly ignited a general parliamentary interest in the twinned issues of the protection of privacy and the statutory regulation of private investigators (Madgwick and Smythe 1974, p. 11). This interest was central to the development of the pro-regulation reform agenda among many parliamentary actors. It should also be mentioned at this point that, although private investigators have not yet been analysed in this book, they do constitute a rather small (see George and Button 2000, pp. 90–2) but highly interesting section of the private security industry. Like the manned guarding side of the industry, private investigators have sought to operate in a domain over which the modern state has traditionally claimed something approaching a monopoly. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police Detective Department was established back in 1842 and since this time the police detective has permeated the British national consciousness through a variety of media, such as detective novels, television series and films (McLaughlin 2007). As such, the activities of private investigators in the post-war security sector have been influenced by the same political norms which have structured the activities of the manned guarding companies, and they have accordingly been concerned with similar issues of legitimacy. So, not only were the parliamentary actors adopting a pro-regulation reform position, but they were doing so in relation to a section of the private security industry which was more than likely to support such a position in line with the re-legitimation agenda. Returning now to the development of the parliamentary proregulation reform agenda: in February 1967, six years after Mancroft’s Bill, Alexander Lyon MP (Labour) introduced his Right of Privacy Bill into the House of Commons under the ten minute rule. This Bill was an explicit attempt to continue Mancroft’s earlier endeavours to generate wider parliamentary interest in the protection of privacy. Lyon did not, however, manage to secure a second reading and his lobbying activities soon faded away (HC Deb [1966–7], vol. 740, col. 1566). Yet this

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was only a temporary hiatus, for two years later, in April 1969, Tony Gardner MP (Conservative) introduced his Private Investigators Bill into the Commons, again under the ten minute rule. Strikingly, this Bill represented the first effort to regulate the activities of private investigators directly. Gardner was concerned that there was no regulatory body to ensure that professional standards were maintained within this part of the private security industry – ‘there is no one available to keep an eye on the “private eye” ’ (HC Deb [1968–9], vol. 782, col. 1444) – and he thus proposed to institute a system whereby private investigators would be required to obtain a certificate from a county court judge stating that they were a ‘fit and proper person’ before they could legally undertake their operations (HC Bill [1968–9] [146]). This Bill therefore represented another stepping stone in the gradual evolution of the pro-regulation reform agenda among a number of parliamentary actors. While on the surface Gardner’s Bill seemed to fall in line with the growing parliamentary movement towards a pro-regulation reform agenda in a relatively straightforward manner, the background to his Bill is very revealing. In an article published in the trade press a few months later, Peter Heims, Vice-President of the Association of British Investigators (the largest trade association in this sector of the private security industry), claimed that ‘I was responsible for the original draft upon which Anthony Gardner based his Bill’ (The Private Investigator 1970). Heims has subsequently confirmed this, stating that ‘I drafted the Bill, which I think he [Gardner] took almost as it was’ (private interview 2009). This is interesting because it shows that, like the executives of the large private security companies, certain private investigators were lobbying for their section of the industry to be controlled through statutory regulation. An indication of the rationale behind this position was demonstrated when Heims commented in the trade press a couple of years later that ‘many of the public regard us as being in a rather dubious business’ (The Police Review 1972). This suggests that, again like the executives of the large private security companies, these private investigators were pursuing regulation in order to change the public’s opinion of their business. In other words, they wanted to imbue their activities with a degree of ‘stateness’ so as to appeal to the majority of the British population’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be provided; that is, they were promoting a clear re-legitimation agenda. Furthermore, by supporting the parliamentary movement towards a pro-regulation reform agenda, private investigators such as Heims were leading the way in establishing a pro-regulation alliance between the reformers and the re-legitimators. To be sure, this alliance was certainly

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not based upon a sharing of political ends, for Gardner’s agenda was to control the activities of private investigators, whereas the investigators’ agenda was to confer a greater degree of legitimacy upon their operations so as to increase their competitiveness. Yet because both agendas shared a common means to these ends – that is, regulation – they gradually entered into an alliance. In broad historical terms, the various permutations of this pro-regulation alliance between parliamentary reformers and industry re-legitimators were to have an enormous impact upon the politics of private security in years to come. The particular alliance with which we are presently concerned, however, was to enjoy only a brief period of success. It fared well to begin with, for there was no opposition to Gardner’s Bill and it was accordingly scheduled for a second reading two months later, but in the event, an extended parliamentary debate over the Divorce Reform Bill meant that there was not sufficient time to carry out this second reading, and the Bill disappeared. However, while Gardner’s Bill prematurely faded away, the broader issue certainly did not – indeed, it soon became far more prominent. In November 1969 Brian Walden MP (Labour) introduced his Right of Privacy Bill into the House of Commons, which was to have a far greater impact than its predecessors. Though more broadly pitched than Gardner’s Bill, it still retained an explicit focus on reforming the activities of private investigators (HC Bill [1969–70] [25]) and, crucially, the Commons again remained sympathetic to the cause, rewarding Walden’s Bill with a second reading two months later. This second reading, in January 1970, proved to be highly successful. After an extremely supportive debate, James Callaghan, the Home Secretary, conceded that the various issues relating to the protection of privacy certainly demanded more parliamentary attention and that the government would accordingly establish a Committee on Privacy to conduct a more technical investigation into these matters (HC Deb [1969–70], vol. 794, col. 939–41). With this announcement, Walden withdrew his Bill. It is interesting to note that, according to Madgwick and Smythe (1974, p. 13), Callaghan intended this Committee to be ‘an interdepartmental committee without teeth’ because he did not want to legislate on any matter relating to privacy. However, as the next section will demonstrate, the Committee did not turn out to be toothless. There were two reasons for this. First, privacy legislation enjoyed a great deal of support inside Parliament. Indeed, in the final contribution to the second reading debate, Niall MacDermot MP (Labour) commented that: ‘The outstanding feature of the debate has been that not one hon.

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Member has suggested that there is no need for legislation’ (HC Deb [1969–70], vol. 794, col. 956). Second, this support was cross-bench in a policy area where the government had no official stance, thereby creating a context in which the Committee enjoyed a significant degree of political manoeuvrability (see Norton 1993, p. 57). And, importantly, these favourable conditions allowed the Committee to re-open the pro/anti-regulation faultlines set down by Soskice four years earlier, in the process signalling a new phase of intra-state contestation within the politics of private security.

Committee vs. department The Committee on Privacy was rather eclectic in its composition: it comprised members of the three main parties, who were drawn from both the House of Lords and House of Commons, together with a number of lawyers and trade union representatives, and was chaired by Kenneth Younger, a former Labour MP and at that time Chairman of the Howard League for Penal Reform, Chairman of the Advisory Council on the Penal System and Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (The Private Investigator 1970). The Committee began its enquiries in early 1970 by taking evidence from a range of relevant agencies, both state and non-state. Of particular interest here is the evidence presented by two sets of actors: the private investigators and the Home Office and police. This evidence illustrates how the re-legitimation agenda and the anti-regulation reform agenda served to influence the policy-making activities of the Committee. In line with their emergent re-legitimation agenda, the evidence submitted by the private investigators was extremely supportive of regulation. For instance, Finlay’s Bureau of Investigation sent a letter to the Committee in September 1970 which concluded that: we would therefore strongly support that the Committee looks carefully into, and thereafter recommends, that some form of practising certificate be introduced for reputable Private Investigators, which could be renewed annually by a Judge in Chambers of a County Court. (TNA: PRO, HO 264/69) In a similar manner, the Association of British Investigators (ABI), which at the time had 483 members and was judged by the Committee to ‘have the best claim to represent reputable private detectives’ (TNA: PRO, HO 264/69), wrote in their submission that:

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The Association of British Investigators believes that proper recognition of a professional body observing a strict code of conduct would be in the best public interest and the Association would therefore support suitable legislation which would restrict the activity of lawful intrusion to suitable persons. (TNA: PRO, HO 264/69) These submissions thus provide further evidence that this small section of the private security industry, like the large contract manned guarding companies, was actively attempting to bring about a system of statutory regulation. These private investigators were willing to relinquish a degree of control over their operations in exchange for an official link with the state, which would in turn structure their activities in line with the population’s state-centric expectations about how investigative activities ought to be undertaken. In other words, these private investigators were actively pursuing a re-legitimation agenda. Interestingly, this political alignment was expected by the Committee, for early in the enquiry Graham-Harrison of the Home Office drew upon his experiences in the Working Party on Private Security Organisation to inform the Committee Chairman that: ‘Many of the more reputable firms are said to desire the creation of a professional code and a system of licensing’ (TNA: PRO, HO 264/57). Graham-Harrison’s early involvement perhaps indicates that the Home Office civil servants were viewing the private investigators in the same light as the large private security companies and, furthermore, were attempting to shape the Committee’s attitudes towards them. Regardless of the subtle backroom machinations of the Home Office civil servants, when it came to formally submitting evidence to the Committee, they left very little open to interpretation. In July 1971, for instance, the Home Office presented the following memorandum to the Committee regarding the idea of licensing private investigators: the impression which would be given by any system would be that those admitted had passed stringent tests and could be employed without fear that they would themselves prove dishonest or employ reprehensible methods. Because of the false impression it would give, the idea of ‘licensed private detectives’ is unattractive. (TNA: PRO, HO 411/7) This line of reasoning was then reinforced by the General Secretary of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) who in April 1971 sent a letter to the Committee asserting that: ‘The Commissioner of the Police

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of the Metropolis was firmly opposed to registration of Private Detective Agencies in that such persons would be given an enhanced status’ (TNA: PRO, HO 264/76). Both of these submissions thus represented clear assertions of the anti-regulation reform agenda which had long been advanced by the Home Office and the police. Significantly, though, during the process of evaluating these submissions, the Committee displayed its pro-regulation reform origins by sympathising more with the pro-regulation re-legitimation agenda of the private investigators than with the anti-regulation reform agenda of the Home Office and the police. This was clearly demonstrated when in July 1971 the various members of the Committee assembled for a weekend at the Berystede Hotel in Ascot to evaluate the submissions that they had received so far. Although the Committee members certainly recognised and gave careful consideration to the Home Office and the police’s objections towards regulation, they were not convinced by the overriding importance of the rationale advanced by these core state actors, as the minutes of the meeting illustrate: The Chairman, summing up the discussion, said that they were in general satisfied that the activities of private detectives constituted a sufficiently special threat to privacy to call for a licensing system of some kind. The aim of this should be to inhibit the likelihood of their undesirable activities, not to give them a stamp of approval. (TNA: PRO, HO 411/7) The Chairman’s summation gives a clear insight into the logic of the pro-regulation reform agenda – the state ought to be firmly in charge of the security sector, so it should implement a system of regulation to control the operations of private investigators, regardless of any unintended transfer of legitimacy. During this weekend meeting, then, the faultlines within the state over the issue of regulation once again began to open out. At this weekend meeting in July, the Committee was only supposed to reach provisional recommendations about the regulation of private investigators, for they had still not yet received oral evidence from arguably the most important representative of all – Sir Philip Allen, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Home Office. However, the provisionality of their recommendations would be called into question following this high-profile interview. During this interview, which took place at the Home Office in October 1971, Allen was flanked by two Deputy Under-Secretaries of State, Mr Graham-Harrison and

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Mr Waddell, and together they once again advanced a solid defence of the Home Office’s long-standing anti-regulation reform agenda. For instance, Allen explained that ‘[t]he main danger in licensing private detectives was, as the Home Office memorandum had pointed out, that the public might be misled into thinking that they had some special competence or powers’ (TNA: PRO, HO 411/7). He also suggested that in addressing the difficult question of how to control the operations of these private investigators, ‘[p]ossibly an ad hoc body was the only answer’ (TNA: PRO, HO 411/7). This line of reasoning thus directly reproduced the previously established Home Office strategy for tackling the large contract manned guarding companies – that is, in order to control these commercial organisations without conferring any legitimacy upon them, they should be institutionalised within a non-statutory central body designed specifically to minimise any official links between these public and private institutions. Indeed, Waddell made the connection between the private investigators and the larger private security companies abundantly clear when he commented that they were really ‘not all that different’ (TNA: PRO, HO 411/7). Given that by 1971 this Home Office strategy was based upon a decade of experience in dealing with the private security industry and that it was communicated by the department’s elite civil servants in their own surroundings, one might have expected it to represent a rather persuasive submission to the Committee’s enquiries. However, this was not the case. A series of internal communications written by the Committee Secretary at the beginning of 1972 reveals that the chapter of the Committee’s report which discussed the regulation of private investigators had actually been written before Allen’s oral evidence was received (TNA: PRO, HO 264/83). Moreover, the Secretary added that: I have now revised the draft, both to take account of Sir Philip Allen’s evidence and of further consultations I have had on points arising therefrom, but not so as to depart in any way from the Committee’s general intention reached at their meeting at the Berystede Hotel in July. (TNA: PRO, HO 264/83) It seems, then, that the Home Office’s additional submissions were never going to alter the previously established pro-regulation reform agenda of the Committee. As the previous episodes in the House of Commons – such as the readings of Gardner’s and Walden’s private members’ bills – suggested, parliamentary actors were generally persuaded by this

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position and their minds, it seems, would not be changed by the Home Office and the police. This represented the first indication that the Committee was not necessarily the toothless inter-departmental assemblage envisaged by the Home Secretary. The official Report of the Committee on Privacy, which was published a few months later in July 1972, accordingly recommended that a legally grounded Central Licensing Authority be set up and given the task of administering licences to those private investigators who satisfied the criteria of a ‘fit and proper person’ (Cmnd. 5012, pp. 135–40). This was precisely the system which the Home Office feared, since it could potentially serve to confer a significant amount of legitimacy upon the operations of the private investigators. As a consequence, when the Report was discussed in Parliament a year later, in July 1973, the growing fragmentation between pro-regulation reform agenda of the parliamentary actors and the anti-regulation reform agenda of the Home Office and the police was reproduced upon one of Britain’s most public stages. In this parliamentary debate, Robert Carr, Callaghan’s replacement as Home Secretary, immediately agreed with the motivations behind the Committee’s proposals to license private investigators – that is, controlling their activities – in the process illustrating the common roots of the reform agenda. However, like many Home Office representatives before him, Carr would not agree with the proposal to regulate them, which he said would effectively amount to a ‘license to pry’ (HC Deb [1972–3], vol. 859, col. 1966). Expanding upon this theme, he went on to reason that: ‘The public might also be misled . . . into believing that the fact that a person possesses a license implies some special status, competence or power’ (HC Deb [1972–3], vol. 859, col. 1966). In place of regulation, Carr instead outlined an alternative proposal which would serve to control the activities of private investigators without conferring any legitimacy upon them: We have therefore been considering whether there is an alternative method which would achieve the committee’s objectives without the drawbacks, and we believe that it means starting the other way round. A person would be disqualified from acting as a private detective if he had been convicted of an offence involving dishonesty, violence or intrusion into privacy or if he had been given a custodial sentence . . . We believe that in this way we should remove from practice those persons who are not found proper to act as detectives without giving anyone a positive license which might misleadingly create the impression that a person was positively certified as being suitable or

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was specifically empowered to make an inquiry. (HC Deb [1972–3], vol. 859, cols. 1966–7) While this alternative solution did seem to offer a compromise, it did not satisfy the parliamentary lobby, which throughout the remainder of the debate continued to call for regulation. However, the Home Secretary did not concede any further ground, and the parliamentary lobby was merely left with the promise of a government White Paper to be published on these matters later in the year (HC Deb [1972–3], vol. 859, col. 1956). Interestingly, no such White Paper was ever published, which suggests that Carr’s intention was not to compromise with these parliamentary actors, but rather to sideline the controversial issue of regulation. Yet, as the next section will demonstrate, this issue was not easily sidelined.

Private members’ bills The political activities of the Committee on Privacy represented only the early stages of the growing parliamentary pressure for private security regulation. During the second half of the 1970s a number of parliamentary actors continued to lobby for such as system, primarily through the medium of private members’ bills. This in turn had the important effect of shifting the balance of the political negotiations further towards a pro-regulation agenda. However, this shift was not achieved by parliamentary actors alone, but rather in partnership with a variety of private security actors. By 1973, after almost half a decade of political inertia, certain private security executives were slowly freeing themselves from the rules of the game set down by the Home Office in the previous decade and were once again searching for political channels through which to pursue their re-legitimation agenda. It is to this gradual political reawakening of the large private security companies during the early 1970s that we must now turn. By 1970 the private security industry in Britain was expanding at a respectable rate. At the beginning of this decade, the industry was worth an estimated £70 million and employed approximately 40,000 men, the majority of whom (25,000) were engaged in guarding, patrolling and cash-in-transit activities (Randall and Hamilton 1972, p. 67). The shifting balance of supply and demand in the security sector was thus still facilitating the ongoing economic expansion of the industry. Yet, importantly, the industry continued to suffer from extremely bad press. It was at the time ‘popular mythology’ that the industry lacked responsibility

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(Randall and Hamilton 1972, p. 68) – a mythology which was perpetuated by both the widespread cultural antipathy towards the industry and the growth of ‘cowboy’ operators. This mythology served to perpetuate the problematic ‘grudge purchase’ culture which pushed down profit margins across the industry. Against this backdrop, the executives of the large private security companies still wanted to bring about a system of regulation so as to imbue their companies with the quality of ‘stateness’ which was so attractive to the average British security consumer. However, their main conduit for achieving this objective was the BSIA, which at the time remained shackled by the Home Office. An illustrative example of the BSIA’s political position in the early 1970s can be found in the proceedings of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology’s Cropwood Round-Table Conference on Private Security in July 1972. The BSIA sent a memorandum to this high-profile Conference declaring that: ‘The B.S.I.A. supports legislation which would enable the security companies to be licensed but the present attitude of the Home Office is that a case has not yet been made out’ (BSIA 1972a, p. 105). This was a rather submissive and defeatist statement from an association whose 18 members accounted for over 90 per cent of the industry’s business (Bunyan 1977, p. 234). It seems as though the BSIA had already accepted the outcome of the proposal before it was communicated to the Conference delegates. As such, the memorandum certainly provided an easy opportunity for the Home Office representative at the Conference to immediately undermine the notion of licensing legislation, which he duly did (Wiles and McClintock 1972, p. 76). This example thus demonstrates how in the early 1970s the BSIA was firmly locked into the rules of the game set down by the Home Office a few years earlier. This subordinated position was even more clearly reflected in the BSIA Council Meeting minutes at the time: Mr. Dunham asserted that BSIA had fallen back, as it is not known nor mentioned by press, radio or television . . . they should do something to promote the Association and by so doing improve the stature of the security industry . . . The Chairman agreeing with this view said that BSIA carried little no weight in various circles and members must act to make the Association known. (BSIA 1972b) It is important to re-emphasise that the marginalised status of the BSIA was precisely what the Home Office civil servants had in mind when they established the Working Party. They wanted the political

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activities of the large private security companies to be concentrated into a single central body which they could then manipulate, manage and depoliticise. However, this was not a foolproof plan, for after a few years of political inertia certain private security executives decided that it was time to distance themselves from the BSIA and operate outside the rules of the game established by the Home Office. Their primary means for achieving this was by making strategic appointments which would in turn serve as pathways into the decision-making networks of Britain’s political elite. Such appointments had been a feature of the industry since the 1950s, with Sir Philip Margetson’s recruitment onto the board of Securicor perhaps being the most prominent example. By the 1970s, however, the large private security companies were employing this strategy to a much greater degree, as evidenced by the appointments listed in Table 5.1. Arguably the most important political appointee at this time was Norman Fowler MP (Conservative), who was serving on Group 4’s Board of Directors, since he represented an important link between the pro-regulation lobby in Parliament and the industry’s re-legitimation agenda. Group 4 Chairman Jorgen Philip-Sorensen was one of the most outspoken proponents of regulation – a perspective which was influenced by his previous experiences in the Swedish private security industry, which has a long history of regulation and enjoys very high levels of Table 5.1 Selected political appointments in the private security industry during the 1970s Name and police rank

Appointment

Sir Philip Margetson, ex-Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Richard Jackson, ex-Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and ex-President of Interpol Sir Ranulph Bacon, ex-Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Ronald Howe, ex-Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Percy Sillitoe, former Head of MI5

President of Securicor and ex-Chairman of the BSIA Director of Securicor and subsidiary firms

Peter Hamilton, ex-Army Intelligence Norman Fowler MP (Conservative) (Adapted from Bunyan 1977, pp. 239–41)

Director of Securicor Director of Factoryguards First Chairman of Security Express when the company formed Secretary of BSIA and Advisor for Chubb Director of Group 4

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legitimacy (private interview 2007). It is perhaps no coincidence to discover, then, that in July 1973 Norman Fowler – seemingly acting as both a Group 4 Director and a Member of Parliament – introduced his Security Industry Licensing Bill into the House of Commons under the ten minute rule (HC Bill [1972–3] [175]). Importantly, this was the first parliamentary bill which explicitly proposed to regulate the large private security companies – all previous parliamentary bills had only focused on regulating private investigators. Fowler’s Bill thus represented a significant advance for the re-legitimation agenda. The timing of this Bill was also highly significant, since it was introduced just one week before a parliamentary debate was scheduled in order to discuss the Committee on Privacy’s recommendations and was therefore presumably deployed to have maximum impact upon the pro-regulation reform lobby within Parliament. In presenting the Bill to Parliament, Fowler’s introductory speech, as one would expect from someone with clear vested interests in Group 4’s commercial success, was highly supportive of the industry: We must all learn to take crime prevention more seriously. If that is the case the private security industry will have an increasingly important part to play. This part should be encouraged and the intention of the Bill is to encourage good security firms and to ensure high standards. (HC Deb [1972–3], vol. 859, col. 537) Fowler’s support of the industry was also supplemented by a Conservative Party pamphlet published in that same year, in which he wrote that: Private security is much criticised in Britain but much of this criticism is ill-founded. The best private security in Britain is very good and the aim of policy should be to encourage this . . . Licensing would show clearly that the government recognised the contribution that private security could make and at the same time encourage even more firms and individuals to make use of their services. (Fowler 1973, p. 20) Interestingly, this parliamentary speech and Conservative Party pamphlet seem to represent the first clear instance of a state actor promoting an explicit pro-regulation re-legitimation agenda (as opposed to some version of the reform agenda), thereby pulling this political position across the traditional public-private divide. For this reason, Fowler thus constituted a crucial component of Group 4’s political strategy

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(although it should be noted that the existence of the Conservative Party pamphlet also suggests that Fowler was acting not purely on behalf of Group 4’s management, but also from a personal ideological conviction in the virtues of free market provision – a conviction which would be displayed more clearly in years to come when serving in successive Thatcher governments). However, despite the significance of this Bill, it did not receive a second reading in Parliament. The regulation of private security companies, separate from the broader issue of privacy, was not yet a high profile issue capable of generating widespread interest, though it would be by the end of the decade. Nevertheless, due to the propitious timing of its introduction, this rejection did not signify the conclusion of the Bill’s life in Parliament. This was because during the parliamentary debate on the Committee on Privacy’s findings nine days later, Fowler made two contributions to the long discussion in order to both draw attention to his Security Industry Licensing Bill and to argue that private security companies should be regulated alongside private investigators (HC Deb [1972–3], vol. 859, cols. 1967 and 2029–30). With these contributions, then, Fowler was once again promoting the re-legitimation agenda of Group 4 and, by extension, the other large private security companies. As we have already seen, however, the Home Office rejected all suggestions of regulation at the end of this debate. Yet the fact that Fowler had not let this opportunity pass without forging an extremely public connection between the large private security companies and the idea of regulation represented an important contribution towards the growing momentum of the re-legitimation agenda. After the Committee on Privacy’s and then Fowler’s important parliamentary interventions, there followed a period of only very gradual movement in the politics of private security. All went quiet in Parliament, with the exception of two unsuccessful Private Detectives (Control) Bills, both of which were introduced as ordinary presentations by Michael Fidler MP (Conservative) and were unsurprisingly supported by Norman Fowler (HC Bill [1973–4] [32]; HC Bill [1973–4] [77]). However, these achieved little publicity and it was becoming increasingly obvious that the Home Office was not intending to produce the promised White Paper on private detective disqualification, nor was it going to engage with the issue of regulation more generally. At the BSIA, political activity was similarly lacklustre. During a Council Meeting in January 1974, for instance, the council members continued to approach the issue of regulation with caution. With a clear ongoing appreciation of the rules of the game set down by the Home Office years before, the

