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SIA Stakeholder Conference 2009: The Regulation Journey

26 May 09

The history of the private security sector and its regulation is a fascinating one. Dr Adam White chose last week’s SIA Stakeholder Conference to recount it in great detail.

By Dr Adam White

First of all, let me explain that I’m not going to discuss the history of the past five years, with which we’re all very familiar, but rather the history of the past 55 years.

That’s because the regulatory regime of today has a long and interesting back-story. I think that developing a strong sense of this back-story will help to frame the debates and discussions during this conference and beyond.

One of the constant features of the idea of regulation over this long period has been its divisiveness. It was as divisive back in the 1950s as it is now. There have always been those, both within the State and the industry, who have argued passionately for and against regulation. There are plainly two sides to the history of regulation in post-war Britain.

I’m only going to focus on one side of this history: the history of those who, over the past half century, have lobbied in favour of regulating the private security industry. That’s not to dismiss or disrespect the history of those who have argued so articulately against regulation over the years. What they have said is important and certainly should not be forgotten.

Regulation is here to stay. I think we can all gain more by looking at the positive, reinforcing lessons history can teach us about regulation rather than the negative, destabilising ones.

Aspirational and ambitious side to regulation

I think it’s important to keep the aspirational and ambitious side of the regulation story alive and fresh in our minds. When we’re drawn into heated debates about the turnaround time on licence applications, the entry standards to the Approved Contractor Scheme or the SIA’s communication and customer service strategies, it’s important to remember that these debates are but one part of a much longer and bigger story.

It’s a story featuring many people who, for decades, fought for the very right to have these debates within the framework of an actually existing regime of statutory regulation. In my view, that bigger picture is massively important.

I’ve spent the last five years researching the history of the private security industry in the United Kingdom. This has involved digging around the national archives in London, rooting around a number of private archives where documents have been stored in everything from cardboard boxes to old dustbin liners, leafing through old newspaper articles and copies of Security Management Today and, most importantly, speaking to many, many people – both retired and currently working – who have spent time in and around the private security industry.

To tell the story that has emerged from this research in full would take hours if not days. That being the case, I’ve chosen five interesting episodes in this story which, I feel, illustrate how the idea of regulation has evolved over the past half century. Five episodes which show the origins of the ideas underpinning private security regulation as we know it today.

I want to show that regulation was not something thought up through a Home Office consultation exercise in the months leading up to the Private Security Industry Act 2001. Rather, it was pieced together over five decades by a group of forward-thinking, like-minded individuals, all of whom had a vision for the future of the private security industry. An industry which is beginning to rid itself of a once negative National Minimum Wage, ‘cowboy’-rich image and becoming a more professional, respected, better paid, higher-skilled and State-regulated sector.

Episode 1: The Case of R D Godfrey

For the first episode in this story, then, I want to recount a short anecdote about the managing director of Securicor in the 1950s – Mr R D Godfrey – which I think shows that some of the foundational ideas of regulation have been embedded within the private security industry for at least half a century.

Fifty years ago, Securicor was nothing like the corporate giant that G4S is today. It was a very small company specialising in the guarding of industrial sites. It had no influential political connections, no clout and no resource base. In short, the company was pretty invisible.

However, its managing director harboured some pretty big ideas about the future of the company, and he duly put together an interesting strategy for moving said company up in the world.

To begin, Godfrey set up a new investigations branch within Securicor. In itself, an act that was quite unexceptional. What’s interesting is how Godfrey then went about manning this new branch.

Rather than recruiting promising young men and women in the area and training them in-house, he began a decade-long letter campaign targeting the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. In these letters, Godfrey repeatedly asked the Commissioner to recommend any ex-CID officers who might be interested in working for Securicor and, on a repeated basis, he would ask the Commissioner to publicly endorse Securicor’s operations.

What’s the significance of these letters? What do they have to do with regulation? The answer, in its most direct sense, is: ‘Nothing’. These letters weren’t requests for legislation to implement a formal regulatory regime. There were no calls for licences, criminal record checks or compulsory qualifications.

In fact, it would be another decade before private security companies started to lobby for these.

