The Coalition Government will most probably not act on private investigators while the Leveson inquiry is also looking into the News of the World phone hacking scandal, and the links between the press, private investigators, the police and politics. The very fact that PIs (and consultants) have not been regulated as the 2001 Act requires, though contract guards, and doormen were, shows how politically and practically tricky it would be.
Bill Butler, chief executive of the SIA, and the Lib Dem MP and Home Office minister in charge of the SIA, Lynne Featherstone, were among those questioned by the committee on May 22. Bill Butler told the committee that PIs should be regulated. He stressed the need for a definition of what would be licensable. As he said, at the SIA and at his previous regulator, the Gambling Commission, he has people working for him as investigators, who were previously police officers. Lynne Featherstone said that the Government could act ‘relatively quickly’ after Leveson finished in October, though bringing in the badge – and training necessary to apply – could take two years, she suggested: ‘providing all goes to plan, it will be in before 2015’, namely the next general election. On the committee’s call for a gap of a year before a former police officer becomes a PI, Featherstone said that the ‘most important thing is that there is no inappropriate behaviour’.
As featured in the April issue of Professional Security, the committee has taken written and spoken evidence from around the PI sector, from industry bodies – the ABI, IPI, WAPI – and some of the big names in investigation services, such as Kroll, G4S, Risk Advisory Group and Control Risks. As the written evidence (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmhaff/100/100vw.pdf) sets out, to be robust regulation would have to train PIs, and make them abide by a code of standards, and define the PI’s work. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners for example suggested to the committee that ‘investigatory activity’ be licensed, rather than simply PIs. Yet the PI sector is an ‘iceberg’ – the visible well-known names, and the unseen one man bands, often ex-police (up to 65 per cent of PIs, according to the committee’s report) or ex-military, running their own businesses, hard for the authorities to reach.
The problem? PIs are seen as the ‘go to’ people if lawyers, insurance companies or debt-chasers want to find people – or their bank account details or medical history – not readily findable. As one, ex-police, corporate investigator, Duncan Mee of Cerberus, told the commitee in written evidence, his company protects clients’ intellectual property rights – working for law firms – by monitoring auctions, making trap purchases, and gathering intelligence.
As past ABI president Richard Newman wrote to the committee: “There is a whole world of difference between an ethical “private investigator” and someone who obtains information from anywhere, for anyone, at a price.” In other words, an information broker. Richard Newman, among others in the PI sector, have queried whether PIs are any more of a corruption risk than public servants such as the police – a trade in personal information by definition needing some insider to access the valuable data, at a price to the procurer. In written evidence the GMB union, recalling a database of blacklisted workers run for building companies, claimed there was a ‘murky and porous border between the police and private investigators’. (Could not the source be prosecuted under the new Bribery Act?). Likewise, the committee report claimed there was ‘an unacknowledged, but deep-rooted intertwining of a private and unregulated [investigations] industry with our police’. As Professional Security reported in November, the SIA minuted last year that it would have rolled out PI licensing by late 2011, but for the 2010 election bringing in the Coalition that soon brought the future of the SIA into doubt and blocked any more sectors being regulated.
Among insights into the PI sector in the committee report – PI fees vary greatly from £250 a day charged by sole operatives, to thousands of pounds for senior investigators, or hard jobs.
As the committee report admitted, PIs do valuable work – such as detecting insurance fraud – and such business crime work is only likely to rise due to police budget cuts.