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participants first ‘considered that the Home Office was unlikely to initiate this subject unless stimulated by the Association stating a case in favour of licensing’. They then decided that, despite the Home Office’s position, it might nevertheless be worth constructing such a case and accordingly delegated this task to the Policy and Public Relations Committee (BSIA 1974). However, a whole year passed before this case was finally deliberated upon, and on this occasion (a Council Meeting in April 1975) the BSIA members agreed that a case certainly could be made in favour of licensing the transport and guard patrol sections, but they did not have a substantive strategy for pursuing this agenda (BSIA 1975). The BSIA, it appears, was not yet politically mobilised. In the middle of this period of inertia, however, a new parliamentary actor moved into the political arena and began the process of once again re-opening the politically volatile faultline between the proregulation parliamentary reformers and the anti-regulation Home Office reformers, in the process injecting new vitality into the politics of private security. In February 1974 Bruce George entered the House of Commons as a new Labour MP and soon afterwards started to take a strong interest in reforming the private security industry. Like many parliamentary actors before him, he immediately seemed to be inclined towards the pro-regulation reform position – that is, he wanted to reassert some clear semblance of state control over the security sector by imposing state-directed training and vetting procedures upon the industry; furthermore, he wanted to accomplish this using statutory regulation, regardless of the unintended consequences this mechanism might have in terms of enhancing the legitimacy of the industry. In 1976 George accordingly began preparations for his long pro-regulation campaign, which would take the form of numerous private members’ bills, participation in select committee enquiries and a handful of long parliamentary speeches. To begin with, George attempted to recruit allies from the BSIA, which was now publicly on record as a supporter of regulation. However, the BSIA remained cautious, as the minutes of a June 1976 Council Meeting reflect: He [Mr Smith of the Policy and Public Relations Committee] reported on a query from Mr. Bruce George regarding licensing to which he had replied, on behalf of the B.S.I.A., that the Association would support licensing but were of the impression that parliamentary time, to give consideration to this subject, would not be made available in the foreseeable future. (BSIA 1976)

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This caution was almost certainly related once again to the restrictive rules of the game set down by the Home Office, for during the subsequent Council Meeting, John Wheeler, the BSIA Director-General, explained that George’s campaign would probably suffer from a ‘lack of support by the Home Office and Police’ (BSIA 1977). But where the BSIA was timid, Group 4 was again bold. This company became a staunch supporter of the campaign, no doubt viewing George as another promising conduit through which to channel its re-legitimation agenda. As George recently explained: ‘Group 4 were constantly supporting me on regulation . . . Helping me with the bills, arguing the case’ (private interview 2007). This therefore represented another example of a proregulation political alliance forming between the reformers and the re-legitimators. With Group 4’s assistance, George introduced two private members’ bills into the House of Commons during 1977, each of which sought to regulate the private security industry through the establishment of a statutory licensing scheme governed by a central body. The first bill, entitled the Registration of Private Security Firms Bill, was presented to the House of Commons in February under the ten minute rule and was significant not only for its content, but also for the supporters and detractors it listed (HC Bill [1976–7] [62]). According to George, the Bill’s supporters included MPs from both benches of the Commons, both large and small companies within the industry, the BSIA, the ABI, a number of academics, the journal Top Security and the Police Federation (HC Deb [1976–7], vol. 925, col. 1251). These supporters demonstrate once again the development of a rather incongruous alliance between reformers and re-legitimators from both public and private sectors. To reiterate, the ultimate objectives of these various actors were not the same, for, generally speaking, while the private security actors wanted to capture a greater degree of legitimacy from the licensing system, the state actors (and academics) wanted to reform the industry through the same means. But despite these contrasting ends, the political strategies being pursued by these different factions actually complemented one another, since both were lobbying for a system of statutory regulation. However, the main detractor listed by George was the Home Office. Indeed, he noted in his introductory speech that: It is paradoxical that normally in these circumstances the Government say to an industry that they want to establish rules for it and the industry wants to stay free. In this case it is the industry itself

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that is crying out for Government intervention and regulation, while the Home Office is resisting the idea. (HC Deb [1976–7], vol. 925, col. 1251) The fact that George considered the Home Office’s position as paradoxical demonstrates his disregard – or perhaps misunderstanding – of the unintended consequences which flow from regulation, namely the conferral of legitimacy upon the industry’s operations. And, crucially, it was the government’s rejection of the Bill for this very reason which explains why it failed to secure a second reading. Moreover, it was also the reason why George’s second bill, which was introduced as an ordinary presentation a couple of months later, met with the exact same fate (HC Bill [1976–7] [114]). Despite the growing support for regulation, the Home Office was thus maintaining a firm anti-regulation stance. Yet although on the surface the failure of these bills to secure a second reading seemed to constitute another successful episode in the Home Office’s ongoing strategy of suppressing the industry’s attempts to capture legitimacy from the state, a closer examination reveals that this was not necessarily the case. This was because although George’s bills made no inroads within Parliament, they did seem to publicly ignite a broader debate around the issue of statutory regulation – indeed, private members’ bills often have this important indirect impact upon political issues (Marsh and Read 1988). Significantly, this burgeoning interest in regulation was perhaps nowhere more evident than in the changing fortunes of the BSIA towards the end of the 1970s. The level of optimism which characterised the BSIA Council Meeting in January 1978, for instance, contrasted markedly with the pessimistic tone of the Council Meetings conducted at the beginning of the decade. The minutes of this 1978 Meeting, for example, take note of: the increasing interest being shown in the Association as evidenced by the numerous enquiries for information on the BSIA, the interviews sought by journalists from a wide range of news media and the fact that the Association is being cited as the voice of the security industry in such journals as ‘Business News’ and ‘Which?’. (BSIA 1978a) Furthermore, the BSIA annual luncheon guest list for 1978 included, among others: the Permanent Under-Secretary of the State for the Home Office, the Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner and Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and a high-ranking official

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from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabularies (BSIA 1978a). This enhanced profile demonstrates that the BSIA was now able to redefine its role within the politics of private security. Far from being locked into a restrictive agenda, it seems that the BSIA was now able to actively engage in the regulation debate and promote the re-legitimation agenda. Furthermore, this proactive stance had a knock-on effect in the industry more generally. In the 1978 BSIA Annual Report, the Director-General wrote that: ‘Applications continue to be received, especially from companies engaged in the provision of guards and patrols under contract. This is no doubt encouraged by the continuing consideration of the question of licensing’ (BSIA 1978b). Overall, then, by the end of 1978, the rather incongruous but nevertheless effective pro-regulation alliance between the pro-regulation reformers and the re-legitimators was clearly changing the complexion of the politics of private security. This in turn had the effect of formally dragging the Home Office back into the negotiations.

The Green Paper At the end of 1978 the large private security companies were in an increasingly powerful lobbying position in both political and economic terms. In political terms they had forged influential alliances with a number of parliamentary actors, they had used political appointments to penetrate the British political elite and they belonged to a trade association with a respectable public profile. In economic terms the shifting patterns of supply and demand in the security sector were serving to facilitate the continual expansion of the large companies. Indeed, Bowden (1978, p. 249) was able to write at this time that ‘the commercialised private police forces such as Securicor, Security Express, Group Four, Factoryguards and others can muster as many men, over 100,000, as the entire British police establishment’. For these reasons, the Home Office civil servants could no longer contain the regulation issue within the rules of the games that they had set down ten years before and were instead forced to employ a much more public medium to address the issue, which came in the form of a Green Paper published in February 1979. A Green Paper is a government report designed to explore different policy options in relation to a particular issue and is usually published within the public domain (it is often followed by a White Paper, which is a complementary report stipulating an exact government policy on the issue, but as we will see this did not materialise for another

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20 years). In line with its exploratory, fact-finding mission, the 1979 Green Paper purported to advance a balanced assessment of the cases both for and against regulating the private security industry. Indeed, the Home Office authors asserted from the outset, rather incredulously given the nature of the Home Office’s previous engagement with the issue, that ‘[t]he Government have not yet formed a view on the balance of these arguments’ (Home Office 1979, p. 1). Yet upon reading the Green Paper, it soon becomes clear that its intention was not to provide a balanced assessment of the regulation debate, but rather to systematically undermine the arguments in favour of regulation and thereby reassert the Home Office’s anti-regulation reform agenda within this policy area – a lack of objectivity which was duly noted by Stenning and Shearing (1979, p. 262) in their analysis of the document at the time: it is evident to even the most casual observer that the Discussion Paper is a tentative governmental response to some quite specific pressures for the introduction of some form of regulatory legislation . . . there is often as much, if not more, comment to be made on what the Paper did not talk about (and why it did not talk about it), as on what the Paper did talk about. Perhaps understandably, George reflects back upon the Green Paper in slightly more emotive terms, commenting that ‘I managed to wring out of Merlyn Rees [the Home Secretary] . . . a Green Paper in 79 and it was a hatchet job on me, deliberately. Just to destroy the concept of regulation’ (private interview 2007). In order to put forward their anti-regulation position, the Home Office authors advanced two main arguments. The first was to simply disregard the industry. They claimed that private security officers had no ‘special powers’ over and above those of the ordinary British citizen and that these actors did not therefore warrant regulation (Home Office 1979, pp. 8–9). As Stenning and Shearing (1979, p. 263) noted at the time, this was a highly unsatisfactory argument because it was patently clear that private security officers did indeed have special powers over and above the ordinary citizen, for they controlled access to and behaviour within both public and private spaces while wearing police-style uniforms. Interestingly, evidence suggests that the Home Office civil servants privately agreed with Shearing and Stenning in this respect, for they had spent the past two decades attempting to control the special powers of private security officers. This rather incongruous

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argument, then, should probably be interpreted more as a politically expedient way of sidelining the regulation issue than as an accurate reflection of the Home Office viewpoint. However, the second anti-regulation argument was far more consistent with the Home Office’s traditional approach in this policy area, for the Green Paper asserted that: First, any form of licensing or statutory control could give the appearance of state approval to particular activities and by increasing an apparent distinction between approved security personnel and other citizens lead people mistakenly to believe that such personnel had some legal authority or power which they did not in fact have. (Home Office 1979, pp. 12–13) This argument was founded upon the long-standing concern that regulation would serve to confer legitimacy upon the industry and therefore play into the industry’s re-legitimation agenda. In an attempt to reinforce this argument, the Home Office civil servants then advanced a highly selective interpretation of the Committee on Privacy’s investigations, stating that: A particular disadvantage of formal controls over private detectives (which the Younger Committee recognised) is that the possession by a private investigator of a license, or other form of authority, might give the false impression of his having special powers or status in the eyes of the public. (Home Office 1979, p. 17) It was true that the Committee did acknowledge this line of reasoning, but importantly they subsequently dismissed it and instead recommended both in their official Report and in the House of Commons that a system of regulation should be introduced. The salient point here is that the Home Office civil servants appeared to be collating whatever evidence and arguments they could gather together in order to present a case against regulation. These arguments, of course, were not put forward because the Home Office civil servants considered that the industry did not need to be controlled (despite the contrary logic of their first anti-regulation argument), for they were ardent reformers. They wanted to maintain the impression that the state continued to exercise some kind of monopolistic control over the security sector so as to appeal to the average British citizen’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to

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be delivered. They also wanted to exercise control over the industry so as to protect both the state’s political supremacy in this foundational sovereign domain and the public good (which from the reform perspective are essentially one and the same thing). However, they were seemingly convinced that regulation was not the appropriate institutional mechanism for exercising control over the industry, for it would potentially serve to confer a greater degree of legitimacy upon the operations of the private security companies. With this in mind, the Home Office civil servants once again promoted the use of an improved nonstatutory central body – i.e., the BSIA – through which to control the industry’s activities. This viewpoint was clearly evident in the Green Paper’s supposedly unbiased evaluation of self regulation as a mode of control: it has to be asked, before public controls are imposed, whether selfregulation could be further improved . . . Could coverage of firms and activities be increased? Might existing codes of practice be further developed? Might some continuing supervision of standards be feasible, for example by inspection on a sample basis, linked with a form of registration? (Home Office 1979, p. 24) This suggests that even though the BSIA was no longer locked into the rules of the games set down by the Home Office during the previous decade, from the latter’s perspective the informal self-regulatory system administrated by this trade organisation was still preferable to statutory regulation as a means of exercising control over the industry. In summary, then, the Green Paper was an exposition of the Home Office’s anti-regulation reform agenda. Crucially, these arguments did indeed succeed in temporarily reinforcing the Home Office’s agenda within this policy area – although this was probably more related to the fact that the Green Paper was supported by the powerful triptych of the government, the Home Office civil servants and ACPO (though not the Police Federation, which was listed as a supporter of George’s bills) rather than the cohesion of the document itself. It is therefore possible to conclude that in 1979 the Home Office was still able to successfully realise its anti-regulation reform agenda in the face of the pro-regulation alliance formed by the reformers and re-legitimators, for it had once again stamped out the issue of statutory regulation. However, the ability of the Home Office to stifle this issue was by this time becoming increasingly compromised, for three important reasons.

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First, the idea of regulating the private security industry was now far more public than ever before. While in the past the issue of regulation was for the most part contained by the Home Office and the police within a relatively small circle of departmental actors and industry representatives, it was now clearly set out within the Green Paper – an openly public document. And although the Green Paper was intentionally written in order to steer the reader towards the case against statutory regulation, the case in favour was certainly not discredited by the Paper’s often unconvincing arguments. In other words, the idea of regulation was now a widely-accessible political reference point. This in turn served to benefit the pro-regulation reformers and re-legitimators who, for different reasons, wanted to publicly build the case in favour of implementing regulation. Second, the complexion of the politics of private security had now changed. Towards the end of the 1960s, the Home Office had managed to prevent different parts of the state coming into conflict with one another over the issue of statutory regulation. By the end of the 1970s, however, this conflict was now firmly established, with a number of parliamentary actors on the pro-regulation reform side and the Home Office and ACPO on the anti-regulation side. Importantly, this conflict in turn provided a window of opportunity for the private security actors to join forces with the parliamentary actors in order to advance the case for regulation. Furthermore, even though the Home Office was continually blocking the path to regulation, the very fact that the executives of the large private security companies were able to publicly promote the idea of regulation in alliance with parliamentary actors served to further advance the re-legitimation agenda, for this political alliance was still creating a relatively official-looking connection between the industry and the state within the security sector. Finally, the Green Paper was published not only at a time when the localised context of the negotiations was changing, but during a period of broader political-economic transformation. Just three months after the Green Paper was released, the first Thatcher government assumed power and began implementing its far-reaching neoliberal project. Crucially, the new government’s emphasis upon market-centred as opposed to state-centred solutions to political-economic problems served to once again shift the balance of power within the politics of private security, though in a number of unexpected ways.

6 The Neoliberal Experiments (1979–96)

By the end of the 1970s, the politics of private security revolved around an increasingly intense regulation debate, which had by now captured the attention of some of the most prominent political actors in the country. On the pro-regulation side were the executives of the large private security companies, the main industry trade association, an ever-growing number of parliamentary actors, the Police Federation and a collection of academics and media commentators. On the anti-regulation side were the Home Office and ACPO. At this time, the comparatively small but extremely powerful anti-regulation alliance was just about controlling the debate. By the mid-1990s, however, the pro-regulation alliance had finally managed to turn the tables by establishing a consensus in favour of regulating the private security industry (which included a reluctant Home Office and an enthusiastic ACPO). Yet the path to this consensus was by no means straightforward, for the ascendance of the neoliberal political-economic project during the course of the 1980s impacted upon the politics of private security in a number of unpredictable ways. This chapter will chronologically analyse this fourth phase of the political negotiations over the constitution of the British security sector.

An ordinary commodity? On 4 May 1979 Margaret Thatcher led the Conservative Party into government with a mandate to address the political and economic problems of the day using a market-centred policy model. One central part of this model was the aim of streamlining public service provision through the processes of contractorisation and privatisation, and the introduction of quasi-markets into public service delivery chains – what became 102

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known as new institutional economics or new public management (see Rhodes 1996; Freedland 2001; Flinders 2008). This neoliberal shift in policy-making is often portrayed as one of the key turning points in twentieth-century political history, yet its immediate impact upon the politics of private security was nominal. The new government’s initial policy stance towards the private security industry seemed to represent, on the surface at least, a direct continuation of the approach taken by the preceding Labour government – that is, promoting a system of self-regulation through a central body composed of industry representatives. However, it must be noted that this continuity was in certain respects unsurprising, for self-regulation in fact complemented the neoliberal mantra of delegating responsibility for service provision to the market wherever possible – indeed, this neoliberal justification for self-regulation would be capitalised upon by the Home Office in the years to come. With this continuation in policy, then, during the early 1980s the Home Office started to institute through the BSIA an improved system of self-regulation in line with the (implicit) recommendations of the previous government’s 1979 Green Paper (HC 397-II [1983–4], p. 246). This process resulted in the establishment, on 28 May 1982, of the National Inspectorate of Security Guard, Patrol and Transport Services, which was an industry-run agency designed to maintain standards among BSIA registered companies (Torrance 1984). With this institutional development, the BSIA became a more sophisticated and powerful trade association with its own Inspectorate. However, the BSIA was also once again under the direct influence of the Home Office, which in turn meant that to an extent this institutional arrangement simply served to reproduce the logic of the central body control mechanism envisaged by F Division Home Office civil servants during the mid-1960s. In other words, while the BSIA was certainly more powerful now, it still represented a mechanism for controlling the industry’s operations without introducing statutory regulation. In this sense, the new and improved BSIA can be regarded as another manifestation of the Home Office’s antiregulation reform agenda (notwithstanding the background influence of the neoliberal rationale for self-regulation). Significantly, though, rather than viewing this re-imposition of selfregulation as another defeat in their quest for ‘stateness’, a number of private security executives started to view this institutional arrangement in a much more positive light, using it as the foundation for a new neoliberal experiment. Taking advantage of the logic of new institutional economics and new public management, in which a series

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of formerly state-monopolised services were being marketised to varying degrees, certain private security executives started to disregard their re-legitimation strategy and instead pursued the idea of presenting their companies as ordinary commercial organisations selling ordinary market commodities. In other words, certain executives tested out the notion of ignoring the influence of the political norms which structure the security sector by discounting the average security citizen’s statecentric expectations about how security ought to be delivered, the logic being that the prevailing neoliberal political-economic climate would serve to soften these expectations. The immediate advantage of this experiment was that it allowed these private security executives to disengage with their long-standing struggle for statutory regulation and instead actively welcome the Home Office’s strategy of self-regulation, since this made perfect economic sense for an industry selling ordinary market commodities. Due no doubt to the way in which this alternative strategy served to simplify the industry’s relations with the Home Office, this neoliberal experiment quickly increased in popularity during the early 1980s, soon becoming the dominant viewpoint within the BSIA. The prefacing comments penned by the BSIA Chairman, W.E. Randall, in the 1982 BSIA Annual Report are illuminating in this respect: ‘Our members are fully committed to the concept of selfregulation of the industry and the need to be accountable’ (BSIA 1982). For many private security companies, then, the neoliberal era represented an opportunity to distance their companies from the intractable problem of legitimacy and finally operate as ordinary market actors selling ordinary commodities within the security sector. Importantly, this experiment was not merely based upon naïve wishful thinking, for at this time the private security industry was being presented with more possibilities for organic economic growth than ever before – indeed, it was during this period that the economics of private security really began to impact upon the security sector. For instance, in an attempt to reduce the financial burden on the Exchequer, the Thatcher government soon began to apply new public management policies to the security sector by contracting out traditional state security functions to commercial organisations. To take one important example, annual Ministry of Defence expenditure on private security contracts increased tenfold during the 1980s, from £461,000 in 1984–5 to £4,418,000 in 1989–90 (HC 171 [1989–90], p. ix). These contracts did not cover what would later be termed ‘inner core’ state security functions, since they were generally structured around the routine guarding and patrolling of military sites and therefore resulted in very little

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interaction with the public, but they nevertheless represented a significant economic breakthrough for the industry (HC 397-II [1983–4]; HC 171 [1989–90]). Furthermore, during the 1980s the construction of shopping malls and other forms of ‘mass private property’ gave security consumers a more balanced choice between public and private security provision, and where the growing demand for security could not be satisfied by the police, the private security industry was usually drafted in (Jones and Newburn 1999b, p. 238). Finally, economic downsizing throughout the British economy meant that many jobs which had performed ‘secondary’ social control functions – such as bus conductors, ticket inspectors and roundsmen – were also being phased out, in the process creating a vacuum which was frequently being filled by ‘primary’ social control providers such as private security officers (Jones and Newburn 2002, pp. 139–42). Against the backdrop of these favourable shifts in supply and demand, the neoliberal experiment thus made an increasing amount of sense and the struggle for legitimacy within the security sector accordingly became far less urgent. One important political consequence of this experiment was that it largely dissolved the pro-regulation alliance between the reformers and re-legitimators. This was because while this alliance was extremely valuable to the private security executives in their efforts to capture legitimacy from state institutions, within the context of the neoliberal experiment it became a burden. This fracture was vividly demonstrated in 1984, when Bruce George organised an inquiry into the Ministry of Defence private security contracts through the auspices of the House of Commons Defence Committee. During this inquiry he interviewed Mr A. Torrance, Inspector General of the BSIA’s newly-established National Inspectorate, about this new agency’s variable enforcement of standards. This resulted in a revealing exchange in which Torrance asked: ‘How can we legally enforce these standards on other [i.e., non-BSIA] companies either a) to apply for membership, or b) achieve our standards?’ George replied: ‘You go down to the Home Office and say, “We support Bruce George’s bill to license the security industry”.’ Torrance then responded: ‘we are an organisation which is fairly recent and I think as we go along our professionalism will increase and the standards of the industry, that segment for which we are responsible, will also increase’ (HC 171 [1989–90], p. 254). This demonstrates the extent to which the BSIA had now changed its position within the regulation debate, for while in the previous decade George’s private members’ bills represented key lobbying mechanisms through which the industry could advance the re-legitimation agenda, these bills were now merely viewed

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as unwelcome attempts to bring about unwanted regulatory controls. This is a clear example of the BSIA showing no regard for the political norms which structure the security sector by representing private security companies as ordinary commercial organisations selling ordinary market products. That said, there was certainly not a blanket conversion to this viewpoint among BSIA members. Over the course of the 1980s, for instance, Group 4 and a number of other companies persevered with the re-legitimation agenda and their corresponding struggle for stateconferred legitimacy. To begin with, certain private security executives continued to regard self-regulation as a stepping stone to statutory regulation, as Jim Harrower, former Chief Executive at Group 4 and later Chairman of the BSIA, made clear: ‘We still had to push self-regulation and stand up and be counted. To get there [statutory regulation]’ (private interview 2007). Furthermore, Group 4 were highly supportive of George’s next (and again unsuccessful) private members’ bill, which he introduced in June 1988, thereby keeping a small-scale version of the pro-regulation alliance alive (HC Deb [1987–8], vol. 135, col. 220). Regardless of the new neoliberal context, then, certain private security executives continued to believe that the future of the industry was dependent upon structuring the activities of private security companies in line with the average British citizen’s state-centric expectations about how the security ought to be delivered. However, as the 1980s progressed, these actors increasingly found themselves in the minority. Indeed, David Dickinson, former Managing Director of Group 4 and Chief Executive of the BSIA, explained the situation in the following terms: ‘The Group 4 position had always been statutory regulation, but we didn’t make a lot of public pronouncements about it because we were good loyal BSIA members, and the BSIA position was “we’re doing perfectly well thank you” ’ (private interview 2007). However, this belief in the necessity of re-legitimation was soon to be proved right in terrible circumstances.

