The Thin Hi-Vis Line

Policing, privatised by stealth… and nobody signed for it.

The civilian police turned me down because I didn’t have a degree. That was the polite version, anyway… a letter that amounted to: thank you for your interest, now kindly go away. So I did what stubborn young men did in those days. I answered a newspaper advert, joined the RAF Police at 26, and found myself on parade next to recruits who had only recently stopped being schoolboys.

Seven-odd years later I bought myself out, and when I tried to go back, Drawdown redundancies had bolted the door behind me. What followed was civilian security management, a career most people fall into the same way I did… sideways at first, and then for decades. I ran operations. I wrote memos people had to sign. And I watched an industry that once guarded warehouses and car parks start doing jobs that used to belong to the police.

So when I say Britain has privatised a large slice of its public safety without ever having the conversation, I’m not repeating something I skimmed over breakfast. I’ve worn most of the uniforms involved. I was simply turned away by the one that was supposed to matter most.

Count the Hi-Vis

Here’s a number that ought to be on the front of every newspaper and somehow never is. As of September 2026, more than 447,500 people in the UK hold a licence from the Security Industry Authority, the regulator for private security. Back in July the SIA counted 506,063 active front-line licences, because tens of thousands of people carry more than one… door supervisor and CCTV, say, stacked like loyalty cards.

Now the other side of the ledger. At the end of March 2026, England and Wales had 145,886 full-time equivalent police officers. A year earlier it was 146,442, and the year before that 147,745. Throw in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and you’re still nowhere close. Private licence holders outnumber sworn officers by well over two to one.

Fair’s fair… a licence isn’t a job. Some holders work the odd weekend on a nightclub door, and some haven’t done a shift in months. Nor is the imbalance brand new; academics were pointing out that private security outnumbered the police in Britain as far back as 1999. What has changed is the direction of travel. In April 2008 the SIA had 234,950 active licence holders. By 2021 it was 375,413. Today it’s close to double the 2008 figure, while police numbers drift gently sideways and down. In the year to March 2026, 9,240 full-time equivalent officers left the 43 forces in England and Wales, and nearly three in ten of those who remain have less than five years’ service.

One line climbs. The other wobbles and dips. Nobody voted on the gap between them.

How We Got Here Without Deciding To

There was no white paper titled Let’s Outsource the Bobby. Nobody stood at a despatch box and announced it. It happened the way most big British changes happen… through a thousand small, sensible-sounding decisions, each one defensible on its own, none of them adding up to anything anyone would have signed off as a whole.

Start with the money. A decade of austerity hollowed out forces, and the recruitment drives that followed mostly refilled what had been lost rather than building anything new. Then add the way we live now. Huge amounts of what feels like public space is actually private property: shopping centres, retail parks, hospital grounds, university campuses, stations, stadiums. The people patrolling them answer to the landlord, not the Chief Constable.

Then the police, stretched thin, started to triage. Shoplifting slid down the list. Back in 2023 the Co-op said officers weren’t turning up to 76% of shop thefts, and its managing director pointed out the obvious problem… when security staff detain someone, and the police never arrive, the thief learns the lesson rather than the shop. By April 2026 the Met’s head of business crime was blaming the post-pandemic prioritisation of violent crime, among other things, for the shoplifting surge. The British Retail Consortium estimates retailers have spent around £5 billion over five years fighting retail crime, guards and body cameras included. The Met, for its part, complains that in four out of five shoplifting cases it never gets the CCTV. Everyone is pointing at everyone else, and meanwhile the hi-vis keeps multiplying.

In places like Clapham Junction, the local Business Improvement District hires its own wardens. Its director has said most of his members don’t even bother reporting shoplifting any more, because they don’t believe anyone will come. Read that again. A whole high street has stopped asking the state to show up, and started paying someone else to.

None of this was a conspiracy. That’s what makes it worse. A conspiracy would at least mean someone had thought it through.

What You Actually Get

Let me be clear about one thing before anyone in a black fleece writes in. The guard isn’t the villain of this piece. I’ve worked alongside security officers who were sharper, braver and more decent than some of the people with warrant cards. Plenty of them are doing a hard job well, at three in the morning, for not much money, with nobody saying thank you.

