🚨 Who patrols Britain’s high streets, and who do they answer to? The question is usually asked about the self-appointed anti-migrant “patrols” that have appeared in some towns, their members often dressed in black and masked by balaclavas, with no public mandate and no meaningful oversight. This piece is about something quieter and more official: a Reform-led council paying a private firm to patrol public space in response to concerns about asylum seekers. For almost two centuries the main answer has been the police, a public service answerable, through law and elected oversight, to the public. In Essex, that answer is being rewritten. Since 14 September, private security guards hired by Reform-run Essex County Council have patrolled Braintree, Chelmsford and Colchester under the name Operation Vanguard (no relation to Merseyside Police’s operation of the same name). On a visit to Chelmsford on 15 October, Nigel Farage told the BBC he wanted the scheme “rolled out much more widely”. Farage presents this as a rescue. The police, he claims, “do not fulfil the job, sadly, that they used to”, and Reform councils are right to start “filling that gap”. He has distanced himself from the masked groups: after the masked protests in Dover and Portsmouth in September, he said “Turning up in balaclavas is not the way to do it.” Vanguard is the version he does endorse. His claim about the police deserves testing against the evidence. It is also a policy proposal, and Essex is showing us what it looks like in practice. The patrols are run by My Local Bobby, a private security firm founded in 2016 by former Metropolitan Police officers. It sells subscription “beats”, foot patrols paid for by residents or business districts, largely in affluent parts of London, and its guards are known as “Bobbies”. Its founder and chief executive, David McKelvey, a former Metropolitan Police detective chief inspector, is also chief operating officer of TM Eye, a linked firm that describes itself as the UK’s “leading private prosecutor”. My Local Bobby’s latest accounts show its average number of employees rising from 80 to 140 in the year to November 2025. It is a growing business in a growing market. As a small company, it publishes no profit and loss account, so whether Vanguard makes it money cannot be seen from its public filings. I first wrote about My Local Bobby in May 2018, when it announced plans to go nationwide after patrolling Belgravia, Mayfair and Kensington for subscribers paying up to £200 a month. McKelvey said then that the firm was taking things back to “Dixon of Dock Green-style policing”. I argued at the time that it amounted to a private police force for the “deserving” rich, while the “undeserving” poor could look out for themselves. Eight years on, the model has changed shape. In Essex, the buyer is a council, the money is public, and the patrols were introduced in response to concerns about asylum seekers. Essex gave it the Vanguard contract without competition. The official procurement notice records it as a “below threshold - without competition” award, worth £141,523.20 including VAT, and the council says a cabinet member decision “provided a waiver to enable a direct award”: its usual rules were set aside to hand the contract straight to one firm. It was signed on 11 September, three days before patrols began. There is no suggestion this was unlawful. But it meant a private firm was patrolling three town centres within months of Reform taking control of the county, with no competing bids. The contract says the guards are there partly to “collect evidence if any incident occurs”, yet the only published report of their work records no figure for detentions and nothing on Wethersfield residents. Colchester’s crime and disorder committee has since asked how the firm was procured, and called for the local Community Safety Partnership to be properly involved before any extension. Farage’s case rests on his claim that the police have “given up” on catching shoplifters. The BBC reported that Essex Police officers had secured more than 4,000 shop theft charges over the past year. In September, the force told Byline Times that all three centres “are safe places” with less crime than three years ago, and pointedly added that the most effective approach was a “joined-up” one with partners. The gap Vanguard was bought to fill was, by the council’s own launch report, one of feeling: the question, it said, was “not whether individual people represent a risk” but whether residents feared crime. The national picture does not match Reform’s “Britain is broken” framing either. The Office for National Statistics bulletin published on 22 October found no statistically significant change in overall crime measured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales over the past year, and put it 14% lower than in 2017. Violence is 79% below its 1995 peak, and theft 77% below. Police recorded homicides, knife crime and firearms offences all fell in the year to June 2026, and recorded shoplifting fell 2% after a period of increases. Not everything is improving: fraud rose 11%, and the share of people who said they had experienced or witnessed antisocial behaviour rose from 36.7% to 41.4%. The ONS thinks most of that rise is genuine, though a change in how the question was asked inflated it. Concern about antisocial behaviour is real. But it does not follow that the police have “given up”, still less that private patrols are the answer. Politicians who tell people Britain is broken, and certain news media that amplify that framing, help create the very fear that private patrols are then sold to soothe. Then there is the distance between what residents were promised and what they got. The council’s guidance told the public the guards would have “no enforcement powers and no ability to arrest people”, and that they “cannot act on crimes themselves”. That wording was misleading. The guards have no special power of arrest, but like any member of the public they can make an arrest in the limited circumstances the law allows. Just three days into the trial, two of them did exactly that, detaining two teenage girls suspected of shoplifting in Colchester and handcuffing them. Essex