Private Eye on the Failure of Private Law Enforcement Firms

One of the ideas floated by the Tories under John Major way back in about 1992-3 or so was that law enforcement should be privatised. Instead of the police patrolling our neighbourhoods to protect us from crime, citizens should be free to hire private security firms to do the same. It’s an idea they nicked from the American Libertarians, though unlike Rothbard, the author of the idea, they didn’t go as far as recommending the privatisation of the courts. The Mail on Sunday ran an article promoting this and other Neo-Lib Tory ideas in their issue that winter.

In their issue 9th – 22nd December 2005, Private Eye ran an article on how one Private Law enforcement firm, had not lived up to the hype, and had spectacularly failed to catch many criminals.

Private Equity
Drake’s Progress

The woeful performance of private law enforcement firms has been exposed once again in a Norwich courtroom.

The Eastern Daily Press recently reported how the firm paid to enforce arrest warrants on people failing to serve community punishment orders managed to catch on 31 out of 260 offenders over the summer, while its success rate before then wasn’t much better.

The company responsible, Drakes (“total civil enforcement and debt recovery solutions”), is one of a breed of companies operating in the criminal justice system that are part of the secretive and avaricious private equity industry. it is part of the Bridgman group that says that it is owned by funds managed by an outfit called Gresham, including the mysterious South Place Zurich Partnership 2002, none of which supply accounts.

Bridgman gets nearly all its funding in the form of loans totalling £10m from anonymous creditors at inflated interest rates, a standard feature of the private equity industry that allows financiers to strip out profits asap and often leads to the kind of cost-cutting that makes chasing offenders look distinctly uneconomical.

Gresham is unabashed about its approach, boasting of its “strategy for exit to deliver maximum value to all investors”. So the uncooperative small-time crooks of East Anglia might soon be somebody else’s problem, but not before the private equity funds have got away with a few quid.

Many of the care homes that collapsed a few years ago, or were so disastrously run that the inmates were abused and neglected, were also owned or managed by these private equity firms. It’s clear that these firms can’t manage services, as they’re simply not interested in them, except as a source of profit.

Tags: 2002, Bridgman Group, Care Homes, Conservatives, Debt Collection, Drakes, Eastern Daily Press, Gresham, John Major, Mail on Sunday, Neo-Liberalism, Norwich, Police, Private Equity Companies, Private Law Enforcement, Rothbard, South Place Zurich Partnership