Agents of Decay
For the last few months I have been working on ideas to strengthen Bedford’s local economy. It follows three years of continual investment and grants: building a football club from the grass up, launching an annual conference that fills every hotel and brings customers to our shops and restaurants, buying and growing businesses, and launching a fund that channels profits back into the town. I set up hardship funds so no child misses out on playing football; I took over and rebuilt the senior women’s team and secured equal facilities; I created and run a conference whose profits go to talented young people with the Bedford Future Fund; and we have given tens of thousands in youth football grants and a recent £25,000 schools fund for equipment.
These are not humblebrags. I don’t need or want a pat on the back. They are evidence, not of moral superiority, but of intent and of results. When you create activity such as football matches, conferences, customers, you fight decline and build opportunity.
So when an initiative to pilot private security in the town centre drew a wave of criticism, it was not only surprising; it revealed a class of people I have come to call, painfully and precisely, the Agents of Decay.
From Observation to Plan
My approach is informed by research, from Jane Jacobs’ insights on vibrant streets to the practical lessons of Broken Windows policing in New York. I wrote a manifesto for Bedford with a five-point plan to ensure safety, clean up public spaces, invest in infrastructure, nurture entrepreneurship, and foster civic pride. A pragmatic sequence to cut out the decay.
The project necessarily began with safety and security. What I want is simple: that crime and anti-social behaviour is not allowed to blight the lives of shoppers, residents, and business owners; that criminals are not free to make life in Bedford a daily misery; that children are not forced to watch people injecting drugs in car parks; that our public spaces are not owned by those who are intoxicated, fighting, vomiting, having sex, or harassing people. I did not realise that insisting on these basic standards of civic life would be considered controversial.
I spoke to victims, shoppers who now avoid High Street, small business owners who have lost trade, residents afraid to walk their children into town.
With the decay evident and in the absence of sufficient police resource, we took the only responsible step available: a private security pilot, working within the law, integrated with police and CCTV, enforcing the PSPO order and protecting our shared spaces.
The Agents of Decay — what they are and what they do
The critics, some councillors, activists, online commentators, oppose the pilot with predictable arguments. They say, “The police should handle it,” but with limited resources, waiting for a response means accepting decline. They claim we’re “cruel to the vulnerable,” yet allowing public drug use where children see it doesn’t help anyone, it entrenches misery. They label private security “paramilitary,” despite its legal integration with police. They suggest it’s “vanity,” but safer streets and thriving businesses benefit everyone, not just me.
I’ve invited critics to walk with me, meet shopkeepers who’ve lost trade, or hear from residents avoiding High Street. All have declined.
Empathy may come from a good place, but when it weaponises compassion into paralysis it becomes destructive, abandoning the real victims, and ensuring the cycle of decay continues.
Collapsing Arguments
They have a handful of standard objections. Each one sounds principled until you translate it into consequences.
“The police should do it.” This is not an argument, it is a demand for perfect institutional capacity. When resources do not exist, ideology that insists on waiting for an idealised state response is an effective abdication.
“You’re being cruel to vulnerable people.” Compassion without consequence is complicity. Allowing public drug use to flourish where children see it turns them, the most vulnerable people we should protect, into victims.
“Private security is paramilitary/privatisation.” Despite regularly explaining that these are professional, trained and licensed security, they give them names such as a militia or a paramilitary. This is an insult to hard-working people, putting themself in dangers way to fill a hole left by the police: through enforcing the PSPO, by reporting crime, by supporting CCTV evidence. The alternative is lawlessness.
“You’re doing this for vanity.” If results means safer streets, reopened businesses, families returning to town is “PR,” then we should want more of it. But it isn’t a vanity project, I’d much rather not be spending this money and focused on growing my businesses.
“What if the security make a mistake?” This backwards focus imagines a hypothetical error from a team who, two months in, have not had a single report against their conduct, while giving a free pass to the dozens of very real, very serious incidents happening in the town every single day. To obsess over a potential misstep while ignoring the constant damage done to residents, businesses, and families is not accountability; it is wilful blindness.
An Olive Branch to the Agents of Decay
Yet I want to be clear: this does not have to be a war. I agree with my critics on one essential point, we must help and support those with addictions, which is why I have committed to support SOS by paying their first year of rent and bills so they can expand into a proper facility. But here is the reality: I cannot do it all. I cannot build treatment facilities, I cannot provide housing stock, I cannot run full-time recovery programmes.
So here is my offer, again: join us. If you care so deeply about the vulnerable, give up your evenings, walk the streets with us, sit with addicts, bring your proposals, your networks, your time. Don’t just signal your virtue on Facebook. Convert it into work. Show up. If you truly care, the door is open and the people you claim to care for are waiting.
The Choice Before Us
I want to be as clear as possible. I am not going to stop. I am going to prioritise civil society in Bedford, but if people want to join us the door is always open and funding is available. Those who have visited me know this is true.
We have a responsibility to our children, to families, and to the hard-working business owners whose livelihoods are being eroded. We can ritualise morality from the safety of social media, or we can choose to do the hard thing: enforce order where it matters, create safe spaces, and then use those spaces to incubate culture and business.
If you wish to oppose, you can come physically and take responsibility for the consequences of your opposition. Until you do, your moral posturing are not progressive acts, they are the slow, dull work of rot.
Bedford deserves better. The council is close to bankrupt. The police does not have the funds. We can’t wait, civil society must act. It needs shopfronts with customers.
If you love this town, you will either help or step aside. If you prefer the theatrics of angry virtue to the unglamorous labour of civic work, then the town will pass you by and you will be remembered, if at all, as an agent of decay.