Police recorded two offences of assault without injury against the guards, raised concerns with the firm, and passed “learning” to it. The firm’s chief executive says his staff will keep detaining suspected offenders where justified. Across all the company’s beats, not Vanguard alone, he says they detain between 10 and 40 people a day, a figure that cannot be independently checked. This is where privatisation stops being an abstraction. When a police officer handcuffs a teenager, a framework of accountability follows: codes of practice under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, a statutory complaints system with independent oversight by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, misconduct procedures, a chief constable, and democratic oversight of the force by an elected police and crime commissioner. A private guard is subject to the criminal law, like anyone else, and needs a licence from the Security Industry Authority. But he is not subject to the statutory complaints and misconduct framework that governs police officers, and much of the day-to-day responsibility for supervising and disciplining him rests with his employer. In Colchester, after police recorded two assaults, the Daily Gazette reports that the cases were closed under what Home Office counting rules call Outcome 20: “further action resulting from the crime report will be undertaken by another body or agency other than the police”. In practice, the “learning” went back to the firm. The council’s only published evaluation of Vanguard is a one-page report produced by that same firm and published by the council. It records activity: hours patrolled, reports filed and meetings attended. On the evidence published, it does not show whether crime fell or whether anyone feels safer. These concerns are not confined to the scheme’s political opponents. When private patrols began spreading in Essex a decade ago, the county’s then police and crime commissioner, Nick Alston, warned they had “the potential to create a two-tier policing system”. The Police Federation has described private patrols as a “slow creep” towards exactly that, in which those who can pay get protection others cannot. The chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, while saying he would welcome extra patrols, was blunt about My Local Bobby’s staff: “They are NOT police officers and please do not ever kid yourself that they are.” In 2019 the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead for local policing, Simon Cole, said such firms “should not replace or supplement policing”, and that intervening when a crime is committed is a job for properly trained officers. The police complaints watchdog has previously asked for powers to investigate private contractors carrying out police work. That proposal concerned contractors given police powers. Vanguard’s guards have none. Criminologists have studied this for three decades. In 1996, David Bayley and Clifford Shearing described policing being “pluralised”, as private security moved into work once assumed to belong to the state. Ian Loader asked how plural policing could be governed democratically. Adam Crawford and Stuart Lister, studying private residential patrols, found that such patrols struggled to build the local knowledge and relationships that make policing work, and that the question of who oversees them remained unresolved. One 2004 study of a British community with a commercial patrol, known in the literature as Merryville, found residents giving tacit support to guards targeting particular groups they saw as threats to their “mental comfort”. Set that beside a scheme whose founding report made fear of crime the test, and which the Daily Mail described as guards “hired to monitor asylum seekers”. The council says its guards would not know whether someone was an asylum seeker unless it was “self-declared or self-evident from the circumstances”. What circumstances? Asylum status cannot be seen. The wording leaves open who might be treated as suspicious, and on what basis. Vanguard also matters because of where Reform wants to go nationally. The party has promised a “vast expansion” of stop and search, including “saturation policing”. It has promised a UK Deportation Command to “track down, detain and deport” people in the country illegally, which Reuters described as similar to America’s ICE. Reform’s home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, insists it would not be the same, and says its officers would not be expected to carry weapons. Vanguard is nothing like that agency: its guards have no immigration powers, and a council has no role in immigration enforcement. But it does establish a model: uniformed patrols in public space, delivered by a private contractor, introduced in response to concerns about asylum seekers, and supervised largely by their employer. Whether or not Essex is testing the water, it is showing what the water feels like. None of this is new. Before 1829, London’s patchwork of policing included private thief-takers, paid by results and answerable to almost no one; the most notorious, Jonathan Wild, ran the thieves as well as catching them. The Metropolitan Police were created partly to end that arrangement, on the principle, attributed to Sir Robert Peel, that “the police are the public and the public are the police”. A public body, accountable to the public, patrolling public space. The pressures on neighbourhood policing are real, and people are right to want visible patrols. But there are accountable ways to provide them. Colchester already employs neighbourhood wardens. One of its cabinet members, Martin Goss, said £50,000 could have funded a full-time council warden, with greater legal powers than Vanguard’s guards, for a year. Essex chose instead to pay a private firm, without competition, to address public anxiety through a scheme whose published evaluation does not show whether anyone is safer, or feels it. Farage now wants that model “rolled out much more widely”. Before he does, voters might ask who those patrols answer to, how their effectiveness will be judged, and what safeguards apply when a private guard uses force.

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