What I do think Godfrey’s letters point to is the beginnings of the idea of regulation. Godfrey recognised that, in order to move Securicor forward, it should attempt to contract-out officers who were vetted, trained and endorsed by the State. This was the way to improve the company’s image, and to enhance the quality of the security services it offered the client base.

One of the only ways to do this back in the 1950s – and in the absence of any formal regulatory framework, remember – was to employ ex-police officers with the support of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This was one of the few ways of putting together a trained, vetted and State-endorsed workforce.

It’s precisely forward-thinking of this nature that, in my opinion, represented the beginnings of the idea of regulation as we now know it.

What happened next with the Commissioner?

This is not the end of the anecdote, though. It’s important to recall what happened next. What did the Commissioner do with all of these letters? To begin with, he simply ignored them. As I’ve said, Securicor was not what G4S is today – it had no political muscle, and could very easily have been ignored.

Towards the end of the 1950s, after nine years of letters, Godfrey’s perseverance finally succeeded in capturing the Commissioner’s attention, albeit not in the way he was hoping. On receiving another one of Godfrey’s missives in 1959, the Commissioner finally asked an assistant to explore the idea of endorsing Securicor.

Far from an endorsement, however, the assistant arrived at the conclusion that Securicor – and all other private security companies, for that matter – should in fact be shut down using Section 10 of the Police Act 1919 (which addressed the impersonation of police officers) and Section 10 of the Public Order Act 1936 (designed to combat any organisations attempting to usurp the police).

Obviously, this outcome wasn’t exactly what Godfrey had in mind. Fortunately for the industry, the Commissioner didn’t act on these heavy-handed recommendations, but neither did he offer Securicor an endorsement.

The anecdote ultimately ends in failure. Godfrey, in fact, never received his police-recommended and police-endorsed employees.

The lesson I want to draw from this first episode, then, is straightforward. Some of the key principles which drive regulation – a will towards professionalism and a partnership with the State – have been around, in one form or another, for at least 50 years. I think Mr Godfrey’s case is ample demonstration of that.

Episode 2: Securicor, Factory Guards, Security Express

For the second episode in this story I want to skip forward to the mid-1960s, when we start to see a more instantly recognisable form of regulation beginning to emerge in key negotiations between the biggest private security companies in the land and the Home Office.

Come the mid-1960s, a number of private security firms were starting to expand their operations at a rapid rate. Companies such as Securicor, Factory Guards (which, in 1968, became Group 4) and Security Express were fast becoming recognisable names within policing circles. This growing notoriety propelled these companies onto the Home Office’s radar.

In October 1965, representatives from Securicor, Factory Guards and Security Express were invited to Whitehall in order to discuss the future of the industry – the first time any such official meetings had taken place between the industry and representatives of the State.

Two significant discussions were had at this meeting. First, it was jointly agreed by everyone that these companies should set up a Trade Association to represent the views of the industry. Over the next few months, this organisation came to fruition in the form of the British Security Industry Association (BSIA).

Second, the issue of statutory regulation – the type of regulation that we’re familiar with today – was brought to the fore. Now, at this moment, when regulation was briefly on the table, it’s striking that the Securicor, Factory Guards and Security Express representatives immediately lobbied the Home Office civil servants for a system of Home Office-administrated licensing designed to eradicate cowboy firms from the industry.

This, I think, is one of the most striking moments in the post-war history of the private security industry. We had representatives from the three largest companies sitting inside Whitehall persuasively asking to be regulated, ostensibly for the greater good of the industry. They were asking the Government to help them clean up the industry by eliminating rogue operators.

Cynical dimension to the equation

There is, of course, an obvious cynical dimension to this request. When large companies lobby for regulation they often do so on the basis that they might be able to capture the market share left behind by those companies who cannot meet regulatory requirements.

It would be naïve to think that this wasn’t in the minds of the Securicor, Factory Guards and Security Express representatives as they were making their case in the Whitehall meeting room.

As I’ve said, however, this isn’t a cynical commentary. I’m striking a self-consciously optimistic tone. With this in mind, I want to highlight the fact that these industry representatives were in fact taking a giant step forward in the long road towards the Private Security Industry Act 2001. They were asking for regulation.