But look at what the structure gives them to work with. A private security officer has no statutory police powers. None. They have the same power of arrest as you or me, plus whatever rights their employer or the property owner lends them… ask you to leave, refuse you entry, hold you until the police arrive, assuming the police do arrive. Their training for a front-line licence is measured in days. A police officer’s is measured in years.

Then there’s the pay. The National Living Wage went up to £12.71 an hour in April 2026, and the average security guard earns roughly £13.51, or around £14.59 in London. So we are asking people on a few pence above the legal minimum to stand between the public and the worst moments of other people’s lives. When it goes well, nobody notices. When it goes badly, we act surprised.

And accountability? The SIA isn’t idle. In the year to March 2026 it revoked 8,286 licences, suspended 2,164 and refused 1,710. Those numbers cut both ways, mind… they show a regulator doing its job, and they show the size of the job. What there isn’t is anything like the independent complaints system that sits over the police, imperfect as that is. If a guard mistreats you, your recourse runs to their employer, the client, the regulator or the courts. The guard on a shop door answers to a contract, and contracts come with a cancellation clause. The police answer, however grudgingly, to us.

[Space here for a story from your security management years… the moment you first noticed the job creeping beyond the fence line.]

Safety You Can Subscribe To

Here’s where it stops being an industry story and starts being a class story.

In the smarter corners of London, residents club together to hire private patrols for public streets. One journalist who looked into it was told by industry sources that at least 50 such patrols operate in and around the capital, mostly in areas that already have low crime. In Hadley Wood the going rate was about £1,000 per household per year, with a car checking every street hourly, round the clock. The sales pitch one organiser used was disarmingly honest: you already pay for private health and private schools, so why not this?

It isn’t only the posh postcodes. On an estate in Sutton Coldfield, 105 households chipped in £10 a month each for guards after a run of burglaries and car thefts. Some neighbours refused to pay, arguing that the moment residents bought their own protection, the police would quietly abandon them. I can’t say they were wrong.

Think about where that leads. The streets that can pay get the hi-vis and the patrol car. The streets that can’t get a crime reference number and a leaflet. The big supermarket chain hires a guard for every door; the corner shop owner does the maths and puts up a hopeful sign about CCTV. And crime, being a practical sort of enterprise, simply moves next door to whoever didn’t subscribe.

I’ve written before about the middle classes quietly opting out of public infrastructure… the self-built workarounds, the private networks, the private everything. Safety is just the latest service to go that way, and it’s arguably the most dangerous one. A two-tier NHS is a scandal. A two-tier right to walk home without being robbed is something older and uglier than that.

Nobody Signed the Memo

In my civilian security days, they called me Mr Memo. Every significant change went out in writing, and every manager signed to say they’d read it. People rolled their eyes. Then, years later, directors would come looking for those very memos, because when something went wrong, the signature proved someone had been told and someone had agreed.

That’s what’s missing here. Britain has restructured who keeps it safe, and there is no memo. No signature. No moment where a government said out loud: we are going to let private firms do a growing share of this, here are the rules, here is who you complain to, and here is how we’ll stop safety becoming something you buy. Instead, the law keeps adding duties for the private side to carry. Martyn’s Law is now on the statute book, handing venues fresh responsibilities for terrorism preparedness, and you can guess who’ll be standing at those doors.

I’m not going to pretend I have a neat answer. Maybe a mixed economy of safety is simply where every modern country ends up, and the honest thing is to regulate it properly and pay people decently. Maybe the police should be rebuilt until the private patrols in Hadley Wood have nothing to sell. Maybe both. What I am sure of is that we should be deciding, rather than drifting.

Up here on my hillside in Spain, safety is mostly a matter of who knows whom and who notices what. It’s old-fashioned, and it works because everyone is covered by the same arrangement. That’s the bit Britain seems to have mislaid. Not the officers, not the budgets… the idea that protection is something we hold in common.

The civilian police didn’t want me without a degree. These days, it seems, they’d settle for a contract. I just wish someone had asked the rest of us to sign for it.

Until Next Time