Ali Ahmadi, Catherine Barnard and Fiona Costello argue that a private security operation launched by Essex County Council to ‘reassure’ local residents about the presence of asylum seekers is likely to reinforce the very fears it aims to address and fuel broader community tensions.

In September 2026, Essex County Council (ECC), a Reform UK-run council, launched Operation Vanguard, a private security operation, to ‘reassure’ local residents. According to the Council, the residents are concerned about the daily gatherings of male asylum seekers visiting the towns from nearby Wethersfield Airfield Asylum Accommodation (AAA). Under Operation Vanguard, six private security operatives (two each in Braintree, Chelmsford, and Colchester) are to patrol daily, providing a visible presence in the town centres. The Council says this is a ‘proactive’ measure to deter asylum seekers from committing ‘antisocial behaviour and crime’.

The questions for this blog are: what is Operation Vanguard for? And how will it affect the communities, asylum seekers, and community organisations?

The Wethersfield AAA has housed single, adult male asylum seekers since July 2023. Currently there are 800 beds, but the Home Office announced plans to increase this to the full capacity of 1,245 beds as it closes more asylum ‘hotels’. Wethersfield is operated by Clearsprings – a private asylum accommodation contractor – and monitored by a multi-agency forum which includes Essex County Council and Braintree District Council. The facility is mostly self-sufficient, with on-site healthcare and other provisions, thus limiting pressure on local services. Buses take asylum seekers to the three nearest towns (Braintree, Colchester and Chelmsford) for services not available on site and for doing voluntary work within the community. According to the Council, many residents feel unsafe because of the presence of asylum seekers who often gather in parks and other public places.

There is no evidence that Wethersfield AAA has increased crime in the neighbouring communities. According to the Essex Police, crimes linked to the site are ‘very low’ and that ‘there is absolutely no reason’ for residents to be concerned about crime by asylum seekers. According to Office for National Statistics (ONS), in the year ending March 2026, overall levels of recorded crime in Essex were down, although anti-social behaviour incidents were up. The Essex police said that this spike was due to more accurate recording of such incidents. The figures produced by the Essex police are in line with those from earlier research that, overall, there is no evidence that immigrants are more likely to commit crime than locals.

It therefore seems that Operation Vanguard is there more to address about the threats posed by asylum seekers than the actual reality of crime committed by them. This gap – between perception and reality – is well-documented. Studies and polls show that asylum seekers and refugees are perceived as safety threats in the UK. This perception is strongest among Reform UK supporters. Academic research, more broadly, finds that the perception of threats to personal safety posed by refugees and asylum seekers is commonplace in Europe, Canada, and Australia. The perceived risk correlates more strongly with media coverage, visibility of male groups in public spaces, political messaging and wider anxieties about crime than with actual local crime statistics. Therefore, perceived risk and actual crime are two different things, and Operation Vanguard appears to conflate the two. One local advice charity in the area said that the decision to introduce Operation Vanguard was ‘made with no consultation’.

Operation Vanguard risks building policy on the wrong evidence base. While residents’ fears may be real and should be taken seriously,  adding more ‘security operatives’ in the streets appears to be treating the symptoms without addressing the cause. It may also reinforce stereotypes about and normalise suspicion of asylum seekers. Research shows that negative framing can, in turn, fuel hostile behaviours towards refugees and asylum seekers by the local population.

The initiative may also embolden far-right groups from outside the area to target and harass asylum seekers within the communities. A community organisation providing support to asylum seekers at Wethersfield told us that many protesters and ‘auditors’ – those who film and post videos of asylum seekers, staff, and the site – come from outside the area. These risks have been acknowledged in Essex County Council’s Equality Impact Assessment of the scheme. These risks might also spill over into the wider community: studies confirm that when refugees are framed as a ‘threat’ by the media and policy, the resulting hostilities extend beyond refugees and target broader racial and ethnic minority communities regardless of their citizenship or origin.

A visible security guard presence will also have an impact on asylum seekers themselves. A study of a similar practice in Sweden said that patrolling and policing made asylum seekers feel figures of threat and subjected them to heightened surveillance, control, and exclusion from public spaces. Another study from Finland found that encounters with private security guards made young immigrants from minority backgrounds feel unwelcome and excluded from public spaces, and that everyday interactions were stigmatising,and embarrassing. This is likely to be more consequential for asylum seekers at Wethersfield, where the ‘prison-like’ setting of the site has already contributed to mental health difficulties for asylum seekers. Operation Vanguard may exacerbate these problems because asylum seekers have a sense of being watched and monitored beyond the site. One local support agency told us their clients ‘feel discernibly less safe since the announcement’.

Similarly, the consequences of Operation Vanguard will affect community organisations providing support to asylum seekers in these towns and on the site. Refugee charities have already been facing unprecedented safety threats. Two organisations in Colchester and Braintree have told us that their staff have experienced a sharp increase in harassment, racist comments, and intimidating behaviour from far-right groups. Operation Vanguard may make it harder for these organisations to deliver services and engage safely with their clients in town centres.

To conclude, there is no evidence that the presence of asylum seekers at Wethersfield AAA has increased crime rates across Braintree, Chelmsford or Colchester. Operation Vanguard responds to a real but distinct problem – of lack of safety among some local residents – but, paradoxically, visible private security is likely to reinforce the very fears it aims to address and fuel broader community tensions. A more constructive path would be a transparent communication of local crime data, careful political messaging, inclusive community safety initiatives that do not single out one group, and sustained investment in the local organisations that already help hold communities together. These will address both the risk and the conditions that generate it.

By Ali Ahmadi, Research Associate, University of Cambridge and PhD student at Anglia Ruskin University, Catherine Barnard, Senior Fellow, UK in a Changing Europe & Professor of EU Law and Employment Law, University of Cambridge and Fiona Costello, Assistant Professor, University of Birmingham.