The Home Office, however, was not convinced and rejected the idea outright.

There’s an interesting pre-history to this important decision, which essentially served to block the road to regulation for a couple of decades. In advance of this meeting, the Home Office needed to establish a policy position regarding the private security industry – an industry it had never before taken much notice of. This did not prove to be an easy process.

Within the orbit of the State

Some key figures, such as the Home Secretary Frank Soskice, wanted to bring the industry within the orbit of the State by reforming the private security companies and re-positioning them as a subsidiary police force – a policy stance which seemed to complement the pro-regulation agenda of Securicor, Factory Guards and Security Express.

However, this was not the dominant line of thinking in the Home Office. For a group of powerful senior Home Office civil servants overrode the Home Secretary’s position with the following line of reasoning: regulating Securicor, Factory Guards, Security Express and other companies like them would only serve to legitimise their operations. In turn, this would have the effect of undermining the public police’s pre-eminent position within the security sector. ‘Is that what the Home Office wants to do, to destabilise the police?’

Ultimately, it was this logic which the Home Office officials took with them into their meeting with the industry representatives. It was also this logic which caused them to reject outright the pro-regulation platitudes of these representatives.

So what can we take from this second episode in my story? We can clearly see that some industry leaders were now aligning themselves in favour of a formal model for statutory regulation in order to clean up malpractice within the industry and improve its image.

Some major players within the State were in agreement with this position, too. People like the Home Secretary, Frank Soskice. However, within Government circles these people were in the minority. No surprise, then, that the Home Office’s wariness and distrust of the industry won through. Nevertheless, the seeds of the idea of regulation were clearly growing.

Episode 3: it’s all about the BSIA

The third episode in this story concentrates on the changing fortunes of the BSIA during the 1970s, and how those fortunes were linked to the ebbing and flowing of the regulation debate.

Following its inception, the BSIA pursued the pro-regulation cause of its central members with some vigour, lobbying the Home Office and launching a media campaign. During the early 1970s, however, this pro-regulation drive slowly ground to a halt as it became increasingly clear that the Home Office wasn’t going to budge.

Indeed, the BSIA Council meeting minutes of June 1972 complained that the Association carried very little weight in political circles and that the press, radio and television showed no interest in its public relations. The regulation cause at this time looked distinctly hopeless.

Over the next few years these circumstances changed dramatically. By the end of the 1970s, the BSIA was once again on the political map. For instance, the 1978 BSIA Annual Luncheon guest list included the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Home Office, the Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner and an Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and a high-ranking member of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary.

Furthermore, the organisation was once again championing the regulation issue. The Association’s 1978 Reports and Accounts note that – and I’m quoting here – ‘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’.

From lifeless slump to impressive peak

So what brought about this change in fortune from the lifeless slump of the early 1970s to the impressive peak of the late 1970s? It’s difficult to pinpoint just one factor, but if I were to highlight anything it would be the strategising of Bruce George MP and Group 4 who, together, re-ignited the regulation debate in the mid-1970s.

Bruce George entered the House of Commons as Labour MP for Walsall South in 1974 – a seat he still holds today – and soon after started to take a strong interest in reforming the private security industry.

With Group 4’s help and support, George introduced two Private Members’ Bills into the Commons in 1977, each of which sought to regulate the industry through the establishment of a statutory licensing scheme governed by a central body. Bills, then, which looked much like the Private Security Industry Act 2001.

Whipping up interest for the cause, George was able to list MPs from both benches, the Police Federation, the BSIA, the Association of British Investigators, the journal Top Security and a range of companies within the industry as active supporters of his movement.

Despite this wide-ranging support, the bills went nowhere within the Commons – neither was given a second reading. While they failed in this legal sense, they also seemed to succeed in another. They succeeded in rekindling interest in the idea of regulation, both within the State and the industry. This, I think, is the principle reason for the BSIA’s change in fortune towards the end of the 1970s.