Legitimation crisis On 22 September 1989 a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army was detonated at the Royal Marine Barracks in Deal, Kent, instantly killing ten marines and seriously wounding another 23 (one of whom later died from his injuries). During the political fallout from this attack, it very quickly emerged that in January 1988 the responsibility for guarding the barracks had been transferred from the Marines

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to a relatively large private security company called Reliance Security Systems. This immediately initiated a highly public debate in both Parliament and the national press about the inability of private security companies to perform their state-contracted functions. The press were first to elaborate upon the connection between the bombing and the failure of private security provision. The next day, for instance, The Independent (1989a) vividly reported that: As the bodies of the dead – aged in their twenties and mid-thirties – were dragged from the rubble, the privatisation of security was strongly criticized. The job of patrolling the perimeter was taken from full-time Marines last year and given to Reliance Security Systems, a private security company. A few days later the same paper then quoted the following from an interview conducted with a former Marine at the barracks: ‘Some [private security] guards refused to patrol the graveyard because they believed it was haunted. One was frightened of the dark’ (The Independent 1989b). From the media’s perspective, then, it was clear that any status or credibility gained by the industry over the past decade was to be quickly disregarded as they instead returned to their traditional standpoint of mocking the industry. This situation brings to mind the comments of the public relations officer working in the industry during the late 1960s, who said that because of the industry’s precarious status in British society, a decade of good work could be undone in an instant. Nothing, it seems, had changed in this respect. Members of Parliament were equally disparaging. In mid-October 1989, Martin O’Neill MP (Labour), who was at the time Shadow Secretary for Defence, seemed to reflect the mood of many MPs with the following comments on the Deal bombing: The presence of some private security firms at gates and on perimeter duty gives a clear sign to terrorists that part of the security is the responsibility of people who do not have access to arms, and who have only a minimum of training and often only the slimmest of commitments to the job . . . I hope that we can ensure that no more of these cheapjack firms will be hired. (HC Deb [1988–9], vol. 158, cols. 173–4) Perhaps unsurprisingly, the number of parliamentary questions concerning the government’s plans to regulate the industry in order to raise standards subsequently increased very sharply, with no less than

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13 written answers being required of the government on this matter over the ensuing parliamentary session.1 This cultural resistance to the unregulated private security industry, in the form of both unforgiving official criticism and dismissive mocking by the media, had the significant effect of completely undermining the industry’s neoliberal experiment. This was because it had become increasingly clear that private security companies did not in fact have sufficient acceptance among a significant proportion of the British population to operate effectively within the security sector without the conferral of some kind of state legitimacy. They were not ordinary commercial organisations selling ordinary commodities because they operated in a sector which was permeated by deep-rooted expectations about how security ought to be delivered. So, while the neoliberal context undoubtedly served to cloud the legitimacy issue in the short term, the Deal bombing revealed the longer-term reality: in the eyes of the majority of the British population, market-based security was no substitute for state security. Given their long-standing familiarity with this legitimacy dilemma, many private security executives quickly returned to their former strategy of attempting to capture legitimacy from the state through a system of statutory regulation. For instance, a former executive of one large private security company described this policy shift among the highranking industry representatives as follows: ‘when the Royal Marines Barracks at Deal was bombed . . . we took the opportunity to say “ok then we must have a move towards statutory regulation, is that agreed, yes it’s agreed” ’ (private interview 2007). Similarly, David Cowden, who at the time was working for Securicor and who later became Chairman of the BSIA, summarised the exact same decision-making process in the following terms: We’ve got to be coming from a fundamentally more sound background in working with the general public. The Deal bombing actually sharpened up one or two and switched their minds. John Wheeler [Chairman of the BSIA’s National Inspectorate and Conservative MP] overnight almost changed his view. (Private interview 2007) Indeed, on 6 November 1989 and 17 January 1990 John Wheeler introduced two (unsuccessful) Security Industry Bills into the Commons so as to once again publicise the idea of introducing statutory regulation into the private security sector (HC Deb [1988–9], vol. 159, col. 702;

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HC Deb [1989–90], vol. 164, col. 304). To be sure, these Bills did not follow exactly the same regulatory formula mapped out by Bruce George in his numerous private members’ bills, for they put forward the idea of giving the BSIA’s National Inspectorate statutory backing (HC Bill [1988–9] [214]; HC Bill [1989–90] [55]) – an institutional arrangement which was no doubt influenced by Wheeler’s professional interests in the Inspectorate. But this divergence over the institutional arrangements aside, these Bills nevertheless began the process of re-forging the proregulation alliance between the reformers and the re-legitimators – an alliance which remains unbroken to this day. Yet while on the surface it appears that the politics of private security had simply come full circle over the 1980s, there were now three crucial differences. First, after a decade of benefiting from government contracts, the growth of mass private property and a shift towards ‘primary’ social control provision, the industry had grown significantly. For instance, the marketing consultancy Jordon and Sons (1989 and 1993; quoted in Jones and Newburn 1995, p. 226) estimated that the industry’s annual turnover had increased from £476.4 million in 1983 to £1.2256 billion in 1990. This growth meant that private security executives now had considerably more resources to draw upon in their attempts to influence the course of the security sector negotiations. Second, the failed neoliberal experiment served to strengthen the industry’s political bargaining position in another way, for in contracting out a number of formerly state-monopolised security services, the state was now dependent upon a few large companies to deliver a number of supposedly public goods. Once a departmental function such as this has been devolved to the private sector, it is often very difficult for that department to find the necessary resources to reintegrate that function back into its portfolio (see Verkuil 2007). This in effect served to intensify the relationship of power dependence between the large private security companies and the state within a more formally constituted security sector network. Third, by the late 1980s ACPO was no longer a supporter of the anti-regulation reform agenda and had joined with the pro-regulation alliance, in the process leaving the Home Office as the sole proponent of the anti-regulation standpoint – a major policy turnaround which will be examined in the next section.

Home alone While on one side of the negotiations the executives of the large private security companies were breaking their alliance with the pro-regulation

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reformers and were beginning their ultimately abortive neoliberal experiment, on the other side another previously entrenched alliance was also experiencing a period of change. During the mid-1980s the anti-regulation reform alliance between the Home Office and ACPO gradually broke down under heavily politicised circumstances. At the beginning of the decade, though, such a split seemed highly unlikely, for the alliance between the Home Office and ACPO was arguably never closer. This was in large part due to the particularly close relationship which emerged between the new Conservative government and the police. Although the Conservatives assumed office on the back of a market-orientated mandate, their platform also incorporated a deep strand of social authoritarianism (Gamble 1994). Importantly, this translated into strong support for the police forces. Indeed, their 1979 Manifesto asserted that ‘Britain needs strong, efficient police forces with high morale. Improved pay will help Chief Constables to recruit up to necessary establishment levels’ (Conservative Party 1990). There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Conservatives delivered on this pledge over subsequent years. Between 1979 and 1988, for example, more than 12,000 additional police officers were recruited, police powers were increased through the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, and the Home Office provided support for more weaponry and training in public order policing (Rawlings 1991, p. 42). So, despite the contradictory policy of contracting out ‘outer core’ security functions at this time – for instance, in the form of the Ministry of Defence security contracts – the Conservatives’ focus upon ‘inner core’ security functions did enable the Home Office and ACPO to maintain a close alliance during the early 1980s. By the mid-1980s, however, this alliance began to disintegrate. The primary cause of this rupture was the politicisation of law and order in the wake of the 1984–5 miners’ strikes. During these strikes, the police, strongly backed by the Conservative government, used controversial tactics to control the thousands of picketing miners. The confrontations are described in detail by Clive Emsley (1996, p. 184): They [the pickets] found themselves confronted by policemen drawn from a dozen or so difference forces, but uniformly kitted out in riot overalls with helmets and visors, shields and long batons. Police tactics were also new. Lines of men carrying long shields took the brunt of any missiles hurled at the police; the lines then parted to release either squads of men carrying small, round shields and batons, or mounted police – the former, according to the new [ACPO

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Public Order Policing] Manual, were to ‘disperse and/or incapacitate’ demonstrators, the latter ‘to create fear’. This was a long way from the friendly policy of policing by consent which characterised the police force during the 1950s. Far from resonating with the public’s desire for a universal and peaceful social order, these police actions were widely seen to be both excessive and militaristic, and they served to bring both the police and the government into disrepute (see Fine and Millar 1985). This significant moment in British policing history had important consequences for the politics of private security, for it laid the foundations for the severance of the long-standing anti-regulation reform alliance between the Home Office and ACPO. In the aftermath of the miners’ strike, ACPO consciously sought to distance itself from its highly politicised relationship with the Conservative government in an effort to steer the police back towards the safe ground of non-political ‘constabulary independence’ (Reiner 2000, p. 73). Significantly, this distancing gave the Chief Constables space in which to independently review their policy stance regarding the industry, and it was not long before a fundamental reassessment took place. By 1987 the private security industry was appearing on the ACPO Crime Committee’s radar with increasing frequency. The Committee’s Chairman at the time, Chief Constable David Owen, has described the reason for this in the following terms: ‘The whole context at the time of private security was very much one of a growth industry, and one realised that here within this growth industry was a very real problem manifesting itself’, the problem being ‘the infiltration of the criminal element into the private security industry’ (private interview 2007). This in turn prompted the Crime Committee to send out a questionnaire to every territorial police force in order to generate data and canvass opinions on the industry. The questionnaire returned a substantial amount of evidence showing widespread criminality within the industry and, moreover, revealed a clear policy stance among Chief Constables: ‘all but two [of the 49 territorial police forces] expressed the view that either statutory licensing, or legislation to establish compulsory “self” regulation, was essential to progress’ (ACPO 1988). In 1988 this information was published in an official report entitled A Review of the Private Security Industry, which accordingly set out the case in favour of statutory regulation (ACPO 1988). ACPO then attempted to guide the Home Office towards this agenda but were unsuccessful, as Owen explains: ‘the Home Office was turning its face against what we thought was fairly

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compelling evidence that something needed to be done. We had various meetings and got precisely nowhere’ (private interview 2007). And with that, ACPO broke its alliance with the Home Office on this issue and joined the growing ranks of the pro-regulation reformers. At the end of the 1980s, then, the Home Office was completely isolated in its anti-regulation viewpoint. Not only had ACPO now sided with the pro-regulation reform lobby, but following the Deal bombing the majority of the industry had also rejoined this lobby in line with their renewed re-legitimation agenda. Significantly, in 1989 the mounting pressure coming from this much-strengthened pro-regulation alliance compelled the Home Office to formally address the regulation debate in the form of a Working Party – the department’s first focused analysis of the industry since the 1979 Green Paper. Once again, the investigations undertaken by the Working Party did not represent a balanced and open-minded assessment of the cases for and against statutory regulation. From the outset, for instance, the remit of the Working Party was limited to a consideration of the ‘ways in which selfregulation might be improved’ and nothing more (HC Deb [1988–9], vol. 149, col. 597). Statutory regulation was simply not on the agenda. As such, the resulting Working Party report, entitled The Private Security Industry Background Paper, quickly reached the pre-programmed conclusion that any problems within the industry should be resolved by instituting a new ‘Manned Services Inspectorate’ to replace the existing National Inspectorate, which would in turn supposedly bring about a more sophisticated and inclusive system of industry self-regulation (Home Office 1991). On the surface, this conclusion appears to be a straightforward reproduction of the anti-regulation reform policy which was first implemented by F Division civil servants during the mid-1960s and then re-implemented in the wake of the 1979 Green Paper – that is, in order to control the large private security companies without conferring legitimacy upon them, it is necessary to contain them within a single central body which has close but unofficial connections to the Home Office. However, a more detailed inspection of the Report suggests that another political rationale was also playing an influential role. For instance, the Report asserted that: ‘The government starts from a position of favouring deregulation in as many spheres of economic activity as possible in the interests of maximising competition and consumer choice’ (Home Office 1991, p. 8). This rationale for rejecting statutory regulation is clearly couched within neoliberal rhetoric – that is, unfettered markets (or deregulated economic activity) rather than regulated markets

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lead to the best outcomes for citizen-consumers. It is difficult to determine whether this neoliberal line of reasoning represented a genuine shift in ideological persuasion within the Home Office or was another politically expedient justification which helped to promote the longstanding anti-regulation reform agenda. Either way, it served to once again push the issue of regulation to the sidelines by facilitating the development of the Inspectorate of the Security Industry (ISI) in 1992. The ISI was an improved version of the National Inspectorate of Security Guard, Patrol and Transport Services established ten years earlier and thus represented yet another attempt to preserve the non-statutory central body control mechanism first envisaged by the Home Office in the mid-1960s. However, this development did not sideline the issue of regulation for long. While the 1982 improvements to the system of self-regulation succeeded in pushing the issue of statutory regulation off the negotiating table for almost a decade – albeit within a notably anti-regulation political-economic context – the 1992 improvements did not fare so well. As we have seen, there was by this time an enormous amount of pressure coming from the pro-regulation lobby, which was unlikely to be quelled by yet another iteration of the same non-statutory central body control mechanism. Moreover, the pro-regulation cause was further consolidated during the early 1990s by another legitimation crisis within the industry, which revolved around the infamous Group 4 prisoner escapes. In 1993, Group 4 won a high-profile government contract to escort prisoners between 21 prisons, 71 magistrates’ courts, 10 Crown Courts and 57 police stations in the East Midlands and Humberside (The Independent 1993). Unfortunately, six prisoners escaped from Group 4’s detention facilities in the first week of the contract, and a seventh escaped soon after. This prompted widespread mockery and criticism in the media, as Sally Weale (The Guardian 1999; quoted in Livingstone and Hart 2003, p. 164) notes: ‘In the early 90s, poking fun at Group 4 became a national pastime after they managed to lose seven prisoners within three weeks of taking on the first private prisoner escort service. Newspaper cartoonists and satirical shows like Have I Got News For You had a field day.’ This episode unsurprisingly strengthened the resolve of both sides of the pro-regulation alliance and, at the same time, served to undermine the recent improvements to the system of self-regulation. Thus, when Michael Stern MP (Conservative) introduced his Private Security (Licensing) Bill in May 1994, he was able to remark that ‘regulation, licensing and inspection for private security firms . . . appears to have the support of not only large sections of the police . . . but the full

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support of the British security industry’ (HC Deb [1993–4], vol. 243, col. 159). The political pressure for regulation appeared to be reaching a critical mass. Recognising this, in the summer of 1994 the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee announced its intention to conduct an inquiry into the regulation of the private security industry. This was to be a crucial turning point in the regulation debate.

The rematch The first encounter between a parliamentary committee and the Home Office over the issue of regulation – which centred around the activities of the Committee on Privacy – resulted in a clear victory for the central government department. However, the rematch between the Home Affairs Committee and the Home Office was a different matter. This was because the political context had changed significantly in the intervening decades and this time around the Home Office faced a much tougher challenge, as this section will demonstrate. Importantly, like the Committee on Privacy 20 years before, the Home Affairs Committee provided a forum in which various actors were given the opportunity to voice their opinions about regulation. Of particular interest here are the submissions of the industry representatives, ACPO, the parliamentary actors, the British Retail Consortium and the Home Office – each of which will be examined in turn. Against the backdrop of two successive legitimation crises and buoyed by the growing strength of the pro-regulation lobby, the industry representatives used the Committee to communicate their re-legitimation agenda in a highly persuasive manner. Group 4’s written submission, for instance, commented that: ‘the perception of criminality within the industry (fed by media scare stories) is now so well established that statutory regulation is now the only way to deal with the natural concerns expressed’ (Group 4 Securitas 1995, p. 153). Securicor’s written submission reinforced this point: ‘The combined effect of statutory registration/licensing and access to criminal records would particularly enhance our public credibility’ (Securicor Security Services 1995, p. 150). Furthermore, in providing oral evidence to the Committee, Jim Harrower, who was at the time a Chief Executive of Group 4, explained more precisely why statutory regulation would improve relations with the public: regulation of course would carry the identification card . . . and if there was enough publicity, which we would put into it, then

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the pensioners and people would know . . . [that] . . . if a guy comes forward with an ID card you can check it, you can see that it is a bona fide ID card and you can move ahead. (HC 17-II [1994–5), p. 5] This is an interesting quote because it illustrates the precise micromechanics behind the industry’s desire for regulation. All legallycompliant private security officers would be issued with a physical licence which would clearly assert that they were authorised by the state to carry out their security functions. This licence would in turn appeal to the average security consumer’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered by providing him or her with a visible and legally grounded connection between the private security officer and the state. It was this symbol of ‘stateness’ which was so central to the re-legitimation agenda. However, these micro-mechanics aside, the general message communicated by the executives of the large private security companies was that they completely supported regulation. ACPO was similarly supportive of regulation, although its rationale was of course clearly rooted in the reform agenda. ACPO’s written submission to the Committee, for instance, included the following statement: Arising out of the recent reforms of the police service and the growing demands and financial restrictions placed upon it, new opportunities have arisen for non-statutory bodies to enter the field of what has hitherto been seen solely as the remit of the police. As the private security industry moves to fill this void so it has attempted to provide a service traditionally seen as the responsibility of the police, but without the moral, ethical or legal constraints which apply to the police. It is ACPO’s contention that the provision of a function inextricably linked to that of the police, should be structured within a statutory framework that commands public confidence. (ACPO 1995, pp. 99–100) This quote is a clear statement of the reform agenda, for while ACPO was pragmatically accepting the existence of the private security companies, it was also asserting that because these companies are operating within a sector which has historically been regarded by the public as being the sole remit of the state, it is the state’s responsibility to maintain some degree of monopolistic control over this domain in line with these public expectations. Once again, then, the reformers and re-legitimators were developing a clear pro-regulation alliance.

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The parliamentary actors also advanced a clear statement of their reform agenda, in turn echoing the sentiments put forward by ACPO. The main parliamentary representative was, unsurprisingly, Bruce George MP. In his submission of oral evidence to the Committee, he too pragmatically recognised that the industry was inevitably going to assume an increasingly important position within the British security sector: ‘The security industry has already made substantial strides into those areas hitherto sacrosanct for the police and will continue to make further inroads’ (HC 17-II [1994–5], p. 78). Moreover, he also recognised that because of the responsibility which comes with security provision, it was necessary to regulate the industry so as to ensure public safety. With this in mind, he advocated a system of regulation very similar to the one set out in his numerous private members’ bills, which would simply be designed to fashion ‘an industry which functions effectively and responsibly’ (HC 17-II [1994–5], p. 79). George thus reiterated to the Home Affairs Committee the reform agenda that he had been promoting now for almost 20 years. Strikingly, in addition to the industry representatives, ACPO and the parliamentary actors, numerous other organisations submitted evidence to the Committee in favour of statutory regulation, ranging from the Association of County Councils to the civil rights group Liberty. Among those organisations which had not traditionally contributed towards the politics of private security, one in particular deserves a brief examination here: the British Retail Consortium (BRC). The written evidence presented by this institution provides us with a rare opportunity to bring the quantified opinions of everyday British security consumers into this narrative. According to the BRC, the British retail industry in 1992–3 represented approximately nine per cent of the custom for the manned guard industry, amounting to somewhere in the region of £63 million in contracts. In December 1994 the BRC sent a survey about the regulation of the private security industry to a large number of its member companies, which together represented no less than 22,000 retail outlets. This survey discovered that a resounding 90 per cent of respondents were in favour of stronger regulation, 80 per cent of whom wanted statutory regulation to be enforced by the state rather than through any self-regulatory mechanisms (BRC 1995, p. 159). This submission thus represents clear evidence that a notable section of the British population indeed expected security provision to be somehow controlled by the state and not left to the unfettered logic of the market – that is, this submission provides evidence of the political norms which structure the British security sector.

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As a result of these pro-regulation submissions to the Committee, the Home Office’s anti-regulation agenda was being pushed towards breaking point. This was first evidenced in the Home Office’s submission of oral evidence to the Committee, which was delivered by David Maclean MP (Conservative), Minister of State for the Home Office. Rather than simply reiterating one of the Home Office’s self-regulation rationales, he conceded that: ‘Our position is that I am coming to this Committee open-minded on where we should go for the future’ (HC 17-II [1994–5], p. 40). And in this new and supposedly open frame of mind, he also admitted that: ‘I could not fail but notice that there were a large number of people in favour of statutory regulation’ (HC 17-II [1994–5], p. 47). So, although the Home Office declined to commit itself to statutory regulation, Maclean’s interview did suggest that the department was perhaps now accepting the inevitability of this outcome. This inevitability was then further compounded by the Committee’s report and subsequent debate in the House of Commons, both of which were resolutely pro-regulation in their orientation. The report, which was published in May 1995, directly reflected the majority opinion of the pro-regulation reformers and re-legitimators, recommending that the contract manned guarding side of the industry should be regulated by a newly-instituted public body (HC 17-I [1994–5], p. xxix). It is also particularly interesting to note the following observation made in the Committee’s report: ‘We have been impressed by the determination of the security industry to improve its own standards and the fact that the pressure for the introduction of regulation has come from within the industry itself’ (HC 17-I [1994–5], p. xxxii). Very similar sentiments were expressed when the House of Commons debated the report’s recommendations six months later. Not only were the majority of the speakers pro-regulation, but it was also re-emphasised by Christopher Mullin MP (Labour), who was a member of the Committee, that ‘[t]he industry is begging to be regulated’ (HC Deb [1994–5], vol. 265, col. 221). These quotes indicate that the re-legitimation agenda of the industry representatives had, it seems, succeeded in exerting a significant degree of influence over the policy-making process. Interestingly, these quotes also show no demonstrable appreciation of the possibly unintended consequence of regulation – that is, the unintended conferral of state legitimacy upon the industry. This suggests, then, that these pro-regulation reformers were either unaware of or unconcerned about this potential scenario. However, despite these mounting pro-regulation forces, for a short

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period of time the Home Office continued to procrastinate over the issue of regulation. It had not yet capitulated to the pressure of the Committee. The final breaking point arrived in February 1996 when during Opposition Day in the House of Commons, Jack Straw MP (Labour), then Shadow Home Secretary, moved that the government implement the recommendations of the Committee (HC Deb [1995–6], vol. 271, col. 869). This was a sign that the politics of private security was now entering the political mainstream, for it was being projected onto one of Britain’s most public stages by a high-flying opposition party one year before a General Election. It also signified the final dissolution of the Home Office’s anti-regulation agenda. Before analysing the resulting parliamentary debate, however, it is necessary to briefly explore the background to this Opposition Day debate, for there is an interesting prologue to New Labour’s sudden decision to party politicise the issue of regulation. Frustrated by the Conservative government’s dilatory behaviour within the increasingly one-sided regulation debate, in the previous year both Bruce George and Group 4 had shifted their political attentions to the increasingly powerful opposition party. George recollects, for instance, that: I shifted my tactics, persuading the opposition to take an interest in private security. That meant I went on endless Criminal Justice Bill committee stages where I made speeches, not aimed at the Tories but at people like Alun Michael, who was the opposition spokesman on criminal justice. I remember organising a conference in one of the committee rooms and inviting Blair who was then leader of the opposition. He said, ‘well you liaise with Alun and I’ll support regulation’. (Private interview 2007) In addition to this intra-parliamentary pressure, New Labour was also being subjected to a subtle form of persuasion from the industry, as a former executive of Group 4 recently explained: Up until the election in 97 we still sensed a great deal of reluctance from the Tories. But we the gang at Group 4 made up our mind when we did the Labour Party Conference . . . [that] . . . they know they’re going to win, you could feel it, and so we decided that we’d be so nice that it hurt . . . we’ve been highly successful at getting them behind the scenes. (Private interview 2007)

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These redirected lobbying tactics were thus serving to press the proregulation agenda upon New Labour’s policy portfolio in the run-up to a General Election. It was a strategy which seemingly paid off, as the Opposition Day debate demonstrated. This debate was a more heated and partisan affair than previous parliamentary exchanges over the issue of regulation, which was perhaps inevitable given that it was framed in party political terms with the next General Election only a year away. In response to Straw’s opening requests for the government to implement the Committee’s recommendations, Maclean argued defensively that: ‘The security industry has expanded enormously over the past 25 years. It has had 25 years of success and achievement, which has been brought about because governments did not interfere with it’ (HC Deb [1995–6], vol. 271, col. 882). However, this response did not convince the Home Office’s opponents, for Maclean’s retort was followed in the debating chamber by some very persuasive pro-regulation speeches delivered by both familiar campaigners such as Bruce George, Norman Fowler and Ivan Lawrence (who was Chair of the Committee), together with numerous recent converts who were no doubt encouraged by the fact that New Labour was now putting its considerable political weight behind the issue. Arguing mostly from a pro-regulation reform perspective, then, the House of Commons was overwhelmingly in favour of statutory regulation. Against such concentrated countervailing forces, in October 1996 the Home Office was finally pressured into issuing a short response to the Home Affairs Committee announcing that a new joint consultation exercise would be launched with both police and industry representatives over the costs and benefits of implementing statutory regulation in the contract manned guarding sector of the private security industry (HC 744 [1995–6], p. 3). Then in December 1996 the Home Office published another Green Paper which, in stark contrast to the department’s previous two reports on the matter, tentatively set out the beginnings of what a regulatory regime might look like. Most importantly, the Home Office conceded in this Paper that there was a case for regulating the contract manned guarding sector through statutory mechanisms – although it was ambiguous about exactly how this could be done. While the Home Office recognised that a new licensing body would have to be established, it prevaricated over details such as whether licensing should apply to all private security officers or only to those with previous convictions, whether a central register should be used or a physical licence should be issued, and whether an inspectorate would be required to enforce the regime (Home Office 1996, pp. 3–9). Nevertheless, behind

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this rather evasive attitude, it was clear that after a five-decade struggle, a shaky pro-regulation consensus on the terms of the reformers and the re-legitimators had finally emerged. Moreover, it had emerged in favourable political circumstances, for the pro-regulation consensus included among its number a powerful opposition party which was just a few months away from assuming office with a landslide majority. This was to be a period of rapid change in the politics of private security.

7 New Labour, New Legitimacy (1997–2001)

By the end of 1996, a pro-regulation consensus had finally been established in the security sector policy network, but it was a relatively shaky consensus. This was because it included a very reluctant Home Office which had only joined the ranks of pro-regulation reformers and re-legitimators out of political necessity. Had the Conservatives won the 1997 General Election, then the road from the 1996 Green Paper to the statute book would in all probability have been a very uncertain one. In the event, however, New Labour won the election with a landslide majority of 179 seats, and this victory turned out to be the cement which transformed the shaky pro-regulation consensus into a strong one, for the new government not only supported the idea of regulation in principle, but also provided a much-needed strategic vision for how a regulatory regime would work in practice. This vision, which was rooted in New Labour’s ‘partnership approach’ to combating crime and disorder, served to fuse together both the reform and re-legitimation agendas and, in doing so, set in motion political processes which led to the Private Security Industry Act 2001. This chapter will chronologically examine this fifth and comparatively calm phase of the politics of private security.

