🚨 Reform UK’s Operation Vanguard: an update Last week I wrote that Nigel Farage’s claim that Operation Vanguard had been “a huge success” rested on anecdote (see below). Since then, more has come out, much of it from Essex Police and the council’s own documents. First, the numbers. The Reform-led council’s only published evaluation is a one-page month one report written by My Local Bobby itself. It records 106 “significant incidents or interventions” in four weeks, including 33 antisocial behaviour interventions, 21 retail theft incidents and 12 safeguarding or welfare responses. (The BBC reported 172, from figures supplied by the council. That is exactly the 106 plus three of the report’s own subcategories, which suggests some incidents were counted twice.) The report does not mention 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”. So a scheme launched over “groups of male migrants being bussed from the Wethersfield asylum accommodation” does not record whether Wethersfield’s residents feature in anything it deals with. Its performance measures are hours patrolled, reports filed and meetings attended. It records no figure for detentions or use of force, and nothing on whether anyone feels safer. Second, an incident that stayed out of public view for over a month. The patrols are run by My Local Bobby, a London-based private security firm founded by former Metropolitan Police officers, which the council contracted without competition, for £141,523 including VAT. On 17 September, three days after patrols began, two of its guards carried out a citizen’s arrest on two teenage girls suspected of shoplifting in Colchester High Street, and handcuffed them. Neither girl was injured. Essex Police recorded shop theft offences, finalised according to the retailer’s wishes because all the property was recovered, and the girls were not charged. Police also recorded two offences of assault without injury against the two guards. They raised concerns with the firm about how the detentions were carried out, and passed on “learning”. The guards were not interviewed or charged. The Daily Gazette reports that police applied Outcome 20, under which further action falls to a body other than the police. The incident became public only on 20 October, when Labour councillor Tim Young raised it at a Colchester City Council committee meeting. So offences were recorded on both sides, and nobody on either side was charged. Look at how each side has been described. Essex County Council’s deputy leader, Russell Quirk, told the meeting the girls “were deemed as criminals”, and called them “prolific shoplifters”, a claim for which, the BBC notes, no evidence was presented. The council, meanwhile, told the BBC that “no crime was committed by MLB operatives”. Teun van Dijk calls this the ideological square: emphasise the wrongdoing of “them”, play down the wrongdoing of “us”. Two teenagers become criminals. Two guards with recorded assault offences against them become blameless. My Local Bobby’s chief executive, David McKelvey, largely rejects the criticism. He told the Gazette the firm does not accept that the detention was disproportionate, citing the recovered property and concerns that the girls might abscond, though he accepted “there were learning points regarding the technique used”. He says the firm has had no formal complaint about force or handcuffs in six years, and that the investigation was not prompted by the girls, the retailer or the public, but came from Essex Police. He adds that “the fact that no further police action resulted highlights this”. It does not. No one was charged, but police reviewed the incident, recorded two assaults against his staff, and closed them with a crime outcome. By his own account, no one had complained, and police recorded the offences anyway. This raises a wider concern. Critics have long described firms like My Local Bobby, which sell subscription street patrols, as privatisation of policing by stealth. Vanguard brings that model onto public high streets, paid for by a council and awarded without competition. Residents were told the guards would have “no ability to arrest people” and “cannot act on crimes themselves”. That was never quite true: like any member of the public, they can make a citizen’s arrest. Within three days, two of them had done exactly that, and handcuffed two teenagers, and their employer says such detentions will continue. A police officer who handcuffs a teenager answers to codes of practice, a statutory complaints system and an elected police and crime commissioner. Here, after police recorded two assaults, the “learning” went back to the guards’ own employer, which then publicly defended them, and whose own report to the council does not count detentions at all. Farage says the police “do not fulfil the job” and wants councils “filling that gap”. Colchester has shown what filling it looks like: patrols with a citizen’s powers, but without public accountability. None of this should surprise anyone who read the council’s launch report, as Byline Times did in September. The report stated that the question was “not whether individual people represent a risk” but whether the arrivals created “a significant fear of crime”, and it relied on “anecdotal evidence” to show that they did. Essex Police said the three centres “are safe places” with less crime than three years ago. The council did not dispute that, replying: “Whatever others say, people are saying that they do not feel safe.” The same report required the guards to be “visible without intruding upon anyone’s lawful activities”. Its Equality Impact Assessment warned that if publicity was badly handled, asylum seekers could feel targeted and become “vulnerable to attacks from other members of the public”. Reform politicians then promoted the scheme with talk of “illegal migrants”, from a cabinet member’s posts to Farage’s claim that Labour “dumped” them on Essex. Even the Daily Mail described the guards as “hired to monitor asylum seekers”, the very purpose the council promised Vanguard would not have. Vanguard was sold as reassurance for residents, “particularly among women and girls”. Its first notable recorded incident ended with two teenage girls in handcuffs and police recording two assaults against the guards. Four weeks later, Farage walked Chelmsford High Street with the patrols and called their work “a fantastic job”. Really? The threat the scheme was built around remains unmeasured, and police say the risk is low. What has been measured came from the patrols themselves. A Reform-led council, with no power over asylum, bought the look of control from a private firm, and so far the most prominent documented result is two teenage girls in handcuffs and a recorded police outcome against the people it hired. If this is the model Farage wants “rolled out much more widely”, voters should ask who these patrols are aimed at, what they cost and who profits, how effective they are, and who they answer to.