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Private security groups are poised to play a larger role in a crackdown on UK street crime because of dwindling police resources, one of the largest outsourcing groups has said.
Jason Towse, head of Mitie’s corporate security business, said “conversations have started” with authorities over how the business can work alongside police forces.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper has pledged to recruit 13,000 more neighbourhood officers and “take back our town centres from thugs and thieves”.
Towse said there was an “absolute opportunity” for Mitie and other security businesses amid a “significant gap in relation to the police response to the overall increase in business crime”.
“You’ll hear a lot more about complementary policing,” he told the Financial Times, adding it can take 18 months to vet and train new police officers.
The group had been working “extremely hard to make sure that we’ve installed confidence with [government] departments to be able to support”.
The number of community support officers has more than halved since 2010 as the previous Conservative government cut public spending, although the overall police workforce has recently returned to near pre-austerity levels.
Although the Labour government has raised police funding in England and Wales by £1bn, police officials have warned the increase will not be enough to prevent cuts to services and staff.
Towse added: “Private security and business play a huge part in the Labour government’s commitment to taking back the streets. It’s just a case of everybody continuing to collaborate and accepting that another service may [perform some police duties].”
Private groups, which already run services including prisons, have been called in to assist front line forces during times when police are squeezed.
Mitie guards were deployed last summer to help tackle the anti-immigration riots that broke out across the country. The company said it was called in to help protect 559 mosques during the unrest, helping to boost revenues by 13 per cent to £2.4bn during the six months to September.
A government-commissioned report found last month that police forces had been “unprepared for the scale of the disorder”, and called for plans to improve the capacity to respond to such violence.
“The police can’t mobilise that many people . . . so that’s where Mitie really does add value,” said Towse.
Mitie, which provides security and CCTV monitoring to some of the country’s largest retailers, also said that it had increasingly helped retailers concerned about the police response to shoplifters.
The country’s largest retailers have in recent years warned of rising theft, including by violent organised criminal gangs. But the British Retail Consortium’s most recent survey found that only 36 per cent of incidents of violence and abuse were reported to the police during the year to August 2023, with most businesses stating this was because they did not believe anything would happen.
Towse said that when he worked as a retail security officer over two decades ago, “when you called the police and you needed support, the response was fantastic, you knew that you had this protective layer”.
But he added that “there was a steady withdrawal of policing. [We’ve] seen all the evidence around austerity and that’s what really drove a lot of that.”
Mitie has cashed in on demand from businesses willing to pay for closer security. Since April 2023, the group said it helped the police to identify 433 prolific offenders across the network of stores that it monitors, leading to 545 arrests and prison sentences totalling almost 300 years.
It is anticipating greater private sector involvement in the justice system despite previous controversies, including industry peer G4S’s notorious mishandling of security at the 2012 London Olympics. In 2022, Mitie was also the subject of a Home Office investigation into allegations of racism by staff that helped run the immigration detention facilities that it managed for the government.
The Home Office said “private security plays an important role in protecting businesses and the public” but added that “full training and accountability are needed to carry out the functions of the police”.
The government “will not be using the private sector to meet the increase in 13,000 extra” staff into neighbourhood policing roles, it added.