The partnership approach to crime and disorder Throughout the post-war era, the Labour Party had generally been perceived by the electorate as being weak on criminal justice policy. This was an area that the Conservatives had typically dominated. While there were times when the Conservatives had certainly strayed onto dangerously authoritarian territory – the miners’ strikes being perhaps the best example – their uncompromising approach to crime control had by and 121

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large proved to be popular among an electorate facing steadily rising crime rates. However, in a remarkable turnaround, during the early to mid-1990s New Labour launched an extremely effective campaign to capture this pivotal policy domain. As McLaughlin and Muncie (2000, p. 169) note: ‘Crime was crucial to both the ideological rebirth of the Labour Party as “New Labour” and its landslide victory in the 1997 General Election.’ Armed with the rhetorically powerful slogan ‘Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime’, New Labour soon persuaded Middle England that its policies represented the best solution to crime and disorder problems in late twentieth-century Britain. Beneath New Labour’s resonant catchphrase was the partnership approach to crime and disorder. This involved an ambitious attempt to absorb the various ad hoc public-private partnerships established by the Conservatives during the previous decade, together with numerous independent crime control initiatives, into a single ‘third way’ approach to criminal justice policy (McLaughlin, Muncie and Hughes 2001; McLaughlin and Murji 2001). The intention of this approach was to harness both public and private resources in the fight against crime by putting state agencies in control of ‘steering’ crime control strategies, while devolving the corresponding ‘rowing’ functions to variety of non-state actors (see Osborne and Gaebler 1992). Furthermore, while state institutions were in theory supposed to assume the dominant role in these partnerships, non-state actors were actively encouraged to contribute towards the development of crime control initiatives so as to ensure that a degree of the responsibility for controlling crime was meaningfully transferred away from the state (Garland 2000). In other words, non-state actors were ‘empowered’ within this new partnership approach. This approach to crime control thus provided a favourable context for the private security companies to assume more responsibility in what was soon to be termed the ‘extended policing family’. That said, while it was always clear that New Labour was going to encourage partnerships with localised community organisations, it was far from certain whether it was always its intention to promote partnerships with commercial organisations such as the private security companies. Indeed, during its period in opposition, Home Affairs spokespersons for New Labour were often critical of the marketisation of public services within the criminal justice sector, as they judged this trend to be more threatening to the delivery of security as a public good than the devolution of powers to non-market institutions, such as neighbourhood watch associations (McLaughlin, Muncie and Hughes 2001, p. 305). However, as the previous chapter illustrated, around the

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time of the Home Affairs Committee’s enquiry, a small but influential coterie of reformers and re-legitimators helped to push the private security industry onto New Labour’s crime control agenda. When New Labour subsequently targeted the issue of private security regulation during an Opposition Day debate in February 1996 it effectively began the process of integrating the industry into its partnership approach to crime control. What is particularly interesting about this policy development is that, unlike the Conservatives, New Labour seemed to appreciate that for private security companies to be engaged in crime control activities, it was essential for them to be both reformed and re-legitimated using statutory regulation. This standpoint was central to the establishment of a strong consensus within the political negotiations. At the time, this was an unusual position to adopt, since most state actors were straightforward reformers who regarded re-legitimation as little more than an unintended consequence of regulation. In order to understand how and why New Labour reached this line of reasoning, it is first important to explore the central dilemma inherent within British criminal justice policy during the mid-1990s. Garland (1996, pp.449–50) captures this dilemma when he remarks that: The predicament for government today, then, is that they (i.e. ministers, officials, agency executives etc.) see the need to withdraw or at least qualify their claim to be the primary and effective provider of security and crime control, but they also see, just as clearly, that the political costs of such a move are likely to be disastrous . . . [This is because] the myth of the penal sovereign and its ‘law and order’ powers are too deeply inscribed, and too politically potent, to be easily dismantled by rational critique and administrative reform, and we will continue to observe its invocation. What Garland is arguing is that in pragmatic terms it was necessary for the government to devolve security provision to non-state actors because the state could not cope with the domestic population’s rising demand for crime control. However, this type of rational pragmatism did not sit well with the average citizen’s expectation that the state ought to monopolise security provision. In the case of private security, New Labour’s solution to this ‘predicament’ was twofold: firstly, it was necessary to reform the private security companies so as to give the impression that the state still retained some degree of monopolistic control over the security sector, thereby (in Garland’s words) reinforcing

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the ‘myth of the penal sovereign’; secondly, it was also necessary to re-legitimate these companies by conferring upon them the quality of ‘stateness’ which the average security consumer expected from their security providers, since this was the most effective way of making these companies empowered members of the emergent extended policing family. Both parts of this plan could, of course, be accomplished through statutory regulation. This synthesis of the reform and re-legitimation agendas can be evidenced in New Labour’s rhetoric soon after coming into power. For instance, on 15 July 1997, just a few weeks after the General Election, the new Home Secretary Jack Straw gave the following speech at the BSIA annual luncheon: To solve the chronic problems of neighbourhood disorder will require co-ordinated action by central and local government, by the criminal justice agencies and by the communities themselves. But the private sector – and the private security industry – also have a crucial role to play. To ensure that you are able to play that role to the full, we must get your industry onto a sound footing. This means proper regulation. But in reiterating my commitment to regulation, my message is not one of mistrust, but of confidence. I am confident that by working together for sound regulation, we can rid the industry of the ‘cowboy’ operators and so restore public faith in your important role in the fight against crime. That is in the public interest as much as it is in the interests of the industry. (Straw 1997) The underlying message of this speech was very clear: ‘sound regulation’ equates to both reform and re-legitimation. This is because both are required in order to ‘restore public faith’ in the industry and to allow the industry to contribute effectively towards the ‘fight against crime’. Significantly, then, the partnership approach to crime control provided the language and concepts which served to meld together both the reform and re-legitimation agendas. As such, it ushered in a period of consensus within the politics of private security and set down the concrete foundations for the Private Security Industry Act 2001.

The consensus The emerging pro-regulation consensus was dependent upon the alignment of New Labour’s partnership approach with the reform agenda of the police and parliamentary actors and the re-legitimation agenda of

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the large private security companies. This section will examine more precisely how these very different – but ultimately complementary – agendas gradually fused together during the first few vital months of New Labour’s period in government, when the future trajectory of the regulation issue was being decided upon. As we have already seen, from the late 1980s onwards ACPO was increasingly in favour of regulating the private security industry. Initially, its motivation for supporting this policy was simply to eradicate the ‘cowboy’ element from the industry and to reassert state control in the security sector – a policy stance most clearly mapped out in ACPO’s 1988 report. In other words, its approach represented a classic example of the reform agenda, which specified that a reformed private security industry was permitted to exist at the foot of a state-controlled, hierarchical security sector. Yet, in tandem with New Labour’s more positive partnership approach towards the industry and the concomitant diffusion of new institutional economics and new public management ideals throughout the higher echelons of the police (see McLaughlin and Murji 2001; McLaughlin 2007), certain high-ranking members of ACPO started to enthusiastically encourage the development of more proactive partnerships with private security companies. While this enthusiasm did not stretch so far as to embrace both the reform and re-legitimation agendas in a manner similar to the New Labour government, it could certainly be described as a more optimistic strand of the reform agenda. For instance, in an influential newspaper article published in the Financial Times, Ian Blair (1998), then Chief Constable of Surrey, observed that: The past 50 years have seen a steady but accelerating loss of the public police’s share of the broad market for security. The police has lost its monopoly over the guarding of cash-in-transit, the control of sports events and the escort of prisoners. Above all, the police has lost its monopoly over the patrol of places where people congregate. Where once people shopped in high streets, which are public spaces where the police has a monopoly, now they go to shopping centres, which are private and patrolled by private security guards. The police should not passively accept these trends, Blair contended, but should rather actively engage with these new security providers: ‘The service should put itself forward as the central point for cooperation between all agencies that affect the security of communities and as the central point of a system of patrols carried out by police, volunteers,

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local authorities and private companies.’ This proposed system would, he continued, steer ‘a middle course between the indefensible claim to a monopoly over patrol and the creeping, unregulated extension of private security in public places. It is a kind of “third way” for the police’ (Blair 1998). With its pragmatic acceptance of the industry, its proposals for a state-directed reform mechanism and its recognition that the police and private security companies must cooperate with each other, this statement clearly resonated with New Labour’s partnership approach to private security provision. To be sure, Blair’s rhetoric did not reproduce Jack Straw’s statements about ‘restoring public faith’ in the industry and as such did not stray into fully fledged re-legitmation territory. However, it did signify a willingness on the part of ACPO to actively build partnerships with private security companies and can therefore be characterised as optimistic reformism. The close alliance between the Home Office (under the command of Jack Straw) and ACPO with regard to this issue of regulation was thus restored, although in the inverse form of its previous anti-regulation incarnation. Yet it is important to acknowledge that while in the late 1990s this optimistic reformism increasingly came to represent official ACPO policy – as evidenced by the institution’s increasingly cooperative relationship with the industry over the next few years and, more symbolically, by Ian Blair’s professional ascent to eventually become the highest-ranking police officer in the country – there were still elements of dissent towards this proactive partnership approach within the major police institutions. As Peter Davies, current ACPO lead on the private security industry, recently remarked, ‘there has been mixed enthusiasm for closer engagement with the industry on the part of ACPO’s leaders, many of whom still lack trust and confidence in the private security industry’ (private interview 2007). This suggests that while some Chief Constables were being increasingly supportive of New Labour’s partnership approach towards the industry and were promoting a more optimistic strand of the reform agenda, others clearly remained rooted in the traditional reform camp, in which the purpose of regulation was nothing more than to control the industry’s operations and to give the impression that the state continued to exercise some kind of monopoly within the security sector. This more pessimistic reformism did not, however, compromise the pro-regulation alliance with New Labour on this matter. In examining the response of the main parliamentary actors towards New Labour’s proposals, it is again instructive to turn our attention towards Bruce George MP, who continued to be the most influential

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and outspoken Member of Parliament within this field. Significantly, in the short period of time between the publication of the Conservative’s December 1996 Green Paper and New Labour’s victory in the May 1997 General Election, George – together with his research partner Mark Button, who was (and still is) an academic at the University of Portsmouth – wrote a response to the outgoing Conservative government’s tentative proposals to regulate the industry (George and Button 1997b). In this document the authors maintained that while they most certainly welcomed any proposals to regulate the private security industry, the regulatory regime mapped out in the 1996 Green Paper did not go far enough. In response to these deficiencies, they developed the following ‘three-dimensional’ model of what their ideal regulatory framework would look like: firstly, it should be ‘wide’, including both the contract and in-house sides of all the sub-sectors of the industry, and not just the contract manned guarding sub-sector; secondly, it should be ‘deep’, stipulating that both companies and individual employees must be licensed and that for a licence to be attained, certain minimum training standards must be satisfied; and, thirdly, the regulator responsible for administrating and enforcing the licensing system should be a statutory agency independent of the industry (George and Button 1997b). For George and Button, only such a ‘comprehensive wide’ model would serve to eliminate the cowboy element from the industry and protect the public. George’s message was thus very clear: he would support New Labour’s proposals so long as the resulting regulatory regime was sufficiently wide, deep and independent to satisfy his reform agenda. To complete the consensus, the most prominent private security industry representatives were also extremely supportive of New Labour’s partnership approach. This is unsurprising given that in almost every respect this approach satisfied the re-legitimation agenda that they had been pursuing for more or less half a century. Statutory regulation within the context of the partnership approach would enable the executives of the large private security companies to finally establish a widely recognisable and official-looking connection between their companies and the state, in the process allowing them to capture the elusive quality of ‘stateness’ which was considered to be so essential in the provision of domestic security. This would in turn allow these executives to both consolidate and expand the operations of their companies within the security sector, in the process generating higher profit margins. Jorgen Philip-Sorensen, at the time Chairman of Group 4, commented upon this general industry support as follows: ‘It was a united effort to regulate

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by many, many companies. We maintained a very pro-active stance’ (private interview 2007). It is also interesting to note that the industry responses to New Labour’s early consultations repeatedly emphasised the importance of the means by which this connection would be communicated to the public – that is, the physical licence. For instance, one prominent managing director outlined the following ideal scenario in a letter dated 17 September 1997 to Alun Michael, Minister for Home Affairs: every security officer/guard would be issued with a registration card/license and a badge with the registration number. Such a badge could be worn on the uniform of whichever company the guard then works for and would become a recognised symbol of an approved, vetted and trained security officer. (Private information) The physical licence was thus considered to be critical to the process of re-legitimating the operations of the industry, as it would enable private security officers to mimic the ‘flashing the badge’ ritual which was so essential to the police’s position in the security sector. And it seems that key industry representatives were more than forthcoming in passing this viewpoint on to the New Labour government. However, it is important to emphasise that during this period the BSIA – which was increasingly becoming the mouthpiece for the proregulation lobby – was not arguing, as one might expect, merely for a ‘light’ regulatory regime which did little more than secure the connection between the industry and the state institutions through the issuing of a state-endorsed licence. Like Bruce George, it also wanted the resulting regulatory regime to be relatively wide, deep and independent (BSIA 1997). This was in large part because it wanted the legislation to be sufficiently ‘heavy’ to eliminate the cowboy companies which for so many years had been consistently bringing the entire industry into disrepute with their criminal behaviour. John Cairncross, current Home Office lead for private security regulation, recently summarised this position as follows: The industry welcomed legislation. When we consulted the industry, people within the industry had been campaigning for years because they wanted some recognition of professionalism, and the legitimate end of the industry wanted the illegitimate end kicked out because

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the cowboys were making the reputation of the industry poor for everybody else. (Private interview 2007) This demonstrates the two significant ways in which statutory regulation would contribute towards the re-legitimation of the private security industry: firstly, through a more positive process it would serve to enhance the status of the reputable end of the industry by establishing a connection between these companies and the state; secondly, through a more negative and proscriptive process it would eliminate those companies whose presence was detrimental to the status of the industry. Furthermore, in eliminating this less reputable end there was also the added economic advantage that the regulated companies could then move into the vacated market space. Either way, the important point here is that prominent industry representatives were joining with ACPO representatives and parliamentary actors in supporting New Labour’s pro-regulation agenda. Against this backdrop, the Home Office was in a prime position to set in motion the constitutional and legislative processes which would eventually result in the Private Security Industry Act 2001.

The White Paper The most common procedure for passing legislation in Britain is as follows. First, the government will set out tentative proposals for a piece of legislation in a Green Paper, which is then used as a common reference point for consultations with a variety of public and private stakeholders. Next, a more concrete legislative proposal will be mapped out in a White Paper, which will be used as the basis for another round of more narrowly-defined consultations. The approved White Paper will then be translated into a Bill, which will be introduced into Parliament. If the Bill makes it through readings in both the House of Commons, the House of Lords and a cross-party standing committee, then it will be written into the statute book. In the regulation debate, the first stage had been reached on two occasions, in the form of the 1979 and 1996 Green Papers. In 1999, on the back of a strong and wide-ranging consensus, the issue of regulation finally advanced to the second stage. In March that year a White Paper entitled The Government’s Proposals for Regulation of the Private Security Industry in England and Wales was published. This section will first examine the content of this White Paper and will

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then analyse the reactions of the main state and private security actors towards this key document. In his foreword to the White Paper, the Home Secretary Jack Straw once again reiterated the government’s increasingly positive stance towards the industry: The Government’s commitment to a partnership approach to crime and disorder as set out in the Crime and Disorder Act means that there will be the opportunity for the private security industry to play a wider role in security community safety. It has also been suggested recently that the private security industry might be able to assist the police by performing a form of complementary patrol service. (Home Office 1999) This again demonstrates the synchronisation of New Labour’s partnership approach with the re-legitimation agenda, for it was becoming increasingly clear that the government, too, wanted the industry to legitimately function alongside the state within the security sector. The White Paper then proceeded to map out the proposed regulatory regime. For analytical clarity, this will be summarised here using George and Button’s previously-introduced three-dimensional analytical framework of ‘width’, ‘depth’ and ‘independence’. To begin with, the proposed legislation could most certainly be characterised as ‘wide’: not only did it stipulate that both contract and in-house sides of the manned guarding sector were to be licensed, but the definition of manned guarding itself was broadly defined to include guarding and patrol services, door supervisors, cash-in-transit, wheelclampers and the use of guard dogs. In addition, it also specified that those who install, monitor and maintain alarm systems were to be licensed. Finally, it indicated that at some point in the future, private investigators, security consultants, locksmiths, keyholders and contracted court enforcement officers would also be integrated into the regulatory regime (Home Office 1999, pp. 23–6). Indeed, with the small exception of safe deposit centres, these proposals covered every sub-sector mentioned in George and Button’s critical response to the 1996 Green Paper (George and Button 1997b, p. 3). In total, then, the White Paper estimated that the resulting regulatory regime would encompass approximately 240,000 individuals employed by 8,000 companies (Home Office 1999, p. 26). This figure serves both to illustrate the enormous proportions that the industry had reached by the close of the twentieth century – by this estimate it was double the size of the police,

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which in March 1999 totalled 123,841 individuals (Home Office 2007, p. 15) – and by extension the impact that developing a partnership with a reformed and regulated industry would have upon the constitution of the British security sector. Regulation was set to be a major turning point in the rise of private security in the post-war era. However, while the proposed regulation was ‘wide’, it was not, by contrast, particularly ‘deep’. To be sure, all security personnel from the ground level up to director level were to be subjected to a criminal records check to ensure that they were a ‘fit person’ before they could be granted a physical licence – a measure which was specifically designed to eliminate much of the cowboy element from within the industry (Home Office 1999, pp. 12–15). But the responsibility for maintaining high levels of service delivery was packaged not within the compulsory licensing system for individuals but within a voluntary accreditation scheme for companies. This meant that while companies which successfully satisfied certain British Standards quality criteria would receive official accreditation – ‘approved contractor status’ – it would not be illegal for these companies to fall below these standards (Home Office 1999, pp. 19–22). In other words, the proposed regulatory regime would ensure that security personnel were not criminals, but it would not guarantee that they were effective at providing security functions. The fact that company accreditation was not made compulsory from the outset subsequently became a constant point of criticism from both the reform and re-legitimation sides of the pro-regulation lobby. Finally, the White Paper provided for the establishment of a new public regulatory institution – at this point to be called the Private Security Industry Authority – which was, in principle at least, designed to have a significant degree of independence from the industry. This was because while the proposed board would include representatives from the police, the private security industry, local authorities, insurers, customers and the public, it was to be ‘headed by a Chairman who has no personal interest in the private security industry’ (Home Office 1999, p. 10). Furthermore, this institution was to be directly accountable to the Home Secretary, thereby ensuring that the direction of private security industry policy would remain in accordance with the Home Office’s interpretation of the public good, even though it was becoming apparent that, within the context of New Labour’s partnership approach, this interpretation increasingly dovetailed with that of the industry (Home Office 1999, p. 10). So, in undertaking its functions – which primarily involved administrating and enforcing the licensing system and raising the standards of the industry – the Private Security Industry

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Authority would in theory have a considerable degree of independence. In addition, it is also worth noting that the Home Secretary, in consultation within the Authority, was also given the power to introduce secondary legislation through statutory instruments. This would allow these state actors to make a number of modifications to the regulatory regime, for example, making the voluntary company accreditation scheme compulsory in the future. However, while depth, width and independence were undoubtedly important dimensions of the proposed regulatory regime, of equal significance – certainly from the industry’s perspective – was the way in which the official connection between the state and the industry was to be communicated to the public. Although it was certainly essential for the state to recognise the industry as a legitimate provider of security functions, it was even more important for members of the general public to do so. Indeed, it was the public’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be provided that both the state and private security actors were attempting to satisfy. As such, the symbolic connection between the industry and the state was vital. On this matter, the White Paper asserted that: ‘The Authority will issue successful applicants with a physical licence. This is likely to be in the form of a plastic card which incorporates measures to prevent fraud such as a photograph of the applicant and a hologram.’ Furthermore, the White Paper continued, ‘[t]he Authority will be expected to publicise the appearance of the card. Businesses and members of the public will be encouraged to ask for sight of the license before allowing them onto their premises’ (Home Office 1999, p. 16). With regard to the process of re-legitimation, these were extremely significant proposals. Not only would the Private Security Industry Authority issue and publicise a personalised, official licence explicitly communicating the connection between the industry and the state, but it would also encourage the public to approach a private security officer carrying such a licence in the same manner as they would a public police officer. One of the most prominent and commonly-used rituals of police officers is ‘flashing their badge’ to a member of the public so as to demonstrate that they are legitimate, state-endorsed providers of security, and now the state was encouraging members of the general public and private security officers to enter into the same ritual. This was therefore an integral component of the process of orientating the activities of the private security industry in line with political norms which structure the security sector. Altogether, then, the White Paper generally seemed to satisfy the various preferences of the reformers and re-legitimators, and their responses

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indicated that this was indeed the case. In their official response to the White Paper, for instance, ACPO (1999) stated that it: broadly welcomes the proposals for regulation of the private security industry as laid out in the White Paper. We believe that they form a comprehensive and timely framework within which the Police Service and the private security industry can co-operate to produce an industry in which the public can have confidence. With this new emphasis on enhancing public confidence in the industry, it seems that ACPO was more than ever embracing all aspects of New Labour’s partnership approach to private security provision, again consolidating its renewed alliance with the Home Office. It was, in other words, gradually moving onto the middle ground in between the reform and re-legitimation agendas. Bruce George, again writing with Mark Button, similarly welcomed the White Paper, although not so much for its strategic vision of a partnership between the industry and the state – which was never George’s primary concern – as for its contribution towards his overarching reform agenda of introducing state controls in order to enforce professional standards upon the industry. To this end, George and Button contended, the proposals set forth in the White Paper ‘do not go as far as we wished, but they do go a long way to laying the foundations for a system of regulation that is wide and will eventually – we hope – also be deep’ (George and Button 1999). Understandably, their main concern was that the voluntary accreditation scheme would not induce all companies to raise their professional standards to an acceptable level and they accordingly argued that this component of the regulatory regime should be made mandatory. This aside, though, they were supportive of the White Paper. The significance of this endorsement should not be underestimated, since after 20 years of lobbying George had become the main link between parliamentary opinion and the industry. As the editor of Professional Security (1999, p. 28) noted at the time: ‘Mention the words “Security” and “MP” and one name springs to mind – Bruce George.’ Given that over the subsequent months he was one of the most active participants during the resulting Private Security Industry Bill’s passage through Parliament, the withdrawal of his endorsement would have proved to be problematic for both the government and the industry. The private security industry’s response to the White Paper was an interesting mixture of great enthusiasm and ambivalence. The trade publication Security Management Today (1999, p. 28) unsurprisingly

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reported that ‘reaction from the manned services sector seems to be ecstatic’. David Fletcher, Chief Executive of the BSIA during the late 1990s, elucidated why this was so: For more than 30 years, the BSIA and its members have been working to ensure that customers can have confidence in security products and services. This is why we welcome regulation; it will enable those companies who have operated to quality standards for many years to get official recognition for their efforts, and will help to achieve a positive image for the security industry. (1999, p. 28) This quote serves to reinforce the basic logic behind the industry’s re-legitimation agenda: ‘official recognition’ from the state will provide the industry with a more ‘positive image’, which will in turn translate into ‘customer confidence’ (i.e., higher profit margins). One of the only criticisms coming from the manned guarding representatives concerned the reliability and concreteness of the means by which the official connection between the industry and the state was to be communicated to the public – that is, the form of the actual licence. As Peter Black, Managing Director of Group 4 at the time, remarked at a conference on the proposed regulation organised by the GMB in June 1999: The proposals are simply the best option for the future of the security industry. They have our full support, we would remove nothing and would only add a PIN number to the licensing scheme such that (as with health care professionals) false licenses can be easily traced. (Black 1999) The rationale behind these remarks was clearly that Group 4 wanted to ensure the integrity of the primary symbol linking together the industry and the state. This was because a black market in false licences would certainly have the effect of damaging the power and effectiveness of this symbol. Interestingly, however, the security alarm systems sector of the industry was simply ambivalent about the regulatory regime. For instance, Security Management Today (1999, p. 28) reported that: ‘The electronic sector has been caught off-guard, as it were, by the proposals, which many seem to have assumed was a discussion taking place in the manned security sector only.’ And while representatives from this subsector did not explicitly contest the White Paper, their attitude towards the proposed regulations could only be described as passive acceptance.