What can we learn from this third episode? I think that this is the point when we can begin to see a real convergence of interests between the industry and the state. Both parties were working together for the future of the industry – a future in which private security companies would be more professional, more respected, better-paid, higher-skilled and, most importantly, State-regulated.

In the minds of the BSIA and Bruce George at least, regulation represented the future of the industry. This future, however, was still 25 years away.

Episode 4: Political fall-out from the Deal bombing

In the fourth episode, we must briefly begin with what happened next in the late 1970s. The pro-regulation fever whipped up by George and his supporters forced the Home Office to address the issue for the first time in over a decade.

The response was a Green Paper, published in 1979, which dismissed the idea of statutory regulation and instead began a consultation process to piece together a more organised system of self-regulation – much as the Foreign Office is currently doing with their consultation exercise for the self-regulation of private military companies, which is definitely a case of history repeating itself.

That’s a debate for another time. Back to the story… With this consultation exercise focusing on self-regulation, statutory regulation was pushed off the agenda for another few years.

However, the regulation issue then re-emerged with intensity in the early 1990s, which brings us to the centre of the fourth episode. Exactly why the regulation issue returned to prominence again at this time is difficult to determine. You can speak to a number of different people and receive a range of different answers.

Certainly the political fall-out from the 1989 Deal bombing pushed the regulation issue front and centre. This tragic incident, in which a Royal Marine barracks guarded by a private security company was bombed by the IRA, prompted many people to ask: how can an industry trusted with the vital job of protecting British troops not be regulated?

In addition to this, there also seemed to be a sense within the industry that self-regulation had run its course. No more could be gained from this system which cast such a patchy net. ‘If the industry is to move forward,’ many people said, ‘regulation is the answer’.

Home Affairs Committee: The Enquiry

Whatever the reasons, the new and rejuvenated pro-regulation campaign culminated in the 1994-95 Home Affairs Committee Enquiry into the regulation of the private security industry.

This enquiry was, in my opinion, the industry’s great debate. Every organisation connected to the private security industry was given the opportunity to have their say. Companies large and small, ACPO, the Police Federation, the Home Office, MPs, the British Retail Consortium, the Unions – you name them, they were there.

During the course of this great debate ideas were exchanged, blueprints drawn up and important decisions made. Much of the content of the Private Security Industry Act 2001 can be found in some form or another in the countless appendices of this enquiry.

Come the end of this great debate, after months of collecting evidence and mapping out ideas, virtually everyone agreed that regulation should be introduced. Regulation, it was argued, was the way to enhance the professionalism and image of the industry. It was the way to secure a safe and prosperous future for the industry.

Virtually everyone was in accord, but with one quite notable exception: the Government of the day. David Maclean MP – who is currently enjoying some notoriety as the leader of the group in the Commons arguing against releasing MPs’ expenses claims – was the Home Office minister representing the Conservative Government in this great debate. Maclean was not a fan of regulation, viewing it as an unnecessary bureaucratic expense.

He did his level best, both in the Home Affairs Committee Enquiry itself and during subsequent parliamentary debates, to swim against this tidal wave of opinion calling for regulation. He could only swim against it for so long. In October 1996, the Home Office was forced to issue a short response to the Home Affairs Committee’s report saying that it would begin a consultation process looking at the regulation of the private security industry.

Broad consensus of opinion emerging

What lessons can be drawn from this fourth episode, then? For me, the Home Affairs Committee can be viewed as the industry’s great debate because it marked the emergence of a broad consensus of opinion around the opportunities and benefits provided by regulation.

In the view of many sections of the industry, several elements of the State and numerous other interested parties, regulation now signified the way forward. It was at this point, then, that those objecting to regulation – even when those objectors included the Government – were finally bowled over by majority opinion.

Episode 5: towards the Private Security Industry Act

For the fifth and final episode in the regulation journey, I want to move onto more familiar ground: the lead-up to the Private Security Industry Act 2001.

The road from the end of the previous episode – the mid-1990s consensus – to the passing of the Private Security Industry Act 2001 may seem like a relatively straightforward and uneventful one. It wasn’t. There were plenty of obstacles remaining, some foreseeable, some unforeseeable.

