A joint investigation published by Al Jazeera English and Liberty Investigates on 20 April 2026 reported that twelve British universities, including Oxford, Imperial College London, UCL, King’s College London and LSE, had paid a private intelligence firm to monitor social media activity and produce threat assessments on students and academics linked to pro-Palestine campus protests. The firm at the centre of the reporting, Horus Security Consultancy Limited, is described in the investigation as run by former military intelligence officials and is alleged to have been paid at least £440,000 by UK universities since 2022, with daily “encampment updates” reportedly sold to subscribing institutions for around £900 a month.
The investigation has prompted statements of concern from the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians, and several student unions. Beyond the political and civil-liberties debate, the story raises a more practical question for every university, college and large campus operator in the country: when do you actually need a private security provider, and what kind of provider should that be?
Two very different industries sit under “security”
The public, and frankly a fair number of procurement teams, tend to treat “security firm” as a single category. It is not. There are two distinct industries here, with different work, different oversight and different legal exposure.
The first is the SIA-licensed private security industry. Under the Private Security Industry Act 2001, designated activities such as manned guarding, door supervision, close protection, cash and valuables in transit, public space CCTV operations, key holding and vehicle immobilising require operatives to hold a Security Industry Authority licence. Every front-line officer is vetted, trained to a published standard and identifiable by their licence number. Firms can voluntarily join the SIA’s Approved Contractor Scheme, which adds a layer of business-level audit.
The second is the private intelligence and investigations sector. Despite a 2013 Home Office announcement that private investigators would be brought into SIA scope, that licensing regime was never implemented. As things stand in 2026, anyone in the UK can describe themselves as an “intelligence consultant” or “investigator” and offer open-source monitoring, background checks or threat assessments without a statutory licence. Some firms in this space are excellent and operate to high professional standards. Others operate with very little external oversight at all. The distinction is not visible from the website.
What the universities reportedly bought
According to the published reporting, the work commissioned from Horus was intelligence work rather than physical security: trawling student social media accounts, compiling daily campus-protest updates, and producing threat assessments on named individuals, including a Palestinian academic invited to give a guest lecture and a PhD student. That is investigations-and-intelligence territory, not the manned-guarding and access-control work that an SIA-licensed firm provides.
The legal and reputational risk profile of those two activities is also very different. SIA-licensed guarding is a tightly scoped, well-understood service backed by a regulator that can revoke licences and prosecute breaches. Social-media monitoring of named students engages data protection law, UK GDPR lawful-basis tests, the Article 8 right to private life, and, in higher education, statutory duties around freedom of speech and academic freedom. The Information Commissioner’s Office and several academic-freedom bodies have already signalled that they will be looking at how this kind of monitoring was justified.
What this means for universities and large campus operators
The Horus story is a useful prompt for any institution to revisit a few practical questions about its own security arrangements.
- Be clear what problem you are buying. Physical safety on campus, event security at graduations and open days, lone-worker protection, lockdown response and access control are SIA-licensed manned-guarding work. Open-source monitoring of named individuals is a different service with different legal weight; commissioning it should sit with your DPO, your legal team and, often, your council, not with estates or facilities alone.
- Check the licence, not just the logo. For any front-line role on your campus, the operative should be able to show a valid SIA licence on request. ACS-approved status at the company level is a useful additional filter.
- Insist on transparency in the contract. What information is collected, how long it is retained, who can access it, and what happens at contract end should be in writing. Vague service descriptions like “intelligence support” are a warning sign.
- Treat counter-terror and safeguarding work with care. Where genuine threats exist, the right first call is usually the police and, where relevant, ProtectUK and the local Counter Terrorism Security Adviser, not a private firm operating outside SIA scope.
- Document the lawful basis. Any processing of student or staff personal data, including from public social media, needs a documented lawful basis under UK GDPR and a privacy notice that students can actually find.
None of this means private security has no place on a UK campus. Universities run residential estates, large public-facing events, libraries open into the night, and high-value research facilities. Properly licensed manned guarding, professional event security and trained close protection for visiting speakers are all legitimate, often necessary, parts of a modern campus security plan. The question raised by the Liberty Investigates reporting is not whether universities should use security firms at all, but whether they always understand which kind of firm they are using, and what that firm is allowed to do on their behalf.
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Our team works with schools, colleges and university estates across London and the UK on SIA-licensed campus guarding, event security, lockdown drills and access control. If you are reviewing your current arrangements in light of the recent reporting, or simply want a second opinion on what your provider is actually delivering, we are happy to talk it through.
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