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There was nothing approaching the enthusiasm of the manned guarding sector (see National Approval Council for Security Systems 1999). It was in fact unsurprising that these companies had been ‘caught offguard’, as they had never been part of the regulation debate. Because their professional activities did not infringe upon what the average citizen considered to be the traditional domain of the state, their operations were not shaped by the political norms which structure the security sector. They had never lobbied for regulation in order to confer legitimacy upon their operations and the state had never sought to control them through regulation. In short, they had never been implicated in the politics of private security, yet suddenly they found themselves in the middle of these political negotiations – but not for long, as it would turn out. However, the security alarms systems sub-sector aside, the responses of the core actors in the pro-regulation movement were extremely positive. Furthermore, the responses of the non-core actors were, it seems, equally enthusiastic, as the Home Office (2000, p. 2) reported: ‘Over 180 responses [to the White Paper] were received from a broad range of interests within the industry and outside. The great majority were supportive of the proposals.’ Unlike previous consultation processes, then, the negotiations surrounding the 1999 White Paper were not characterised by a contestation between different factions within the regulation debate, but were rather defined by an everconsolidating consensus in favour or statutory regulation. This in turn provided a conducive context for the government to take the idea of regulation to the next stage: introducing a corresponding bill into Parliament.

The Private Security Industry Act 2001 On 7 December 2000 the Private Security Industry Bill was presented to the House of Lords (HL Bill [2000–1] [4]). With the exception of three changes, the Bill was basically the same as the White Paper. The first change was that the security alarms systems sub-sector had been removed from the Bill. This no doubt reflected both the ambivalence of this sub-sector towards licensing and the fact that the reformers did not regard the expansion of this sub-sector as a case of encroachment upon the traditional domain of the state (whereas they did regard the manned guarding sector in this way). The second change was that in-house licensing, except in the case of door supervisors and vehicle immobilisers, had been removed from the Bill. Charles Clarke, then Minister of

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State for the Home Office responsible for steering the Bill through the House of Commons, subsequently explained the rationale behind this exclusion. To begin with, he argued, in-house security employees would be subjected to a more thorough internal vetting process than contract employees, thereby rendering an extra level of vetting unnecessary. In addition, he noted, the inclusion of in-house personnel would take the estimated number of licences needed to between 300,000 and 350,000 and would therefore overload the new regulator (Stg Co Deb [2000–1] Co B Private Security Industry Bill, col. 68). Either way, these two modifications served to whittle down the scope of the Bill to the contract manned guarding side of the industry, which once again took centre stage in the politics of private security. The third change was that skills competencies were added to the licence, thereby making some degree of training mandatory. So, while the first two changes served to narrow the Bill, the third change had the effect of making it deeper. The Bill’s passage through the House Of Lords was relatively smooth, although not without an important intervention by the Chairman of the BSIA. To begin with, it is important to recognise that especially during its first term in office, before the invasion of Iraq created deep political divisions, New Labour was in a powerful position within the British political system and party discipline was very high. Thus, upon its entry into the House of Lords, the Private Security Industry Bill experienced strong support from the Labour benches. The Conservative benches, however, were not initially so enthusiastic, and it was only following a consultation with David Cowden, then Chairman of the BSIA, that they decided to support the Bill. Cowden recalls the consultation as follows: I remember getting a call, I was Chairman of the BSIA at that stage, not working for Securicor, and got this call to go and see a group in the Lords . . . They said, ‘Right, thank you for coming, now you don’t want this legislation at all do you?’ It was a Tory group, you know. And they were really flummoxed when I said, ‘Well, yes’. ‘You do?’, they said, ‘Oh crikey, but isn’t this interference?’ I said, ‘Yes, but for the last few years now the responsible end of the industry, and the BSIA as its mouthpiece, have been moving towards a regulatory process. The fact that we’ve been getting into prisons, airport security, seaport security, military establishment security, we deserve some degree of recognition. That’s what we’re talking about. We have to keep defending this position that we’re all a bunch of vandals, but

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we’re not. Apart from being a huge industry, we deserve something better.’ And they said, ‘Oh right, so what do you want us to do?’ So I said, ‘All I really want you to do is tidy up’. (Private interview 2007) It is, then, against the backdrop of this exchange that we must interpret the assertion made by Lord Cope of Berkeley, the Conservative peer who led his Party’s contribution to the House of Lords debate on the Bill, that: ‘We accept the judgement of the Government that it is time to legislate’ (HL Deb [2000–1], vol. 620, col. 581). And later in the Bill’s second reading, Lord Viscount, another Conservative peer, confirmed this support when he remarked that this was ‘not . . . a party politically controversial Bill’ (HL Deb [2000–1], vol. 620, col. 592). Given this consensus, greatly lubricated by the intervention of a key industry representative, the Bill progressed through the committee and report stages in the Lords with only minor amendments – although it is worth noting that in both of these stages there were unsuccessful attempts by reformers to bring in-house licensing back into the legislation (House of Commons Library 2001, p. 18). Having completed its route through the House of Lords, the Bill was then introduced into the House of Commons for its second reading on 15 March 2001. With New Labour’s majority of 179 seats there should have been few difficulties in steering the Bill through the Commons. However, a potential problem did emerge in the form of Bruce George, who was considering withdrawing his support because of the removal of in-house licensing, which he judged to be a significant blow to his reform agenda (private interview 2007). While the loss of George’s endorsement would certainly not have endangered the government’s capacity to secure the Bill’s passage into the statute books, it would hardly have represented an auspicious beginning for the regulatory regime to have its main parliamentary supporter and campaigner stand against it. However, in the event, circumstances in the form of the impending General Election prevented George from opposing the Bill, as he recalled: Charles [Clarke] then said, ‘I don’t mind you speaking against the Bill, that’s your privilege, but if you successfully move any amendments, and the amendment is carried in the Commons, then the Bill is the prisoner of the Lords. The election is going to be X date, and if one person objects to the Bill as it has come from the Commons then

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that’s the end of your Bill. And I can’t guarantee that the Bill will be in the next Queen’s speech’. (Private interview 2007) This scenario was indeed very plausible, especially since the reinsertion of in-house licensing, George’s most likely first target for amendment, had already been rejected twice within the Lords. So, faced with the choice of supporting a Bill he thought was not sufficiently ‘wide’ or losing the opportunity to regulate the industry after almost a quarter of a century of persistent campaigning, George understandably chose the former option. As a consequence, the Bill’s passage through the second reading, committee, report and third reading stages was, at least among the most prominent parliamentary actors involved, characterised once again by consensus. Indeed, in the last of seven committee sittings, Simon Hughes, the Home Affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, commented that: ‘An important Bill, long in gestation, has been dealt with in one of the least confrontational ways of any Home Office Bill that I can remember. I am glad that there was such consensus’ (Stg Co Deb [2000–1] Co B Private Security Industry Bill, col. 232). The Private Security Industry Act successfully reached the statute books on 11 May 2001, less than a month before the 2001 General Election which had almost inadvertently derailed its passage through Parliament. Partly due to the manner in which it was rushed through Parliament, but more as a result of the underlying pro-regulation consensus among the key political actors, the Act resembled the Bill in every crucial respect: a mandatory licensing system would ensure that the contract side of the manned guarding and keyholder subsectors, together with the contract and in-house sides of the door supervisor and vehicle immobiliser sub-sectors, were populated by ‘fit and proper persons’ (which now meant non-criminals with a minimum of mandatory training, thereby making the regime ever so slightly deeper); a voluntary accreditation scheme would encourage companies to maintain high levels of training and delivery standards; these regulatory tools would be administered and enforced (using a newly-created series of criminal offences) by the Security Industry Authority (SIA), a non-departmental public body directly accountable to the Home Secretary; and the Home Secretary, in collaboration with the SIA, was given the power to modify the regulatory regime through secondary legislation using statutory instruments (for a more detailed breakdown of the Act, see George and Button 2002).

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Significantly, however, the Act itself did not put forward any kind of strategic vision for the future development of the private security industry, for like all Acts of Parliament it was characterised by dense legalese which was purposely written to narrowly define the Act’s implications (thus in principle minimising the number of unintended consequences stemming from the legislation). As a result, there were no allusions to the important partnership rhetoric which so strikingly characterised the content of the 1999 White Paper and subsequent parliamentary debates. Yet this is not to say that this crucial rhetoric disappeared. For instance, John Cairncross, current Home Office lead for private security regulation, recently explained that the Home Office has used a combination of both the rhetorically powerful White Paper and the densely detailed 2001 Act to construct the resulting regulatory regime so as to ensure that the strategic vision of a partnership between the industry and the state has indeed been translated into some kind of institutional reality (private interview 2007). In a sense, then, the entire process from the 1999 White Paper to the 2001 Act can be taken as one legislative package which served to map out the future of the private security industry in England and Wales (and eventually Scotland and Northern Ireland). Crucially, it was a package which represented a historic turning point in the constitution of the security sector. This was because the passage of the Private Security Industry Act 2001 meant that, after more than 50 years of negotiations, the future of security provision in Britain was finally to be constructed in line with the political consensus carved out by the reformers and re-legitimators. But while in one sense the legislation represented an end-point in the politics of private security, in another sense it constituted a new beginning. To be sure, there would be no more political negotiations over the establishment of a regulatory regime, yet there would be ongoing debates about the extent to which regulation was delivering on the ambitions of the reformers and the re-legitimators. Moreover, it is difficult to over-emphasise these ambitions. For instance, in one of the final contributions to the parliamentary debate over the Bill, George (HC Deb [2000–1], vol. 365, col. 84) framed regulation in the following terms: The process of transformation of the police in this country began in 1829 and it took 40 years before the police force was in existence throughout the United Kingdom. I am sure that 2001 will be seen in a comparable light, and considered the date when the private security industry began the real process of reform.

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David Dickinson, former Managing Director of Group 4 and Chief Executive of the BSIA, commented that ‘[l]icensing is the start of a journey’. He continued: If the future forty years ago was to get public acceptability of what we do, the future in the next forty years is to move up our people, their standing, their status, their skills, their accountability, into the area where the police officers are. If you go to Sweden [where there is a long history of statutory regulation], police officers and private security officers have the same esteem in public affection. That’s been achieved by upscaling the private security industry to the point where is can in its own way be as professional, accountable and useful as the police can in theirs. (Private interview 2007) The expectations of what the Act would in theory deliver were therefore enormous and, as we will see, the inevitable gap between expectations and reality would characterise the next phase of the politics of private security.

8 The Era of Regulation (2001–10)

The Private Security Industry Act 2001 marked the beginning of a critical new era in the politics of private security. For more than half a century, the pro-regulation reformers and re-legitimators had been advancing their respective agendas on the assumption that regulation would bring with it certain benefits. The reformers were operating on the assumption that regulation would serve to increase state control over the industry and give the impression of some kind of state monopoly in the security sector. The re-legitimators were working on the assumption that regulation would have the effect of imbuing the industry with the illusive quality of ‘stateness’ which was so crucial to the everyday citizen’s perceptions about how security ought to be delivered in Britain. However, with the passing of the Act, it was now time to discover the extent to which these assumptions could actually be translated into real-world outcomes. This final empirical chapter will examine this process of discovery and, in doing so, will mark out the terrain of the politics of private security in Britain today.

The Security Industry Authority The centrepiece of the Private Security Industry Act 2001 was the creation of the Security Industry Authority (SIA), a non-departmental public body which is directly accountable to the Home Office and is tasked with the day-to-day responsibility of regulating those sections of the industry covered by the legislation. The hopes and aspirations of the reformers and re-legitimators have essentially been resting upon the success or failure of this new regulatory institution. A credible, efficient and effective SIA would serve to lay down the foundations for the successful realisation of the reform and re-legitimation agendas, while 141

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an impotent, inefficient and ineffective SIA would serve to frustrate the successful realisation of these agendas and would leave the constitution of the security sector in considerable disarray. This section will narrate the story of the SIA from 2003 onwards, in the process positioning the regulator somewhere in between these two extreme scenarios. The story will be divided into three chronologically ordered phases: ‘the transformation’ (2003–4), ‘false starts’ (2004–6) and ‘back to basics’ (2007–10). The transformation (2003–4) This phase is centred around the period of institution building at the beginning of the SIA’s lifespan, before it started to actively regulate the industry. It has been called ‘the transformation’ because in the SIA’s early days its leadership employed highly aspirational rhetoric to describe the intentions of the new regulatory body – this institution, they said, was going to ‘transform’ the industry. For instance, in his foreword to the SIA’s first Annual Report, Peter Hermitage, the SIA Chairman between 2003 and 2006,1 wrote the following: there is still a long way to go before the private security industry is viewed with trust by the general public, as a partner by other enforcement authorities, and as making a real contribution in the fight against crime. Key to this is nothing less than the transformation of the industry – eradicating criminality, increasing professionalism and skills, improving career paths and employment prospects, providing reassurance for security users and for the wider public. (Hermitage 2004, p. 2) In his accompanying foreword, John Saunders, the SIA Chief Executive between 2003 and 2006, continued this ambitious theme: perhaps the Act’s most important contribution is that it provides sound foundations for introducing fundamental change, creating a private security industry that is healthier, more successful, dynamic and fit to pursue new market opportunities. Above all, an industry that is respected and proud of its reputation. (Saunders 2004, p. 6) These statements are interesting because of their scope. The Private Security Industry Act 2001 sets out the regulatory mechanisms for achieving two primary objectives: to reduce criminality and to raise standards in the industry. On the surface, these stated objectives are more directly

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representative of the reform than the re-legitimation agenda (although the very act of regulating does, of course, feed directly into the re-legitimation agenda). However, the fact that the SIA leadership was talking about economic wellbeing and reputation building shows that, rhetorically at least, they were explicitly embracing not just the reform but also the re-legitimation agenda. They were, in effect, reproducing the dynamic soundbites of the 1999 White Paper which was structured around New Labour’s partnership approach to combating crime and disorder. Re-legitimation was not something to be left to chance. It was not simply to be an unintended consequence of the licensing process, but was rather to be actively brought about by the regulator.

False starts (2004–6) However, these ambitions soon started to look increasingly overoptimistic, as the SIA struggled to implement its licensing system over the subsequent years, let alone find time to transform the industry. The SIA – in partnership with its managed service provider BT Syntegra – introduced licensing in two main stages: firstly, the licensing of door supervisors was to take place between April 2004 and March 2005, with vehicle immobilisers following soon after; secondly, the licensing of all other sectors covered by the legislation was to take place between April 2005 and March 2006. Both stages were fraught with administrative problems. To begin with, data on the projected number of applications in the first year was wildly inaccurate. The SIA expected to process 135,000 applications between April 2004 and March 2005, but ended up processing just 25,000 – a discrepancy which was largely a result of poor data about the number of active and licensable door supervisors in the industry (HC 1059 [2004–5], p. 17). Furthermore, even with the significantly reduced number of applications, the SIA and BT Syntegra encountered ‘teething problems’ when processing the application forms, which in turn caused delays in the issuing of licences (HC 1059 [2004–5], p. 17). These false starts had three immediate consequences. Firstly, because the SIA is a self-funding organisation which is dependent upon licence fees (£190 per licence at the time) for its income, the significant shortfall in application numbers meant that the SIA ended the 2004–5 financial year £13 million over-budget and had to be bailed out by the Home Office. Secondly, the delays in processing licence applications resulted in dissatisfaction among the affected section of the door supervisor sector, for whom the licence was both a prerequisite for earning a living and a symbol of their new legitimacy.

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Thirdly, the SIA’s credibility as a capable regulator was damaged from the outset and its transformation rhetoric accordingly began to appear rather hollow. Yet the situation then became much worse for the SIA during the second stage of its licence implementation process, which ran from April 2005 to March 2006. Significantly, this stage included the security guarding sector, which was the largest (and politically most powerful) section of the industry covered by the legislation – indeed, of the 130,000 applications which were expected in that year, 90,000 would in theory come from this sector alone (HC 178 [2005–6], p. 17). In order to avoid the scenario whereby the majority of licence applications fell towards the end of this period, thereby causing a last-minute rush, the SIA made an agreement with representatives from the manned guarding sector (mostly through the BSIA) to stagger applications throughout the year. Unfortunately, this staggered approach failed to materialise and the worst case scenario unfolded: 50 per cent of the applications were received in the three months prior to the March deadline and 30 per cent afterwards (HC 178 [2005–6], p. 17). This scenario predictably served to intensify the problems experienced by the SIA in the previous year: application turnaround time once more increased significantly; the SIA finished another financial year in deficit and yet again had to be bailed out by the Home Office; and, perhaps most significantly, the SIA’s credibility as a competent regulator diminished even further among its key stakeholders. As Robin Dahlberg, Acting Chairman during the height of the crisis, has commented: ‘At one stage it would have taken an average applicant four months to get a licence if nothing was wrong, and so there were some major issues in terms of our credibility with the industry, with ministers and with the police’ (private interview 2009). Needless to say, with all these problems the transformation rhetoric used in the SIA’s early days was quickly being phased out by its leadership, a process which has been neatly captured by Peter Hermitage: ‘Perhaps the enthusiasm to create this brave new world when we started off faded by the time we got to March 2006, where the issue was much more around “let’s just make sure we can achieve what we can achieve, which is getting people licensed” ’ (private interview 2009). This change in attitude, which gradually permeated throughout the whole institution, marked a notable turning point in the evolution of the SIA’s identity. Back to basics (2007–10) During the course of 2007, the SIA started to embark upon the third (and ongoing) phase of its journey – ‘back to basics’ – which revolved

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around the process of downsizing its regulatory ambitions (and, concomitantly, the expectations and ambitions of its key stakeholders). During the course of this process, the transformation rhetoric which had dominated the institution’s early discourse was quietly relegated to the background by its leadership, and more emphasis was instead placed upon meeting and consolidating the two basic objectives which are set out in the Act: reducing criminality and raising standards. Importantly, this back to basics strategy was facilitated by two factors. The first was the willingness of the SIA leadership to admit their past mistakes and to ask their key stakeholders – both in the industry and government – for a fresh start. This disarming tactic was most effectively communicated at the SIA’s aptly named ‘Changing Agenda’ conference in May 2007, which gave the new SIA Chairman, Baroness Ruth Henig, the opportunity to express regret about past regulatory failures and to encourage the industry to look forward to a brighter future (Henig 2007). Both the conference and the new Chairman were well received, which helped to consolidate this new direction in the SIA’s regulatory strategy. The second factor was the introduction of the Regulators’ Compliance Code, which became an integral componet of the SIA’s strategic environment. In the 2004 Budget, the Chancellor commissioned a report from Sir Philip Hampton, Chairman of J Sainsbury Plc, on the potential for increasing administrative efficiency among public sector regulators. The resulting report, Reducing Administrative Burdens: Effective Inspection and Enforcement, advanced the following core message: ‘comprehensive risk assessment should be the foundation of all regulators’ enforcement programmes’ (Hampton 2005, p. 1). This basically means that public sector regulators should only intervene in commercial activities where there is a clear and demonstrable risk to the public. The report’s recommendations were incorporated into the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006 and were subsequently issued to all public sector regulators in the form of the Regulators’ Compliance Code in December 2007 (Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform 2007). This Code had important implications for the process of reframing the SIA’s identity, for while the SIA’s two basic objectives of reducing criminality and raising standards in the industry are very obviously designed to reduce risk to the public, the more transformational objectives of improving economic wellbeing and reputation building are not (at least on the surface) so obviously designed to achieve this goal – they are more about enhancing the status of the industry. With the issuing of this Code, then, the SIA had essentially been placed under a centrally-imposed obligation to

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phase out its transformation agenda. Given that this obligation neatly tied in with its ‘back to basics’ identity shift, the SIA set about this task very quickly – evidenced by the fact that the transformation agenda was notably absent from the two SIA Annual Reports published since the formal introduction of the Code (HC 732 [2007–8]; HC 79 [2008–9]). Both the ‘fresh start’ strategy and the introduction of the Regulators’ Compliance Code thus helped the SIA to successfully downsize its regulatory remit from 2007 onwards. It was hoped by the SIA leadership that this would make its regulatory objectives more manageable and, by extension, would usher in a period of stability. However, the much sought-after stability was slow in coming. In November 2007, for example, it transpired that the SIA had issued 39,885 licences to non-European Economic Area individuals who had not undergone a right to work check. After liaising with the Border and Immigration Agency, it was discovered that approximately 11,000 of these individuals either did not have or had not proved the right to work in the UK (HC Deb [2007–8], vol. 469, col. 481), and over the next few months the SIA was forced to revoke approximately 7,000 licences from these individuals. Unfortunately for the SIA, this incident resulted in a deluge of negative media coverage – especially once it was discovered that some of the illegal immigrants were working in Whitehall departments and, in one officer’s case, was directly responsible for guarding the Prime Minister’s car. Then, exactly one year later, it emerged that the SIA had employed 38 members of staff who had not received the necessary security clearance to issue licences. This once again prompted widespread negative media coverage and eventually led to the resignation of another Chief Executive, Mike Wilson, in November 2008 (see BBC 2008; The Guardian 2008). It seems that the industry’s regulator – like the industry itself – had now become a prime target for the media. By and large, though, the SIA did manage to weather these crises and, by repeatedly turning the attention of its critics away from these administrative mishaps and towards the improving performance of its basic regulatory functions, it finally started to highlight and consolidate its regulatory accomplishments in 2009 and 2010. In March 2010, exactly six years after opening for business, these accomplishments included: issuing 328,167 valid licences; refusing 18,505 licence applications; revoking 17,127 licences; conferring and approving 627,835 qualifications; and bringing 655 companies on to the Approved Contractor Scheme (Security Industry Authority 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). These numbers illustrate that by this time the SIA had certainly succeeded

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in changing the profile of the industry. From the reform perspective, for instance, there were now mandatory criminal records checks, a new set of criminal offences and a series of competency requirements with which to control the industry. From the re-legitimation perspective, there were now a third of a million licences in circulation which were serving to communicate to the average British citizen that the industry has some kind of formal, legally grounded connection with the state and the public good. For present purposes, however, the key questions are: has the SIA met the expectations of the reformers and re-legitimators? Has it become a credible, efficient and effective regulator capable of properly satisfying their ambitious agendas? Or has it become an impotent, inefficient and ineffective regulator capable of little more than further confusing the already ambiguous constitution of the security sector? The next two sections will address these questions.

The promise of reform The reformers had grand ambitions for regulation. For them, this institutional mechanism would in theory serve to control the expansion of private security provision by bringing the industry’s activities in line with the public good. This was important for three overlapping reasons: firstly, it would go some way towards meeting the majority of the British population’s expectations that security provision ought to be the exclusive responsibility of the state by creating the impression that the state exercised some kind of monopoly in the security sector; secondly, it would serve to clearly put the professional interests of state security providers before those of the industry, thereby ensuring the state’s ongoing dominance in this traditionally sovereign domain; and, thirdly, it would allow the state to better protect the public from any malpractice in the industry. In other words, regulation would situate the state actors in line with political norms which structure the security sector. In order to assess the extent to which the ambitions of the reformers have been satisfied so far, this section will analyse the reactions of notable reformers to the activities of the SIA. The focus will be on three particular groups of reformers: the Home Office, which since New Labour came to power has tended to tread the middle ground between the reform and re-legitimation agendas; ACPO, which in more recent times has advanced what can be best described as an optimistic reform agenda (at least among its more progressive members); and interested parliamentary actors, the most significant of whom continues to be Bruce George, who has consistently advocated a straightforward reform agenda.