The first and most obvious obstacle was the incumbent Conservative Government in 1996. There’s an enormous gulf between launching a consultation exercise – as the Conservatives did in 1996 – and actually introducing a Bill into Parliament. Given that the commitment of the government towards regulating the private security industry was at best questionable, the introduction of any such Bill was far from certain.

That particular obstacle was removed the following year, however, when Labour won the General Election with a 179-seat majority. New Labour was far more committed to the idea of regulation – especially since bringing the industry into the ‘Extended Policing Family’ fitted in neatly with its favoured ‘partnership approach’ to combating crime and disorder. One obstacle removed, then.

Another obstacle was the anti-regulation standpoint of a number of Conservative peers in the House of Lords who, like David Maclean, regarded regulation as an unnecessary bureaucratic expense and who were considering voting against the Private Security Industry Bill as it went through the Lords.

I’ve been told a fantastic story about how these peers called in a high-ranking member of the BSIA, expecting him to agree with them in attacking this meddling behaviour of the New Labour Government, and then being completely shocked when the BSIA representative promptly announced his support for regulation.

What these peers didn’t understand, and what the BSIA representative explained to them, was that – and I’m quoting the representative here – “…for the last few years now the responsible end of the industry, and the BSIA as its mouthpiece, has been moving towards a regulatory process. The fact that we’ve been getting into prisons, airport security, seaport security and military establishment security means that 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 we’re not. Apart from being a huge industry, we deserve something better”.

This explanation was, it seems, sufficient to convince the Conservative peers of the value of regulation, and they accordingly passed the Private Security Industry Bill through the Lords. Another obstacle removed.

Bruce George: so nearly a regulation dissenter

The final obstacle I’m going to mention is perhaps the most unexpected one: Bruce George. It’s interesting to find out that one of regulation’s great proponents very nearly withdrew his support for the Private Security Industry Bill as it meandered through Parliament.

George threatened to withdraw his support because of in-house licensing, which was included in the 1999 White Paper on private security regulation but then removed from the Bill introduced into Parliament. For George, the absence of in-house licensing was a major problem because it left a sizeable proportion of the industry unregulated.

To be sure, George withdrawing his support for the Bill would not have delayed its progress through Parliament – Labour had a majority of 179 seats, and party loyalty at the time was very high. What difference did one vote – Bruce George’s vote – make?

In a formal, legal sense not a lot. In another more symbolic sense, though, it would hardly have been an auspicious beginning for the Bill to have one of its main proponents speak out against it.

In the event, however, circumstances prevented this from happening. The approaching 2001 General Election meant that there wasn’t enough time to steer the Bill through Parliament with amendments, such as re-attaching in-house licensing. George was faced with the choice of either supporting the Bill without in-house licensing included or risk losing it altogether. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he chose the latter option.

Three lessons to be learned

What does this fifth and final episode teach us, then? I think it teaches us three important things.

First, that circumstances reaching far beyond the industry have shaped the regulation we have today. Most notably, the 1997 and 2001 General Elections both influenced the course taken by first bringing in a more sympathetic Government and then by cutting short parliamentary debate about the content of the Private Security Industry Act.

Second, forward-thinking people within the industry were fighting to bring about regulation to the very end – without the key last-minute intervention by the BSIA representative in the Lords, for instance, the Bill might never have made it through the Upper House.

Third, compromises were made. In-house licensing was one sacrifice among many that has been made over the 50-year journey to the Private Security Industry Act 2001.

That brings me to the end of my story. What I hope I’ve done is to keep this aspirational and ambitious side of the regulation story alive and fresh in our minds. I hope I’ve given you a sense of some of the people who, over the past 55 years, have struggled, battled and plotted to bring about a system of statutory regulation so as to move the private security industry forward.

To help the industry shake off its negative cowboy image and to become a more professional, more respected, better-paid, higher-skilled and State-regulated sector.

As I said, when we’re drawn into heated debates today about the turnaround time on licence applications or the entry standards to the Approved Contractor Scheme, I think it’s important to remember that these debates are one further episode – a sixth episode – in the long, long story of regulation.