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The relationship between the Home Office and the SIA is a curious one – as indeed is the relationship between any non-departmental public body and its parent department. On the one side, there is an expectation among Home Office ministers and civil servants that the SIA will administer and enforce its regulatory regime with a significant degree of independence, for the SIA is (in theory at least) a self-funding body with a wide range of autonomous powers within the framework of the Private Security Industry Act 2001. On the other side, because the SIA is directly accountable to the Home Office, the consequences of its regulatory activities – whether positive or negative – ultimately arrive on the desk of Home Office ministers and reflect upon the standing of their department. This often incongruous fusion of independence and dependence means that it is difficult to accurately gauge the opinion of Home Office actors on the success or otherwise of the SIA because they are torn in two directions. To illustrate this, take the following examples. While both Peter Hermitage and Baroness Ruth Henig candidly admit that there have been a number of deep tensions with the Home Office in the wake of licence application delays, consecutive budget deficits, the ‘right to work’ scandal and, especially in the transformation era, over the strategic direction of the regulator (private interviews 2009), on the record at least, Home Office ministers have always been unfailingly positive and upbeat about the SIA. Vernon Coaker and Alan Campbell (two Home Office ministers who have at different points had the SIA in their portfolio of responsibilities), for example, have written highly supportive forewords to every one of the SIA Annual Reports from 2005 onwards, despite their behind the scenes frustrations with the regulator. Furthermore, when receiving a grilling in the House of Commons over the 2007 ‘right to work’ scandal, the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith repeatedly defended the SIA’s integrity (HC Deb [2007–8], vol. 469, cols. 481–9). Because of the Home Office’s complex relationship with the SIA, in which lines of accountability and notions of autonomy are blurred, it is impossible to clearly judge whether or not the SIA has so far been satisfying the reform objectives of the Home Office. Significantly, though, the opinions of key ACPO and parliamentary actors on the merits (or otherwise) of the SIA are much less difficult to decipher. Early on, there were signs that ACPO was going to become a central stakeholder in the SIA’s emerging regulatory regime. To begin with, Richard Childs, who between 1998 and 2003 was Chief Constable of Lincolnshire Police and ACPO lead on the private security industry, became one of original board members of the ‘shadow SIA’ (the name

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given to the regulator before it was officially incorporated in April 2003) and he publicly embraced the reforming – and also to some extent the re-legitimating – potential of the new regulator. For example, at the regulation launch event in September 2001 – entitled ‘The Private Security Industry Act 2001: Raising Standards Through Regulation’ – Childs made the following remarks: The crucial feature of any growth in the role of the industry in delivering services is that it is done within a framework which retains police primacy and coordination . . . Within this framework regulation should mean that we will be able to work more confidently with the security industry in the belief that we are dealing with reputable and professional individuals who are of good character, well trained, have sensible conditions of employment, accept and embrace the boundaries of their work, are effectively supervised, managed and monitored. In essence, an industry that can be routinely respected and might in time become fairly referred to as a profession, unthinkable if the public image of a security officer as a retired boxer with a dog standing outside a factory gate is not laid to rest. (Childs 2001) Interestingly, in this speech he also stated in no uncertain terms that, as has historically been the case, this optimistic reform agenda is not subscribed to by all police actors: Given the antagonism exhibited by some from within the service to what is seen, rightly or wrongly, as a predatory industry and an as yet unclear political agenda on privatization within policing, advocating this kind of initiative is hardly popular or easy to move forward, and I check my car brake pipes every day. (Childs 2001) However, this internal fragmentation aside, Childs’s message was clear: ACPO is prepared to invest time and effort into the SIA’s regulatory regime in order to reform the private security industry. This commitment was then reinforced a year later when the Community Safety Accreditation Scheme (CSAS), which allows Chief Constables to delegate policing powers to private actors under the Police Reform Act 2002, was provisionally tagged to the SIA’s Approved Contractor Scheme, thereby creating a potentially robust institutional pathway between ACPO and the SIA. Yet this optimistic beginning did not continue for long. Childs resigned from the board in August 2003 and soon became disillusioned

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with the transformation rhetoric employed by the early SIA leadership and the manifold problems which materialised during the introduction of the licensing system. He recently explained this disillusionment in the following terms: I think the SIA has been a huge lost opportunity . . . What it became was an institution like a butterfly which was flapping around all over the place wanting to be innovate instead of just delivering its core business . . . the credibility is just nil . . . It lost touch with its basic function which was to license. Had it stuck with that and got it right, it might have been able to move on with some credibility. (Private interview 2008) This criticism then takes on greater proportions when it is noted that Childs is the ACPO representative in charge of authorising CSAS accreditation, and in his opinion the SIA’s scheme has not been developed to a high enough standard for it to be directly linked into ACPO’s scheme. As a consequence, any fast-track or interchangeability mechanisms between the two schemes have been sidelined, in the process undermining the possibility of any solid institutional pathway between the two institutions (private interview 2008). In summary, then, it seems fair to conclude that the SIA has not satisfied the grand reform ambitions of the more progressive wing of ACPO. It is important to briefly counter this rather negative view, however, by pointing out that while the SIA’s regulatory regime has not, by and large, satisfied the more far-reaching reform ambitions at Chief Constable level, it has fared better lower down the police hierarchy, where reform ambitions tend to be more pragmatic. The reform agenda of those police officers working with private security officers on a day-today basis has generally been much more simple – to reduce criminality – and it seems that the SIA has succeeded in satisfying this more straightforward agenda to a certain degree. For instance, one Counter Terrorism Security Advisor based in London has recently commented that: ‘The CRB [Criminal Records Bureau] check has acted as a deterrent to criminals thinking about working in the industry. It was needed to regulate the industry. The police put trust in the private security industry now so we sleep a little better knowing that they’re regulated’ (private interview 2009). That said, there is also a perception at this level that, while regulation may have reduced criminal malpractice across the industry to some extent, the SIA still needs to develop a more proactive enforcement strategy so as to reduce criminality even further and improve its credibility.

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The following remarks made by a Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police are fairly representative of this view: ‘You can’t run a system with any credibility if you don’t crack the whip. Intelligence is given to the SIA by the police but nothing is done with it’ (private interview 2009). So, although the picture is generally more positive at this level, some problems clearly remain. Finally, it is necessary to examine the standpoint of Bruce George, who remains the primary reference point for expert parliamentary opinion on private security regulation. Interestingly, George’s stance is not dissimilar to that of Richard Childs, with the exception that the scope of George’s dissatisfaction with the regulatory regime is much broader. This is because it is directed towards the Private Security Industry Act 2001 as much as the SIA itself. George, as we already know, was far from satisfied with the content of the Private Security Industry Bill during its passage through Parliament. In his view, the exemption of in-house licensing, the sidelining of compulsory company registration and the variability of the proposed training programme were serious problems (private interview 2007). However, as the previous chapter noted, George was unable to attach amendments to the Bill because of the time constraints imposed by the forthcoming 2001 General Election. Given these restrictions, his contributions to the Bill’s parliamentary readings, he claims, were designed not so much to influence his parliamentary peers as the first generation of SIA leadership which would soon have the power to shape the new regime: ‘most of my speeches are directed towards whoever the first Chairman of the SIA was going to be’ (private interview 2007). His hope was clearly that the SIA leadership would be able to mould the regulatory regime in line with the amendments that he was entitled to talk about but was never able to formally attach to the Bill. During the SIA’s early years, George was relatively patient with this strategy. Even after the SIA’s numerous false starts he continued to be critical more of the Private Security Industry Act 2001 than of the SIA itself. In his contribution to the SIA’s ‘Changing Agenda’ conference in May 2007, for instance, he focused all his frustrations on the Act, calling it a ‘grossly defective piece of legislation’ (Professional Security 2007), and he reiterated this exact same message in his Foreword to Mark Button’s 2007 book Security Officers and Policing (Button 2007a; George 2007, p. xiv). Furthermore, later that year George very publicly defended the SIA during Jacqui Smith’s (heavily party politicised) parliamentary grilling over the ‘right to work’ scandal with the following intervention: ‘Does the Home Secretary accept that most people who take an interest in the Security Industry Authority – both of us – agree that it

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is doing a pretty good job? I am not uncritical, but it does a good job’ (HC Deb [2007–8], vol. 469, col. 487). Two years later, though, it seems that George’s patience with the SIA had finally run out. At the Security Institute’s Annual Conference in 2009, which was attended by many of the major players in the industry and the SIA, he publicly reprimanded the SIA for not pushing regulation far enough. Highlighting the ongoing absence of in-house licensing, the low level of training standards compared to regulatory models in other European countries and the SIA’s continual engagement with what he regarded as non-security sectors such as vehicle immobilisers and bailiffs, George aggressively contended that ‘regulation needs a few repairs’ (Sims 2009). In George’s opinion, the SIA leadership had not constructed a regulatory system which was sufficiently rigorous – or in terms of his and Mark Button’s ideal regulatory framework, ‘comprehensive’, ‘deep’ and ‘wide’ enough – to satisfy his ambitious reform agenda. It is possible to conclude, then, that while the SIA has certainly gone some way towards meeting the reform agenda, there remains a great deal of dissatisfaction among the most notable reform groupings. The prevailing opinion seems to be that although the SIA has positively impacted upon the profile of the industry, it lost vital credibility during its early false starts, it failed to concentrate on what should have been its main priorities and it did not set training standards or Approved Contractor Scheme (ACS) entry requirements at a sufficiently high level. So, from the perspective of the most prominent reformers, regulation has not yet delivered on its promise.

The promise of re-legitimation While the regulatory ambitions of the reformers were considerable, those of the re-legitimators were even more far-reaching. For them, this institutional mechanism would in theory serve to enhance the legitimacy of private security companies in the security sector by structuring their operations in line with the average British citizen’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered. Expressed differently, it would have the effect of configuring their activities in accordance with the political norms which structure the security sector. This was important because it would in principle allow them both to increase their short-term profits by ameliorating the grudge purchase culture which had permeated their marketplace for decades and, at the same time, to increase their medium- and long-term profits by providing more opportunities for organic economic growth. In order to assess the

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extent to which the ambitions of the re-legitimators have been satisfied so far, this section will analyse industry reactions to the SIA’s regulatory regime. In the first year or so of the SIA’s lifespan, there appeared to be a widespread sense of optimism within many sections of the industry regarding the potential benefits of regulation, especially among those prominent contract manned guarding companies which had been lobbying in favour of regulation for decades. This optimism was in large part related to the transformation rhetoric which was coming from the SIA leadership at the time. This was because this rhetoric seemed to encapsulate virtually everything that the re-legimators wanted from regulation – that is, enhanced reputation and economic wellbeing in addition to reduced criminality and higher training standards. Indeed, off the record it has frequently been suggested by a number of industry and state representatives that the harmonisation of the transformation rhetoric and the re-legitimation agenda of these companies was in fact no coincidence and that the BSIA was exerting a considerable amount of influence over the SIA during this period. Commenting upon these accusations in the mid-2000s, one analyst went so far as to label the SIA as the ‘pimp’ of the industry (Zedner 2006, p. 279; see also Button 2007b). While we will probably never know the exact degree of this influence, we do know that the perception of regulatory capture was sufficiently widespread to persuade Baroness Henig to launch a more inclusive ‘stakeholder engagement strategy’ during the 2007 ‘Changing Agenda’ conference so as to allay fears that the larger private security companies were unfairly shaping the regulatory regime (Henig 2007). Speculation aside, however, the most important point here is that at this early stage the SIA’s transformation rhetoric was serving to consolidate – and perhaps even to raise – the high expectations and ambitions of the re-legitimators. Of course, if this transformation agenda was ever going to be translated into real-world outcomes, the SIA would have to maintain the appearance of being a credible, efficient and effective regulator, capable of demonstrating to the government, the police and the average British citizen that, through their licensing system, they were more than able to pilot the industry towards these ambitious targets. However, with the SIA’s false starts, this optimistic scenario quickly fell by the wayside, in the process dealing a number of blows to the expectations of the industry. These blows came in two forms. On one level, these false starts significantly diminished the ability of the SIA to raise the status of the industry, which was a central feature of the re-legitmation agenda.

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The vice-chairman of one large multinational private security company described this situation in the following terms: The nature of what the SIA are doing should raise the status of the industry. But the SIA does not have much positive publicity. It has a great deal of negative publicity – for instance, with the illegals working with licences. That was staggering – it should be impossible. It was a devastating backwards step. Other negative publicity: employing non-cleared people and blowing their budgets. There’s been virtually no positive publicity since day one, so the idea that they’re raising the status of the industry is problematic. They’ve not done as good a job as would’ve been expected. They’ve also been dogged with bad luck, but that’s often of their own making. (Private interview 2009) In other words, the SIA’s false starts meant that it could not come close to accruing the symbolic power of the Home Office or the police in the security sector – that is, it could not be viewed by everyday citizens as a credible guarantor of the public interest. This in turn had the effect of devaluing the SIA-issued licence. From the perspective of the re-legitimators, then, the SIA was not developing the qualities needed in order to enhance the public standing of the industry. Moreover, the SIA’s false starts negatively impacted upon the industry on a further level: it presented all regulated companies and individuals with an array of costly administrative problems. The operations director for a large nationwide company described the initial licence application process in the following terms: ‘When it started the SIA was a real dog’s breakfast. We were made to feel like criminals because the SIA wasn’t getting licences out quick enough’ (private interview 2009). The director of a medium-sized London-based company listed some more specific problems: ‘Birth certificates were lost. Information was lost. The SIA are a shambles. If they were a company they would go bankrupt’ (private interview 2009). Furthermore, as a result of consecutive budget deficits the SIA was forced to raise licence fees from £190 to £245 in April 2007 (HC 819 [2006–7], p. 34), which caused more disillusionment among private security companies by further increasing the financial burden of regulation on the industry. Unsurprisingly, these administrative costs, coupled with the SIA’s credibility problems, caused a great deal of resentment within the industry. However, it is important to divide this resentment into two categories. For those mostly smaller and politically less powerful companies which had been reluctantly dragged into regulation, regulation was viewed as nothing more

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than a tax which brought about no long-term benefits. For the mostly larger and more politically powerful companies which had lobbied in favour of regulation, there was resentment because the economic and reputational benefits of the SIA’s regime were not at this stage outweighing the administrative burdens. This is a crucial distinction to make because it was the expectations of these large companies which were being most acutely undermined by the SIA’s false starts. Since the regulatory tensions of the 2005–7 period, however, there has been a growing acknowledgment within the industry that to some extent regulation has now started to bring about tangible benefits. This shift in attitude, which has largely paralleled the SIA’s back to basics strategy, was certainly evident at the SIA’s 2009 Annual Conference entitled ‘The SIA Journey’, where there appeared to be an emerging view among key stakeholders in the government and the industry that the SIA’s performance had improved since its numerous false starts over the preceding years (see Security Industry Authority 2009). Nevertheless, the key question is to what degree has the SIA overcome its early weaknesses to become a credible, efficient and effective regulator capable of realising the industry’s re-legitimation agenda? It is possible to give an indepth answer to this question by drawing upon recent research conducted by White and Smith (2009) which examined in detail the industry’s perceptions of regulation. This research can be employed to examine three interlinked dimensions of the re-legitimation agenda: firstly, the degree to which industry representatives now regard the SIA as a credible enforcer of regulation; secondly, whether or not industry representatives think that the SIA has succeeded in enhancing the status of private security providers in the eyes of the general public; and, thirdly, the extent to which industry representatives consider that the economic situation of their companies has improved since the introduction of regulation. Each will be examined in turn.

A credible enforcer? According to the Private Security Industry Act 2001, the primary purpose of licensing is to reduce criminality within the industry by subjecting all licence applicants to a criminal records check. Ostensibly, this part of the regulatory regime appears to contribute primarily towards the reform agenda of controlling the activities of private security companies by aligning their operations with the public good. However, this core regulatory function also contributes enormously towards the re-legitimation agenda. This is because the process of issuing all private security officers

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with a photo-card licence which asserts that they have been authorised by a state body – the SIA – to undertake their security activities sends out a message to the average citizen that private security companies are shaping their operations in line with the political norms which structure the security sector. It also allows private security officers to engage in the police-like activity of flashing their badge to the public, which serves to further reinforce this structuring process. However, for this scenario to occur, it is essential that the licensing system is administered properly and credibly. This means that licences must only be issued to ‘fit and proper’ individuals, that licences must be revoked where appropriate and that those unlicensed private security officers who tarnish the industry’s image must be forcibly removed from the security sector. In other words, for this scenario to occur, the SIA needs to be a strong and effective enforcer. The SIA’s own statistics on its enforcement activity demonstrate that by either refusing or revoking licences it has so far removed somewhere in the region of 35,000 individuals who would otherwise be working in the industry, which in turn suggests that in recent times it has indeed established itself as a credible enforcer of regulation. However, White and Smith’s research, which focuses upon industry perceptions of regulation, paints a slightly different picture. They discovered that industry representatives were significantly divided about the degree to which the SIA has actually succeeded in reducing criminality. From a sample size of 572 private security providers, they found that approximately a third of respondents thought that criminality had been reduced through regulation, another third were undecided on this matter, and the final third judged that criminality had not been reduced since the introduction of regulation (White and Smith 2009, p. 21). These statistics indicate that, from the industry’s perspective, the SIA’s licensing regime – and by extension the project of re-legitimating the industry – was still to some extent being undermined by the ongoing existence of cowboy operators who are choosing to eschew the licensing system (pp. 23–4). Given this perception, it is unsurprising to find out that White and Smith’s research also revealed that the same private security providers thought that the SIA was a relatively weak enforcement agency. When asked about the SIA’s enforcement policy against private security staff working without a licence, over half of the providers judged that it was ‘slightly’ or ‘much’ too weak (White and Smith 2009, p. 24). Similarly, when questioned about the SIA’s enforcement policy against private security companies providing unlicensed staff, approximately

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three-fifths considered that it was ‘slightly’ or ‘much’ too weak (p. 26). Interestingly, two of the primary reasons given for these perceived weaknesses were, firstly, that the SIA has virtually no street presence and, secondly, that it does not prosecute enough when criminal practices are identified. These reasons are notable because they point to the importance of both the instrumental and symbolic side of enforcement. Increasing street presence and bringing forward more public prosecutions would not only have the instrumental impact of reducing criminality in material terms, but would also have the symbolic impact of re-emphasising the authority of the state in the private security marketplace which, as we have repeatedly seen, is one of the core objective of the re-legitimation agenda. This leads to the significant conclusion that the SIA has been falling short of the industry’s expectations with regard to enforcement not only in instrumental terms, but also symbolic terms.

An enhanced status? A central characteristic of the re-legitimation agenda is the following line of reasoning: a credible system of regulation would in principle serve to enhance the standing of industry in the eyes of the general public by structuring the activities of private security companies in line with the average British citizen’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered. Given that credible regulation is a prerequisite of enhanced public standing, one would expect to find similar differences of opinion over the degree to which the SIA’s regulatory regime has served to enhance the industry’s public standing. Significantly, this hypothesis seems to be confirmed by White and Smith’s research. They discovered that private security providers were divided over the degree to which regulation has had the effect of enhancing the industry’s public standing: from a sample size of 611 providers, approximately a third thought that regulation has served to increase the general public’s level of trust in the industry, another third were undecided on this matter, and the final third judged that regulation had not served to increase the general public’s level of trust in the industry.2 These statistics seem to indicate that, to date, the introduction of regulation has not translated into a widespread and far-reaching improvement in the industry’s public standing, though admittedly it has had some positive impact. Interestingly, the accompanying comments given by some of those who participated in this research provide an insight into the reasoning behind this spread of opinion.3 For present purposes, this reasoning can

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be divided into four categories. The first comprises those who genuinely believe that regulation has already served to enhance the industry’s standing in the public consciousness. One private security officer from a medium-sized company based in Yorkshire, for instance, made the following comment: ‘If the public see a licence they immediately see more authority and trust.’ The second category comprises those who believe that regulation would serve to enhance the industry’s public standing if the SIA could more effectively educate the public about the benefits of regulation. For example, the manager of a company based in the Midlands and the north-west remarked that ‘the SIA should make the general public more aware of their role and the restrictions that are placed on the acceptance of licence holders to build public confidence’. Similarly, the chairman of a large nationwide company observed that ‘the SIA doesn’t do any marketing to the public. Unless the public know about regulation how are they going to feel safe because it’s there?’ (private interview 2009). The third category comprises those who see regulation as a missed opportunity because, against the backdrop of its false starts, the SIA has failed to establish itself as a credible regulator. Advocating this opinion, one private security officer working for a large nationwide company made the following comment: I do not generally think that the general public have any great awareness of the regulation of the security industry other than what they hear in the press which has generally been negative. Given the amount of negative press coverage that has resulted from Government depts/agencies using security firms who have employed illegal immigrants and asylum seekers whose history cannot have been vetted properly, it is inevitable that the general public will have misgivings about the SIA’s ability to police the activities of security companies and their staff. The fourth category comprises those who simply dismiss the logic of the re-legitimation agenda because they think that the industry’s destiny is to be indefinitely resigned to the disreputable end of the security sector as a consequence of the public’s entrenched negative attitude towards private security provision. Advancing this viewpoint, one manager of a large company based in the north of England and Scotland made the following assertion: [The] general public have shown a lack of interest in the security industry for years which has not improved since licensing was

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introduced. I do not believe that members of the general public are fully aware of the changes as they pay little or no attention to security operatives unless they have a direct impact upon them. These categories showcase the range of perspectives regarding the impact of regulation on the industry’s public standing. However, the most important point to take from these perspectives is that, with the notable exception of those who fall into the final category, all providers do still have an expectation that in theory regulation has the capacity to re-legitimate the industry, even if in practice this expectation has not been fully satisfied by the SIA’s regulatory regime. Economic wellbeing In its complete formulation, the line of reasoning which has consistently underpinned the re-legitimation agenda is that not only would regulation serve to enhance the public standing of the industry, but that as a result of this enhanced public standing the economic situation of the industry would be considerably improved. This is based on the presumption that regulated and respected private security companies would in principle be able to increase their short-term profits by ameliorating the grudge purchase culture which has permeated their marketplace for decades and, at the same time, would be able to augment their medium- and long-term profits by developing more opportunities for organic economic growth. Given that this section has now demonstrated that there are differences of opinion over the extent to which regulation has so far served to successfully enhance the public standing of the industry, one would expect to discover that the impact of regulation on the industry’s economic wellbeing has been similarly variable. Once again, this hypothesis appears to be confirmed by White and Smith’s analysis. This research can be utilised in two ways: firstly, to analyse the degree to which regulation has served to ameliorate the grudge purchase culture; and, secondly, to explore the extent to which regulation has served to provide more opportunities for organic economic growth. Central to ameliorating the grudge purchase culture which has constrained the industry’s overall development for decades is persuading purchasers to buy security products in line with quality criteria as opposed to price alone. It was hoped by the re-legitimators that regulation would serve to bring about this scenario by communicating to those members of the general public who buy security that the marketplace is now populated by regulated and respectable companies, not

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cowboy operators. However, White and Smith’s research suggests that this anticipated transformation has not occurred. When a sample of 557 private security providers was asked whether or not regulation had resulted in their customers becoming more motivated by quality and less motivated by price, approximately two-thirds considered that it had failed to do so (White and Smith 2009, p. 53). This suggests that, despite the introduction of regulation, the grudge purchase culture has to a large extent remained embedded within the private security marketplace. This observation is reinforced by the fact that according to White and Smith (p. 61) profit margins in the industry have, on balance, decreased very slightly since the introduction of regulation. This is perhaps indicative of the fact that private security companies have been forced to bear the financial burden of regulation without reaping the economic rewards of improved market conditions. Importantly, a number of key industry figures have attempted to explain why the grudge purchase culture has continued to cast such a long shadow over the industry. The primary explanation given is that the SIA has simply not invested enough time in communicating the benefits of regulation to purchasers. The director of one large company articulated this problem in the following terms: The SIA really needs to advertise its role more, for example with buyer forums. If the government says regulation increases quality then the buyers will be more likely to believe us. Those companies that do take on all the things that we tell them about training etc are often surprised by the level of quality and the number of checks we have. I think because people have traditionally looked down on the industry they don’t assume that all those regulations are there. (Private interview 2009) The logic here is very similar to the logic of why the industry’s public status has not been significantly enhanced post-regulation – that is, the regulatory regime does not have a sufficiently high profile. Until the end-users of security – more immediately the purchasers and more distantly the public – are aware of the positive impacts resulting from regulation, private security companies will not be able to commercially capitalise upon the benefits of regulation. In a sense, then, the problem alluded to here is that the SIA has focused upon transforming the supply side of the private security marketplace (i.e., the companies), but has largely ignored the demand side (i.e., the purchasers). As consequence, regulation has in effect served to (further) distort the private security

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marketplace by improving service provision, but disregarding purchasing behaviour. This, it seems, is one of the primary reasons why the SIA has failed to fully satisfy the expectations of the re-legitimators. However, when investigating the extent to which regulation has served to increase opportunities for organic economic growth, more positive trends can be identified. For instance, White and Smith’s research reveals that since the introduction of regulation, the number of opportunities for economic expansion has, on balance, increased slightly (White and Smith 2009, p. 62). This suggests that the medium- and longterm economic benefits of regulation are gradually being realised within the private security marketplace. It is important, though, to separate this trend into two categories, for a closer inspection reveals that this expansion has very different sides. On the one side, there is small-scale expansion between different sub-sectors – for example, companies moving from the security guarding sector into the public space surveillance sector (White and Smith 2009, p. 64). In a sense, this is a relatively artificial mode of expansion because the regulatory regime had the effect of dividing the industry into seven licensable sectors which had not existed in such a discrete form prior to regulation. This suddenly created the opportunity to move between the newly-designated sectors. On the other side, however, there is large-scale expansion into new areas of security provision which hitherto had been the exclusive preserve of the state. An excellent example here is Group 4 Securicor’s 2008 contract (worth £100 million) ‘to provide cover for the emergency services if they are on strike or swamped by a national disaster, because the army is too stretched to offer back-up’ (The Observer 2008). This is precisely the type of organic economic expansion which the executives of the large and ambitious private security companies had been seeking for decades – high-profile, high-yielding contracts which situate the industry alongside the state at the very centre of the British security sector. Moreover, according to Jorgen Philip-Sorensen, who from 2006 until 2010 was non-executive Chairman of Group 4 Securicor, such contracts have in large part been a result of regulation: ‘Today security guards are doing things which were never dreamed of a few years ago. Licensing is undoubtedly a key to this. It has been expensive, but it has made a dramatic difference’ (private interview 2007). This shows that for certain private security companies – especially the larger ones which had lobbied so vociferously for regulation in the post-war era – regulation is now finally starting to improve the longer term economic wellbeing of the industry. It must be emphasised, however, that at present examples such as this seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

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It seems reasonable to conclude, then, that the SIA’s regulatory regime has satisfied the grand expectations and ambitions of the re-legitimators to some degree: while the SIA has not exactly established itself as a strong and credible regulator, it has made some headway in accomplishing its regulatory objectives (especially in more recent years); while the public standing of the industry has not been enhanced to the anticipated levels, there is some recognition among everyday British citizens that the emergence of licensed, state-deputised private security officers is a positive development; and while the grudge purchase culture which has plagued the private security marketplace for decades has not been completely eliminated, there is some indication that parts of the industry are enjoying a more favourable economic environment. This moderate degree of satisfaction is perhaps best encapsulated by the following remark made by the chairman of one of the largest companies in the British security sector: ‘Overall the SIA has done the industry good. It’s improved people’s perception of the industry slightly. Its image is slightly better’ (private interview 2009, emphasis added).

The politics of private security in the era of regulation This chapter has demonstrated that, far from representing an end-point for the politics of private security, the Private Security Industry Act 2001 has instead served to usher in a critical new era centred around the gap between the high expectations of the reformers and re-legitimators and the down-to-earth realities of the SIA’s actually-existing regulatory regime. This hotly-debated political terrain is structured in line with three agendas, two familiar and one new. The first is the reform agenda advanced by ACPO, a number of key parliamentary actors and (in a rather opaque manner) the Home Office. In its current formulation, this agenda runs as follows: the SIA should strengthen its regulatory regime so as to increase the state’s ability to bring the operations of the private security industry in line with the public good. The second is the re-legitimation agenda advocated primarily by private security representatives, but also to some degree by those state actors who have actively embraced the partnership approach to crime control. In its current formulation, this agenda runs as follows: the SIA should, firstly, strengthen its regulatory regime in order to enhance its reputation (both symbolically and instrumentally) as a credible public enforcer of regulation and, secondly, communicate the benefits of regulation to both the general public and private security purchasers so as to improve the industry’s commercial appeal. These two (familiar) agendas are driven by the desire

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of the reformers and re-legitimators to bring about a regime which satisfies their long-standing but as yet unfulfilled expectations about the potential benefits of regulation. The third is the ‘back to basics’ agenda advanced by the SIA, which is the major new political player in the political arena. There are two important sides to this agenda, both of which serve to bring the SIA into conflict with the reformers and the re-legitimators. On the one side, this agenda is motivated by the SIA’s preference for a relatively lowkey and straightforward regulatory regime in the wake of its numerous false starts and failed transformation agenda. On the other side, the agenda is motivated by the SIA’s obligation to adhere to the Regulators’ Compliance Code, which stipulates that public sector regulators should only intervene in the marketplace where absolutely necessary. Both sides of this agenda limit the degree to which the SIA is willing to – and indeed is permitted to – regulate the industry in the manner envisaged by the reformers and re-legitimators, hence the ongoing political tensions between the SIA, industry representatives (especially from the larger and politically more powerful companies), ACPO, the Home Office and a number of key parliamentary actors. After more than 60 years of negotiations over the composition of the security sector, then, these are the contours of the politics of private security at the present time. As a final comment on this political narrative, it is interesting to contrast the political confrontations today with those in the immediate post-war years. During the 1950s, the politics of private security was structured around a series of polite letters written by the managing director of (in today’s terms at least) a micro-sized company and speculatively sent to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who routinely dismissed them. Today, the politics of private security is centred around a legally grounded system of regulation which was brought about through a complex process of political manoeuvring involving mulitnational private security companies, the higher echelons of the police, Home Office ministers and prominent parliamentarians. The difference in scale is considerable, and this in turn serves to once again highlight the enormous political shifts which have occurred in the provision of domestic security over the past half-century.

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Part III Comparisons and Conclusions

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9 Towards a New Social-Scientific Understanding

The argument of this book has been that the politics of private security should be considered alongside the economics of private security if we are to develop an indepth understanding of the global transformation which is currently taking place in the nature of domestic security provision. This is because this political mode of analysis not only offers an interesting new narrative about the rise of private security, but it also facilitates the development of a much more sophisticated socialscientific understanding of this phenomenon. The objective of this final chapter is to highlight the importance, originality and generalisability of the concepts and arguments which have been mapped out over the previous eight chapters. It will do this in three parts. Firstly, it will delineate the contours and underline the significance of the political narrative about the rise of private security in post-war Britain. Secondly, it will demonstrate how this narrative can be used to enhance our social-scientific understanding of domestic security provision, specifically by returning to the key research questions which were set out in the introductory chapter. Thirdly, it will explore the degree to which the concepts and arguments that have emerged out of the British case can be generalised to other countries.

The political narrative At the beginning of the book, it was contended that the conventional way of charting the rise of private security provision comes in the form of a distinctly economic narrative, which has been called here the economics of private security. In this narrative we come across a number of themes such as the fiscal crisis of the welfare state, rising crime rates, the changing social relations of crime, security fetishism and the emergence 167

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of mass private property. For proponents of this economic narrative, what all these themes have in common is that they have served to modify the laws of supply and demand within the post-war security sector in such a way as to provide opportunities for private security executives to manoeuvre their companies ever deeper into this traditionally sovereign domain. In this narrative, then, the expansion of private security is essentially distilled into a neat scenario whereby skilful businessmen are simply seen to be taking advantage of shifting market signals in the postwar security sector. This narrative does, of course, have a great deal of merit and it has never been the intention of this book to discredit it. The economics of private security is central to understanding the post-war transformation of the domestic security sector. However, it has been the intention of the book to demonstrate that this narrative does not tell the whole story. Throughout the post-war era, the executives of successful and ambitious private security companies have been forced to conduct themselves not only as smart businessmen quickly responding to shifts in supply and demand, but also as accomplished political strategists, carefully guiding their companies through the complex political terrain of the ever-changing security sector. At the same time, politicians and police officers have not been content to act as bystanders while market forces sweep through what they commonly regard as the most fundamental and sacrosanct domain of the modern state, and have thus been motivated to repeatedly intervene in the business practices of the industry so as to shape and control its operations. In other words, the rise of private security has been permeated by a series of deeply political processes and challenges. In order to properly comprehend the transformation in domestic security provision, then, the argument of this book has been that we need to take account not only of the economics of private security, but also the politics of private security. To illustrate this argument, the book has charted the politics of private security in Britain between 1945 and 2010. The key moments in this significant political narrative are as follows. In the immediate post-war decades, the negotiations over the constitution of the security sector were actually quite an uneventful affair, involving just two actors – the Metropolitan Police and Securicor – who were engaged in a series of rather low-key exchanges. However, despite this lack of political dynamism, this early period was notable for the fact that through such incremental exchanges these actors started to set down the rudimentary foundations for the reform and re-legitimation agendas. The embryonic re-legitimation agenda, for instance, took shape around Securicor’s attempts to structure its activities in line with the average

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British citizen’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered. These attempts ranged from straightforward requests for police endorsement to the fabrication of links with this symbolically powerful institution, and from making board-level appointments which tapped into the ‘old boy’ police network to symbolically borrowing from the police’s authority by issuing police-style uniforms to its private security officers. Each of these strategies, it is critical to note, was designed to advertise or sell Securicor’s services to security purchasers through a political – as opposed to an economic – logic in which they were presented not only as private goods, but also as state-authorised public goods. This was the motivation behind the re-legitimation agenda. At the same time, the nascent reform agenda was slowly taking shape around the response of the Metropolitan Police to Securicor’s political machinations. Over the course of the 1950s, key figures in this institution started to recognise that there was a pressing need to control the operations of Securicor (and similar companies) so as to both meet the British population’s expectation that the state ought to exercise some kind of monopoly over security provision and also to protect their own professional interests and the interests of the general public. Importantly, though, they reached the conclusion that they needed to implement these control mechanisms in a manner which avoided the unintentional conferral of legitimacy or ‘stateness’ upon the company’s operations, as such a scenario would potentially serve to erode the police’s pre-eminence in the security sector. As such, they ended up utilising the rather blunt instrument of simply threatening Securicor with the possibility enacting the 1919 Police Act and the 1936 Public Order Act should the company ever step out of line. Although this strategy seemed to satisfy their reform criteria, it was in reality largely ineffective. Significantly, during the course of the 1960s these rudimentary agendas steadily came to revolve around one key issue: regulation. For the re-legitmators – a group which by now included several large private security companies such as Securicor, Group 4 and Security Express – regulation represented a robust means of developing an official-looking connection with the state, in the process communicating to the general public that they were not simply private actors motivated purely by satisfying private goods, but were also state-deputised actors functioning in line with the public good. In other words, regulation was a core component of the industry’s evolving strategy of politically selling itself to the British population. In the reform camp, regulation was a divisive issue. Some reformers – especially the civil servants

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working in F Division of the Home Office – conceded that regulation might represent an effective mechanism with which to control the activities of private security companies, but also contended that it might serve to empower the industry by conferring legitimacy upon its operations. With this in mind, they sought to control the industry using alternative means – namely, by encouraging the larger companies to work within the confines of a specially created trade association whose political movements were to be primarily determined by the state. This arrangement was thus designed to facilitate reform without re-legitimation. Another group of reformers, however, advanced a resolutely pro-regulation agenda because they believed this to be the most effective way of bringing the activities of the private security companies into line with the public good. This group appeared to be either unperturbed by or indifferent to the possibility of unintentionally conferring of any degree of legitimacy upon the industry. At this time, then, the reformers were divided into distinct anti-regulation and pro-regulation factions. Importantly, throughout the 1960s it was the anti-regulation faction which managed to control the course of events, hence the establishment of the BSIA as a low-profile control mechanism which circumvented the legitimacy dilemma. Broadly speaking, these political groupings continued to define the politics of private security into the 1970s, although the relationships and the balance of power between them began to change during the course of this decade. The catalyst for these changes was the entry of key parliamentary actors into the pro-regulation reform lobby, specifically in the form of the Committee on Privacy and Bruce George MP. Not only did these parliamentary actors serve to shift the balance within the reform lobby, but they also teamed up with industry re-legitmators in an effort to create a pro-regulation alliance. Significantly, this alliance did not emerge because of their shared ends – while the reformers wanted to control the industry, the re-legitimators wanted to enhance its commercial appeal – but because they were seeking to use the exact same means to bring about their different ends: regulation. Despite the incongruity of this alliance, by the end of the 1970s this pro-regulation lobby had nevertheless generated a considerable amount of momentum in the political arena and had successfully put the anti-regulation reformers on the back foot to the extent that they were holding on to the political agenda by only a relatively narrow margin – though hold on they did. However, it is important to note that although the re-legitimators were still at this juncture a few years away from accruing the benefits of an actually existing regulatory system, the very fact that they were lobbying

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in favour of regulation alongside a number of prominent parliamentary actors did serve to contribute a great deal towards their overarching strategy of advertising and selling private security services to the general public through distinctly political channels. Yet, during the early 1980s, this pro-regulation alliance began to falter as the politics of private security took some unlikely twists and turns. Most importantly, within the context of the ascendant neoliberal climate, a number of prominent private security actors began to reassess the political context of the security sector. Witnessing the steady marketisation of other formerly public monopolies, they determined that perhaps there was no longer such a strong expectation that security provision ought to be monopolised by the state. As such, they decided to eschew these political norms and instead experiment with the idea of selling their security services as ordinary commodities. This in turn had the effect of whittling down the industry side of the pro-regulation alliance to just those few companies who remained convinced that a regulated private security industry would fare better in the longer term. Significantly, towards the end of the decade these stalwart re-legitimators were proved right within the tragic context of the Deal bombing, which prompted a massive public and media backlash against unregulated private security provision. They were then proved right once again in the early 1990s with the Group 4 prisoner escapes, which caused a similar media storm and corresponding public condemnation. By the mid-1990s, then, the main industry players had virtually all switched back to the re-legitmation agenda, viewing regulation as the key to addressing these public relations crises. In doing so, they also re-forged their alliance with the pro-regulation reformers, who were themselves growing in both number and stature during this period, especially following the endorsement of ACPO in the late 1980s. Political pressure for regulation was therefore mounting and it was in 1996 that the anti-regulation lobby, which by this time comprised only an increasingly isolated Home Office, finally capitulated to this pressure for regulation, thereby creating a tentative pro-regulation consensus. However, it was not until New Labour came to power in 1997 that this tentative consensus was transformed into a more stable, concrete consensus. This was because the new government advanced a strategic vision for the security sector – known as the partnership approach to crime and disorder – which for the first time explicitly made space for a reformed and re-legitimated private security industry (though it must be added that this space was partly created in response to direct lobbying from the reformers and re-legitimators). This strategic vision in

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turn provided the context for the construction of an actually existing regulatory regime. It was on the back of this vision, for instance, that a White Paper on the regulation of the private security industry was published in 1999, that the Private Security Industry Bill was introduced into Parliament in 2000 and that the Private Security Industry Act was finally passed in 2001. In this four-year period, then, the politics of private security experienced an intense period of change which resulted in one of the most significant moments in the transformation of domestic security provision in post-war Britain: the creation of a legally grounded regulatory regime which had the potential to realise the ambitions of the reformers and re-legitimators. Following this period of frenzied political activity, expectations were riding very high. For the reformers, this piece of legislation would in theory establish an institutional mechanism which could finally be employed to exercise a proper level of control over the industry. For the re-legitimatiors, the provisions in the Act would in principle begin the process of drawing a legally grounded and highly visible connection between the activities of private security companies and the state, in the process structuring the industry’s activities in line with the average British citizen’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered. The question was: could the SIA – the non-departmental public body responsible for administrating and enforcing regulation – deliver on these expectations? Evidence suggests that almost a decade after this Act was passed, the expectations of the reformers and re-legitimators have not been fully satisfied. A gap has opened up between what the reformers and re-legitimators hoped regulation would accomplish and what the SIA actually has accomplished. To be sure, the SIA has certainly reformed the industry to a degree: there has been a demonstrable reduction in criminality and the majority of private security officers are now operating at an acceptable minimum standard. But in the view of the key reformers there is still substantial room for improvement: most importantly, they want the SIA to both establish itself as a more credible regulator and to adopt stricter enforcement procedures. Likewise, the SIA has re-legitimated the industry to some extent: the public standing of the industry has been enhanced to a moderate degree and there is an indication that the long-term economic situation of the industry will improve as a result of regulation (at least for the larger companies). However, again, from the perspective of the re-legitimators there is still a long way to go: they also want the SIA to establish itself as a more credible regulator and, furthermore, they want the SIA to invest more resources into the project of advertising

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the benefits of the regulatory system to the general public so as to enhance the public standing of the industry. In other words, the industry re-legitimators (perhaps predictably) want the SIA to act as a more efficient and effective mechanism through which they can politically sell their services to the average British citizen. It is in this heavily contested arena of unsatisfied ambitions and expectations, then, that the politics of private security is located today. This short summary has mapped out a distinctly political narrative about the rise of private security in the post-war era. To be sure, the economics of private security certainly provides a crucial backdrop to this narrative and the changing economic context of the security sector also feeds into the assumptions which underpin the politics of private security, as Chapter 2 made clear. But, ultimately, this political narrative follows a completely different course of events to the economics of private security, for it illustrates how in the post-war era the executives of private security companies have not only been seeking to advertise and sell their services through economic salesmanship, but also through political salesmanship. It shows how they have been responding not only to straightforward market signals in the post-war security sector, but also to the deep-seated political norms which structure this sector. It also demonstrates that, far from being passive spectators of this market expansion, politicians and police officers have actively sought to influence the industry’s operations through both the anti-regulation and pro-regulation reform agendas and, within the context of New Labour’s partnership approach, by also promoting the re-legitimation agenda. In order to understand the post-war transformation of the domestic security sector, then, we need to account for both the economics and politics of private security. We need to draw not only upon such concepts as the fiscal crisis of the welfare state, rising crime rates, the changing social relations of crime, security fetishism and the emergence of mass private property, but also upon the concepts of regulation, reform and re-legitimation. In this way, we can construct a new and interesting narrative about the rise of private security in the post-war era, which has far-reaching consequences.

A social-scientific understanding Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of this political narrative is that it serves to significantly enhance our social-scientific understanding of the changing nature of domestic security provision today. This is because it allows us to put forward a new set of politically-minded

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answers to the key conceptual and empirical questions set out at the beginning of the book – answers which move us far beyond the limited remit of the default economic framework. In doing this, it contributes towards critical debates surrounding the issue of domestic security provision which are currently taking place across a wide range of social science disciplines, from political science, economics and history to criminology, sociology and socio-legal studies. In this section, each of these key research questions will be addressed in turn. How have private security companies become so prominent? The conventional answer to this question, drawn from the economics of private security, is that these companies have expanded their operations by responding to a series of common shifts in the laws of supply and demand. These shifts have included the fiscal crisis of the welfare state, rising crime rates, the changing social relations of crime in an increasingly fragmented postmodern society, security fetishism and the emergence of mass private property – though it must be emphasised that the exact combination of these factors usually varies in accordance with geographical location and may also be shaped by additional market idiosyncrasies in specific security sectors. This is certainly an important answer, but it is not a comprehensive one, for the political narrative mapped out in this book gives rise to a completely different answer. It has shown that the journey private security companies have taken from the margins to the centre of the domestic security sector has been not just an economic one, but also a political one. In recent decades private security companies have faced an enormous barrier to entry into the security sector in the form of deep-seated political norms centred around the average British citizen’s expectation that security provision ought to be monopolised by the state. In a effort to unlock this barrier to entry, ambitious private security executives have accordingly employed a range of strategies designed to confer upon their companies the quality of ‘stateness’ which is considered to be so central to legitimate security provision. These strategies have included requests for police endorsement, the fabrication of links with police forces, calculated appointments which tap into the ‘old boy’ police network and symbolically borrowing from the police’s authority and status by issuing police-style uniforms to private security officers. Over the period covered by this book, however, one strategy has eclipsed all others: the pursuit and exploitation of a system of statutory regulation – a system which would in principle create an extremely visible and legally grounded association between the state and the private security industry. All of these strategies, then, have been advanced in an attempt to raise the public

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standing of the industry in a manner which would in theory serve to facilitate and consolidate the expansion of private security companies right into the centre of the security sector. The contention of this book is that it is only by connecting this political narrative to the standard economic narrative that we can begin to provide a sophisticated answer to this important question. What motivates them? The default answer to this question, again extrapolated from the economic narrative, is that private security companies are driven purely by economic motivations – that they are in virtually all instances simply seeking to maximise their profit margins by doing whatever is demanded of them by their customers, so long as these demands are situated within the prevailing legal framework (although this is not always regarded as a constraint, as cowboy companies have frequently demonstrated). As such, it is assumed that they are not motivated by moral or normative considerations at all, just the pursuit of profit. This is, of course, a crucial answer which gives rise to many valuable insights, but again it is not a complete one, for the politics of private security leads to a different formulation. While the preceding chapters have recognised that private security companies are commercial organisations motivated by economic imperatives, they have also demonstrated that these imperatives are closely entwined with moral and normative considerations. In order to expand their businesses, the executives of ambitious private security companies have been compelled to respond not only to conventional market signals, but also to deeply embedded political norms centred around the idea that security provision ought to be monopolised by the state. And in structuring the activities of their companies around these political norms – for instance, by lobbying vociferously for a system of statutory regulation – these executives have essentially been acting in accordance with both economic and moral motivations. They have been orientating the activities of their companies in line with the public good because that is what everyday citizens morally expect crime fighting agencies to do. Now, this is a critical point which on its own advances our understanding of private security provision. Yet the implications of the arguments in this book actually go much further than this, for they suggest another path along which moral considerations can find their way into the motivations of private security actors – namely, through processes of socialisation. It is not the case, for instance, that the inter-subjective political norms which structure the security sector are formed through a process which somehow excludes those individuals working in the private security industry. There is no scenario whereby everyday British citizens give

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shape to these political norms and private security actors then interpret them in some kind of ontologically separate realm; rather, the expectations of private security actors also contribute towards the construction of these political norms – these actors are also everyday citizens who have gone through the same processes of socialisation as everyone else. This being the case, it can be argued that private security actors internalise normative considerations about how security ought to be delivered not only by interpreting the morally contextualised market signals of the security sector, but also through broader processes of socialisation. What is their relationship with the state? The standard answer to this question, once again derived from the default economic framework, is that private security companies regard the state as both a competitor and a source of business. Their relationship with the state is therefore viewed primarily in economic terms. It is argued here that while this is certainly a valuable observation which opens up significant avenues of enquiry, it once again constitutes only a partial answer. This is because the relationship between the private security industry and the state is actually far more complex than this analysis suggests. The political narrative mapped out over the course of this book suggests that there are in fact two dimensions to this critical relationship. On the one side, the executives of private security companies do indeed regard the police as competitors and have accordingly sought to outmanoeuvre them in an effort to capture an ever greater share of the security sector market (as the economic narrative would predict). On the other side, however, this strategy has of course required these executives to structure the activities of their companies in line with the average British citizen’s state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered – a requirement which has compelled them to consciously steer their companies into a position where they can be formally controlled by the British state through statutory regulation. Put differently, in order to outmanoeuvre the police, these companies have rather paradoxically sought to be controlled by the state. This already peculiar relationship then becomes even more unusual when it is appreciated that the more the state regulates these companies – and imbues them with the muchdesired quality of ‘stateness’ – the greater the ability of these companies to use their enhanced public standing as a means of further outmanoeuvring the police. In summary, then, private security actors tend to regard the police – together with other state institutions – both as competitors and as a vital source of competitiveness (in the form of enhanced legitimacy).

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How can they be controlled? The typical answer to this question, which again emerges from the economic narrative, is that because private security companies are amoral economic actors who shape their activities solely around the needs of their customers, the only way to effectively structure their operations in line with the public good is to externally impose it upon them through statutory regulation (the obvious exception here being if the customer is actually a state institution, in which case the terms of contract will automatically orientate a company’s activities towards the public good). This is an important answer – shared, it must be noted, by the pro-regulation reformers identified throughout this book – which has a great deal of merit. Extrapolating from the politics of private security, however, a very interesting alternative answer can also be given to this question. To arrive at this new answer is first necessary to highlight once again that many private security companies – especially in the more ambitious end of the industry – have a tendency to internalise the public good by responding to the morally contextualised market signals of the security sector and through societywide processes of socialisation. In other words, these companies have a tendency to guide their activities towards the exact same end – the public good – which in the economic narrative can only be reached through the external imposition of statutory regulation. With this in mind, it could be argued that another method through which the activities of private security companies could be aligned with the public good would actually be to harness this internalised logic. Take the British case, for instance. If the SIA, the Home Office and the police started to more actively portray these companies as state-deputised actors working in accordance with the state-defined public good, it might serve to intensify the burden of expectation upon these companies and push them even further towards the public good. That is, if more everyday people expected these companies to act as state-deputised and morally-bound actors, then these companies might be even more likely to perform their operations in line with these expectations. This is not to contend that more coercive forms of regulation should be faded out, for there should always be a safety net in place – especially for the less ambitious end of the industry which is less concerned with the burden of public expectation. Yet it is to contend that alongside these conventional ‘external’ regulatory activities, state agencies should perhaps consider pursuing a complementary strategy centred around the notion of harnessing the potential of ‘internal’ regulation. What does their increasingly ubiquitous presence in twenty-first-century society tell us about the future of security provision? The most common

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answer to this final question, again drawn primarily from the economics of private security, is that the exponential growth of private security provision in recent decades represents the emergence of a new (postmodern) era of pluralised security provision which is fast eclipsing the monopolistic arrangements of the modern era. There is a great deal of analytical purchase in this answer, for the expansion of private security has certainly been a central dimension of the radical transformation in post-war security provision. Drawing upon the arguments mapped out over the preceding chapters, however, it can be argued that this answer may well be overstating the case – rather than heralding a brand new era of post-monopoly security provision, this book has demonstrated that private security companies have for many years actively been reconciling their activities with the state-centric political norms which characterised the modern era. This is because while the reality of domestic security provision has moved steadily away from these monopolistic security arrangements, the popular idea of security provision has not. Many people have remained extremely attached to the normative idea of a state monopoly over security provision, and this enduring attachment has compelled private security executives to advertise their companies not just as commercial organisations delivering private goods, but also as state-deputised organisations acting in accordance with the public good. The contemporary security sector, then, is not dominated by the modern state as it once was, but neither has it progressed to a postmodern system of wholesale pluralised security provision. It is instead in an acute period of flux in which a radical new system of pluralised security provision is overlapping with a traditional, state-centred system which can trace its origins back to the Enlightenment. The answers to these questions add something genuinely new to interdisciplinary debates about the changing nature of domestic security provision. They show that once the politics of private security is analysed alongside the economics of private security, we can develop a much more sophisticated social-scientific understanding of private security provision. Yet it is important to acknowledge that these answers – together with the narrative from which they are drawn – suffer from one major limitation: they are derived exclusively from the British case. While it has been demonstrated that the economics of private security does have analytical purchase across a wide range of countries, the same cannot at present be said for the politics of private security. The final few pages of the book will accordingly be focused on the task of exploring the generalisability of the concepts and arguments mapped out over the

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preceding chapters by setting out a comparative approach for studying the politics of private security.

A comparative analysis At the beginning of this book it was contended that the politics of private security is not unique to Britain, but is rather a worldwide phenomenon. The objective of this final section is to substantiate this claim by exploring the extent to which the concepts and arguments mapped out in this book can be generalised to other countries. However, before commencing such a comparative analysis, three important caveats must be set down. Firstly, the intention of this analysis is to examine the degree to which the concepts of regulation, reform and re-legitimation have analytical purchase in other countries. In other words, the emphasis will be on conceptual generalisation. The analysis will not be searching for countries where the trajectory of the security sector has followed the same twists and turns as the British narrative, for each country will inevitably have its own idiosyncrasies centred around localised market conditions and cultural norms. Secondly, the analysis is exploratory and speculative. It does not have the luxury of drawing upon indepth primary research and is therefore dependent upon the knowledge available within the extant academic literature. Unfortunately, as others who have entered into this particular comparative realm have noted (Jones and Newburn 2006, p. 1), this literature is sparse and underdeveloped. As such, the ensuing comparative analysis is also relatively limited in scope. Thirdly, rather than focusing on the political dimension, most of the extant literature is instead primarily concerned with either delineating the economics of private security in particular countries or sketching out recent institutional innovations in these countries – an orientation which in large part results from the increasing popularity of the economically-driven nodal governance model as a lens for studying the changing nature of domestic security provision. As a consequence, even if the politics of private security has shaped the trajectory of a given security sector, the available literature might not pick this up. With these caveats in mind, then, the objective of this comparative analysis is not so much to illustrate where the politics of private security is found in the world (for the literature does not generally permit this), but rather to indicate where it might be found (which can often be discerned through a careful reading of the literature). This comparative exploration will first concentrate on Europe where, as we will see, the search for generalisability generates the most

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promising results. We begin with Ocqueteau’s analysis of private security provision in France, where the key concepts of regulation, reform and re-legitimation do seem to have a reasonable degree of analytical purchase. In this country, formal private security regulation was introduced during the mid-1980s in an attempt to control (or reform) the operations of rogue private security companies, which were seen to be threatening the integrity of civil liberties (Ocqueteau 1993, p. 112; 2006, p. 61). Ocqueteau explains that regulation came in two forms. In the first instance, prefectures were delegated the task of creating a register of those companies which satisfied certain vetting criteria – a regulatory mechanism which, when viewed through the prism of re-legitimation, might actually serve to (unintentionally) enhance the standing of these companies, especially if they exploited these regulatory mechanisms with this explicit goal in mind. Interestingly, Ocqueteau confirms that this indeed was the case, remarking that: Retrospectively it becomes particularly apparent that the whole monitoring operation has given the private security sector much more credibility in the eyes of the public . . . it knows how to market its stamp of approval. It tends to adopt the line that the new regulation has virtually made private security agents auxiliary policemen. And above all they seek State-approved legitimacy which is not always easy to come by, over and above commercial legitimacy. (1993, p. 113) In the second instance, when high-profile government contracts were awarded to registered companies, civil servants were often seconded to these companies in order to micro-regulate the services being contracted out. With regard to this form of regulation, Ocqueteau reaches the conclusion that this process too was reflective ‘not so much of the economic efficacy of these companies as of their “official” legitimacy’ (1993, p. 118). These scenarios, then, share notable similarities with the British case, with regulation serving as a kind of political melting pot in which French versions of the reform and re-legitimation agendas are brought together. However, Ocqueteau’s observations comprise just one small section of a relatively short journal article, so it is not possible to delve much deeper into this case. The contention here, though, is that if this case were subjected to a sustained examination using the concepts of regulation, reform and re-legitimation, it seems likely (given Ocqueteau’s comments) that we would discover that the

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politics of private security has indeed played a central role in the overall transformation of French security provision. France does not appear to be anomalous in this respect either. According to Ferret (2004), the pluralisation of domestic security within a powerful state-centric normative framework is not a phenomenon specific to France, but is actually representative of the manner in which domestic security provision is transforming across what he terms ‘Old Continental Europe’ (which for him comprises France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Belgium). He argues, for example, that ‘everything still happens within the state framework as far as this historically and sociopolitically specific part of Europe is concerned . . . while the circle [of security providers] becomes bigger, its contours are still drawn by the same “subtle architect” ’ (Ferret 2004, p. 62). Importantly, then, if in these countries private security companies are being forced to conduct their operations in security sectors which are deeply permeated by state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered, we can perhaps expect that the concepts of regulation, reform and re-legitimation might apply here as well. Indeed, it is certainly the case that each of these European countries has a system of private security regulation in place (see Button 2007b), so this speculation does not seem unreasonable. However, the line must be drawn when it comes to what could perhaps be termed ‘New Continental Europe’ – that is, the post-socialist East European states. The collapse of the Soviet Union has created an entirely different trajectory of security sector reform in this part of Europe, centred around sudden demilitarisation, a rapid escalation in organised crime and the emergence of new nationalist movements (see Juska 2009). As a consequence, the concepts of regulation, reform and re-legitimation do not seem to readily apply in this region. Beyond Europe, it is necessary to turn our attention to the Anglosphere – specifically, Australia, Canada and the USA – where the search for generalisability generates mixed results. Australia appears to be the most promising case, for Prenzler and Sarre’s (1998, 2006 and 2007) analyses of security provision in this country seem to identify something closely resembling the interlinked processes of regulation, reform and re-legitimation. Importantly, they first outline the state-centric normative context of the Australian security sector: ‘For much of the twentieth century, state police held a virtual monopoly, at least in the public mind, on crime control’ (Prenzler and Sarre 2006, p. 170). Next, they observe that private security companies – despite experiencing significant growth from the 1970s onwards – have

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generally been held in low regard by the public. During the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, this public contempt manifested itself in a series of critical media exposés on the industry (Prenzler and Sarre 2007, p. 52). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this combination of an esteemed system of monopolistic public policing and a widely disdained system of private security provision seems to have precipitated – as it did in the British case – a pro-regulation lobby comprising Australian versions of both state reformers and private security re-legitimators. In the 1990s, for example, state actors responded to these high-profile industry controversies by introducing new – and strengthening existing – regulations to control the activities of private security companies (Prenzler and Sarre 2006, pp. 178–9; 2007, p. 52), which in turn indicates the emergence of a reform movement. Furthermore, they were supported in this process by the companies themselves, who were also lobbying for stricter forms of state regulation (Prenzler and Sarre 1998, p. 5), thus suggesting the presence of a re-legitimation lobby. Crucially, then, this sequence of events seems to resonate with the concepts and arguments which have been developed throughout the course of this book, and it is accordingly hypothesised that if a deeper investigation of this case were to be conducted, we could reasonably expect to uncover yet more evidence that the politics of private security has been actively shaping the transformation of the post-war Australian security sector. The Canadian case also appears to share some political characteristics with the British case, though the parallels are less clear-cut. In this country we again find a security sector which is structured by state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered. As Rigakos and Leung (2006, p. 126) remark: ‘One of Canada’s unique features is its identification with its federal police as a national symbol of sovereignty . . . the “Mounties” . . . are perhaps internationally the most widely recognized police agency in their unique red tunic, Strathcona boots, and wide-brimmed hat.’ We also find a loosely controlled private security industry in this country, which in recent years has been experiencing acute public relations problems following high-profile incidents of malpractice (Rigakos and Leung 2006, p. 134). Given this (now very familiar) combination of factors, it is unsurprising to discover that there is increasing pressure for a much more stringent system of private security regulation to be introduced within the Canadian security sector (p. 134). Unfortunately, what the available literature does not inform us (due to its apolitical lens) is whether or not this pressure is coming from state actors, private security actors or the general public – or a combination of the three. As a consequence, without further research we cannot tell whether or not the reform and re-legitimation agendas are actively

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shaping the trajectory of the Canadian security sector. However, there does seem to be some preliminary evidence that this might indeed be the case. In contrast to the Australian and Canadian cases, however, there appears to be little possibility of discovering the politics of private security in the American security sector. As Manning (2006, p. 111) notes: There is very little perceived competition, tension or concern about the growth or size of private policing in America . . . The operations of the private police are rarely controversial and ‘below the radar’ of the public. They are legitimate but relatively unregulated. This suggests that in the USA private security companies are able to act as ordinary commercial organisations selling ordinary commodities – their activities do not seem to be structured by state-centric expectations about how security ought to be delivered. Without the presence of these political norms, there is no motivation for state and private security actors to formulate and pursue the reform and re-legitimation agendas. Interestingly, there are two possible reasons why private security services are regarded as unremarkable commodities in the USA. The first relates to the observation that private security companies have never been completely pushed out of the security sector by monopolistic state forces. Historical trends such as the use of strikebreakers, the need to protect frontier settlements and the popularity of non-state investigative services have had the effect of maintaining a consistent demand for private security provision during the ‘conventional’ period of monopolisation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Spitzer and Scull 1977; Sklansky 1999; Manning 2006). The second relates to the deeply embedded capitalist free-market ideology which seems to permeate most aspects of American life, including the domestic security sector (Manning 2006, p. 98). This ideological persuasion means that market signals in the American domestic security sector are not bound up with moral and normative considerations as they are in many other countries. Therefore, there is not sufficient motivation for private security executives to conduct themselves as moral actors – they can simply operate as normal businessmen. For these reasons, then, we are unlikely to locate the politics of private security in the American security sector. Outside Europe and the Anglosphere, the literature on the changing nature of domestic security provision unfortunately becomes even more disparate and does not fall neatly into regional or cultural clusterings. There is not space here to undertake a world tour of the remaining

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countries covered by existing scholarship. It is instead more useful to offer a rule of thumb and to provide illustrative examples. The rule is that the key concepts of regulation, reform and re-legitimation are most likely to have analytical purchase in those countries where the state has historically exercised something approaching a legitimate monopoly over domestic security provision, for this institutional arrangement creates the empirical and normative conditions in which the politics of private security tends to take shape. This rule has to an extent been demonstrated by the countries examined so far, for, to varying degrees, we have found the politics of private security in Britain, Old Continental Europe, Australia and Canada, where the state has historically dominated security provision by popular consent. Put differently, in all these countries we can see the phenomenon of ‘police fetishism’. Conversely, we have not found the politics of private security in New Continental Europe and the USA where (for very different reasons) the state has never really built a popularly-mandated monopoly over security provision. Importantly, this rule of thumb does seem to translate outside of Europe and the Anglosphere. For instance, it is possible to identify a version of the politics of private security in contemporary Japan, where the ‘celebrated’ public police forces have dominated the domestic security sector for much of the twentieth century (see Yoshida and Leishman 2006, p. 224) Equally, it is not possible to detect any trace of the politics of private security in the West African states, where citizens have frequently taken responsibility for their own security provision, often to protect themselves from a despotic, authoritarian state (Ebo 2008). So, although this rule is only based on a limited number of cases, it nevertheless represents a useful first step for conducting comparative research into the politics of private security. This section has provided evidence, then, that the politics of private security is not unique to post-war Britain, but is rather a worldwide phenomenon. It is far from being ubiquitous, of course, but it does seem to exist in one form or another in numerous countries across the globe. Furthermore, if social scientists started to more actively search for these political processes – as opposed to focusing primarily on economic factors – more evidence would undoubtedly be uncovered. The central point here, though, is that the concepts and arguments mapped out over the course of this book do have a global resonance. As such, they enhance our social-scientific understanding of the private security provision not only in post-war Britain, but in domestic security sectors the world over.

Notes

1

Introduction

1. Bruce George has in fact campaigned for private security regulation since the mid-1970s in his position as a Labour MP, as later chapters will illustrate. However, the majority of his academic writing on the issue dates from the mid-1990s onwards.

2

Structure, Agency and Security

1. It should be noted that the six empirical chapters which follow this chapter can be understood without reading the ensuing theoretical discussion. This means that those readers who are more interested in the empirical – as opposed to the theoretical – side of the politics of private security need not necessarily engage with the debates covered in this chapter. 2. It should be acknowledged from the outset that Loader and Walker often use the anchored pluralism model as a normative framework as opposed to an explanatory framework. Following Crawford (2006), however, it is argued here that this model can also be regarded as both an explanatory and a normative model.

3

Emerging Agendas (1945–59)

1. ‘TNA: PRO’ is the standard bibliographical abbreviation for ‘The National Archives: Public Record Office’. This abbreviation will be used throughout the book except in the bibliography, where the full reference will be used.

6

The Neoliberal Experiments (1979–96)

1. See HC Deb (1989–90), vol. 163, written answers, col. 391; HC Deb (1989–90), vol. 164, written answers, col. 384; HC Deb (1989–90), vol. 165, written answers, cols. 869–70; HC Deb (1989–90), vol. 168, written answers, col. 72; HC Deb (1989–90), vol. 168, written answers, col. 86; HC Deb (1989–90), written answers, vol. 168, col. 103; HC Deb (1989–90), vol. 169, written answers, col. 756; HC Deb (1989–90), vol. 170, written answers, col. 372; HC Deb (198–90), vol. 171, written answers, col. 99; HC Deb (1989–90), vol. 173, written answers, col. 172; HC Deb (1989–90), vol. 176, written answers, col. 119 (10 July 1990); HC Deb (1989–90), vol. 177, written answers, col. 261; HC Deb (1989–90), vol. 177, written answers, col. 471. 185

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Notes

The Era of Regulation (2001–10)

1. Peter Hermitage was, in fact, the SIA’s second Chairman. The first Chairman, Baroness Molly Meacher, resigned in December 2003. Before her resignation, however, she too employed ‘transformationist’ language to describe the objectives of the SIA. 2. These statistics were not published in White and Smith (2009), but were generated during the course of the same piece of research. Because they have not been published elsewhere, it is necessary to provide the exact question format and data here. A sample of 611 private security providers was asked the question: ‘To what extent do you agree with the following statement about the impact of regulation on the relationship between private security staff and the general public? Since the introduction of statutory regulation the public seem to have more trust in private security staff.’ The responses were as follows: ‘strongly agree’ (6.1 per cent), ‘agree’ (26.7 per cent), ‘undecided’ (32.6 per cent), ‘disagree’ (28.3 per cent) and ‘strongly disagree’ (6.4 per cent). 3. Likewise, these comments were not published in White and Smith (2009), but were generated during the course of the same piece of research. Because they have not been published elsewhere, it is important to provide the exact question format and data here. The same sample of 611 private security providers was asked the follow-on question: ‘If you have any further comments about the impact of regulation on the relationship between private security staff and the public, please write them here.’ A total of 113 comments were given, ranging from a couple of words to long paragraphs.

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Index

Africa 184 anchored pluralism 29–33, 34, 36, 37 see also monopoly; nodal governance; political economy of private security Anglosphere 181–2, 184 Australia 181–2, 184 Belgium 181 Blair, Ian 125–6 Blair, Tony 118 British Retail Consortium 114, 116 British Security Industry Association (BSIA) 60, 67–8, 75–9, 90–7, 100, 103–6, 108, 109, 124, 128, 134, 136–7, 140, 144, 153, 170 Button, Mark 17–8, 127, 130, 133, 151, 152 Callaghan, James 83–4, 88 Cambridge Institute of Criminology 90 Canada 181–3, 184 Carr, Robert 88–9 census 44 Childs, Richard 148–50 Chubb 75, 78, 91 Clarke, Charles 135–7 Community Safety Accreditation Scheme 149–50 see also police and policing; police legislation comparative framework 179, 183–4 Conservative Party 92–3, 102, 110–11, 118–19, 121–2, 136–7 Cowden, David 67, 108, 136–7 Committee on Privacy 83–9, 92–3, 99, 114, 170 see also Parliament

crime rates 8–9, 29, 43, 122, 167, 173–4 see also economics of private security Crown Agents 53–4 Dahlberg, Robin 144 Davies, Peter 126 Deal bombing 106–9, 112, 171 Dickinson, David 106, 140 economics of private security 3–4, 6–11, 19–20, 21, 22, 26–7, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34–7, 43, 48, 49, 52, 54, 55, 58, 61, 72, 89, 97, 104–5, 159–62, 167–8, 173–8, 179, 184 see also anchored pluralism; nodal governance; political economy of private security Emsley, Clive 62, 110–11 Enlightenment 19, 22, 30, 34, 178 Europe 24, 152, 179–81, 184 fascism 48 Factoryguards 52, 71–4, 91, 97 see also Group 4 fetishism 9, 25, 43, 167, 173, 174, 184 see also economics of private security Fidler, Michael 93 Finlay’s Bureau of Investigation 84 fiscal constraint theory 7–8 see also economics of private security fiscal crisis of the state 7–8, 43, 167, 173, 174 see also economics of private security

198

Index Fletcher, David 134 Fowler, Norman 91–3, 119 France 180–1, 184 Gardner, Tony 82–3, 87 Garland, David 123–4 George, Bruce 17–18, 94–6, 98, 105–6, 109, 116, 118, 119, 126–7, 128, 130, 133, 137–8, 139, 147, 151–2, 170 Godfrey, R.D. 44–5, 47–8, 50–2, 55–8 Group 4 52, 71, 91–3, 95, 106, 113, 114, 118–19, 127–8, 134, 140, 161, 169, 171 see also Factoryguards Hampton, Sir Philip 145 see also Regulators’ Compliance Code Harrower, Jim 106, 114–15 Heims, Peter 82 Henig, Baroness 145, 148, 153 Hermitage, Peter 142, 144, 148 Hobbes, Thomas 23–5, 30, 34 see also monopoly Home Office 47, 49–50, 57, 80, 89–90, 94, 95, 96, 102–5, 109–14, 117, 118, 121, 126, 128–9, 135–6, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 147, 148, 154, 162, 163, 170, 171, 177 Green Paper 1979 97–101 Green Paper 1996 119–20 Secretary of State, see Callaghan, James; Carr, Robert; Rees, Merlyn; Smith, Jacqui; Soskice, Frank; Straw, Jack versus the Committee on Privacy 84–9, 93 White Paper 1999 129–35 Working Party on Mock Uniforms and Vehicles 60–5 Working Party on Private Security Organisations 65–79 see also House of Commons Home Affairs Committee; police and policing; private security legislation; Security Industry Authority

199

House of Commons Defence Committee 105–6 House of Commons Home Affairs Committee 114–19 Inspectorate of the Security Industry 113 International Professional Security Association (IPSA) 66–7 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 106 Italy 181 Japan 184 Jones, Trevor

44

Keynesianism 6–7 see also economics of private security; fiscal constraint theory; fiscal crisis of the state Labour Party 103, 118–19, 121–40, 143, 147, 171, 173 see also third way Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006 145 legitimacy, see re-legitimation Leviathan, see Hobbes, Thomas Loader, Ian 12, 14, 29–33, 34–5, 42, 46, 62, Lyon, Alexander 81 Maclean, David 117, 119 Mancroft, Lord 81 Margetson, Sir Philip 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 91 mass private property 9, 26, 43, 105, 109, 168, 173, 174 see also economics of private security; nodal governance Michael, Alun 118, 128 miners’ strikes (1984–5) 110–11, 121 Ministry of Defence 104, 105, 110 monopoly state 13–14, 48, 49, 51, 52, 63, 66, 68, 81, 125–6, 141, 147, 169, 178, 181, 184 theory of 22–5, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 43

200

Index

monopoly – continued see also police and policing; reform; regulation; re-legitimation morality 13, 175–7, 183 National Inspectorate of Security Guard, Patrol and Transport Services 103, 105, 108, 109, 112, 113 neoliberalism 7, 101, 102–6, 108, 109, 110, 112–13, 171 new institutional economics, see new public management New Labour, see Labour Party new public management (NPM) 102–4, 125 see also neoliberalism Newburn, Tim 44 Night Guards 43–9 see also Securicor nodal governance 25–8, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 179 see also economics of private security; mass private property O’Neill, Martin 107 Owen, David 111–12 Parliament House of Commons 70, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 92, 94, 95, 99, 105, 108, 114, 117, 118, 119, 129, 136, 137, 148 House of Lords 63, 81, 84, 129, 135, 136–7, 138 see also Committee on Privacy; House of Commons Defence Committee; House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Peel, Robert 41, 61 police and policing 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 25, 26, 29–31, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52–3, 55, 56, 59, 61–79, 80, 81, 84, 86, 88, 91, 95, 97, 98, 101, 105, 110–11, 113, 116, 119, 124–6, 128, 130, 131, 132, 139, 140, 144, 148–51, 153,

154, 157, 163, 168, 173, 174, 176, 177, 180, 181, 182, 184 Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) 100, 101, 102, 109, 110–12, 114, 116, 125–6, 129, 133, 147, 148–50, 162, 163, 171 Central Conference of Chief Constables 61 Metropolitan Police 41–59, 60–2, 64, 68, 70, 81, 91, 96, 151, 163, 168–9 Police Federation 95, 100, 102 Royal Commission on the Police 62, 63, 72 see also Blair, Ian; Childs, Richard; Home Office; miners’ strikes; police legislation police legislation Police Act 1919 47–8, 57–8, 59, 61, 63, 64 Police Act 1964 62–4 Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 110 Police Reform Act 2002 149 politics of private security 3–6, 11–20, 21–2, 25, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 41–59, 60–79, 80–101, 102–20, 121–40, 141–63, 167–84 see also economics of private security; political economy of private security; private security; private security legislation; reform; regulation; re-legitimation political economy of private security 5, 21–2, 33–7 see also economics of private security; politics of private security Portugal 181 postmodernism 8, 10, 19, 174, 178 post-war consensus 42–3 privacy 80–4 Right of Privacy Bill 81, 83 see also Committee on Privacy; private investigators; private security

Index private detectives, see private investigators private investigators 69, 80–8, 92, 93, 99, 130 Association of British Investigators (ABI) 82, 84–5, 95 Private Detectives (Control Bill) 93 Private Investigators Bill 82 private security control, see reform; regulation; Security Industry Authority growth 3–4, 6–19, 26, 42–3, 44, 45–7, 49, 52, 55, 58–9, 61, 66, 72–3, 89, 97, 104–5, 109, 111, 127, 135, 149, 152, 159–62, 168, 174–6, 177–8 see also economics of private security; politics of private security hardware 70–1, 77–9, 130, 134–5 media 43, 73, 74–6, 77, 79, 82, 89–90, 96, 106–8, 113–14, 125–6, 146, 158, 171, 182 purchasing 14, 45–6, 72–3, 89–90, 152, 159–62, 169 recruitment 45, 56–7, 91 representation, see British Security Industry Association; International Professional Security Association selling, see re-legitimation theorising, see anchored pluralism; monopoly; nodal governance; political economy of private security uniforms 30, 47–8, 57, 60–5, 98, 169, 174 see also private security legislation private security legislation Private Security Industry Act 2001 121, 124, 135–40, 141, 142–3, 148, 151, 155, 162, 172 Private Security Industry Bill 133, 135–40, 151, 172 Private Security (Licensing) Bill 113 Registration of Private Security Firms Bill 95 Security Industry Bill 108–9

201

Security Industry Licensing Bill 92–3 see also private security; regulation; Security Industry Authority Professional Security Magazine 133, 151 Public Order Act 1936 47–8, 57–8, 59 Rees, Merlyn 98 reform 12, 13–14, 17, 18, 19, 25, 32, 35, 41, 48, 49, 50, 52, 59, 60–79, 80–101, 102–20, 121–40, 143, 147–52, 155, 162–3, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184 see also regulation; re-legitimation regulation 10, 12, 14, 16, 17–20, 59, 60–79, 80–101, 102–20, 121–40, 141–63, 169–73, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184 see also reform; re-legitimation; Security Industry Authority Regulators’ Compliance Code 145–6, 163 Reiner, Robert 8–9, 25, 42 re-legitimation 12, 15–17, 18, 19, 25, 32, 35, 41, 44, 45, 50, 52–9, 60–79, 80–101, 102–20, 121–40, 141, 143, 147, 152–62, 168, 169, 170, 173, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184 see also reform; regulation Reliance Security Systems 107 Saunders, John 142 Securicor 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 49–59, 61, 67, 68, 71, 72, 79, 91, 97, 108, 114, 136, 161, 168, 169 see also Night Guards Security Express 61, 71, 72, 74, 91, 97, 169 Security Industry Authority (SIA) 131, 132, 138, 141–63, 172–3, 177 see also private security legislation; reform; regulation; re-legitimation Security Management Today 133–4 Shearing, Clifford 9, 25–8, 98 Smith, Jacqui 148, 151–2

202

Index

Smith, Martin 155–61 Sorensen, Jorgen Philip 74, 91, 127, 161 Soskice, Frank 68–70, 80, 84 Soviet Union 181 Spain 181 Stenning, Philip 9, 25–8, 98 Stern, Michael 113 Straw, Jack 118–19, 124, 126, 130

Torrance, Alistair 105 Tuck, Raphael 69–70, 80

Thatcher, Margaret 93, 101, 102–3, 104 third way 122, 126 see also Labour Party

Younger Committee, see Committee on Privacy

United States of America 181, 183, 184 Walden, Brian 83, 87 Walker, Neil 12, 29–33, 34, 35 Wheeler, John 95, 108–9 Wilson, Mike 146

Zedner, Lucia 9, 18