Even its more paranoid residents would struggle to describe this place as a hotbed of crime. It is six months since anyone reported a stolen bicycle and, according to official figures, the number of weekly burglaries is 0.9.

Frinton-on-Sea is very prosperous by the standards of this part of the north Essex coast. But most criminals would think twice before thieving in a town wedged between a railway line and the North Sea with just one proper road in or out. Anything out of the ordinary here is swiftly noted, usually with suspicion.

Frinton is famous for refusing to have a pub until the 21st century. When Sainsbury’s opened a modest new store last year, it even faced a campaign against the sign on the front — because it was ‘too orange’.

Hi-viz security: Steve Beardsley (left) and a colleague have been hired to patrol Frinton's streets

On the surface, then, Frinton would not appear to be a town with a great deal to worry about. So why have local residents felt the need to hire an additional, private police force at their own expense?

The answer is not so much to do with crime. It is a symptom of a much deeper malaise which should perplex the political class far more than squabbles about tax credits or Trident missiles. It is the fact that places such as genteel Frinton no longer feel they can rely on the state.

Many people all over the country feel not merely neglected but abandoned by central government. They pay their taxes, as they have always done, but the services which they expect in return — be it health, education or policing — are now in steep decline.

And, while the simplistic Left like to blame it all on ‘Tory cuts’, these citizens know it’s not all about budgets. Instead, it’s about the fashionable causes and warped priorities of a richly rewarded managerial elite versus the expectations of the people they serve.

For example, the public hear the Chief Constable of Surrey saying that her officers may no longer bother chasing car thieves or those who drive away from petrol stations without paying.

They hear the Police Commissioner for Devon and Cornwall say officers may no longer bother investigating some suicides or those who do a runner from a restaurant (in an area dependent on tourism).

They hear the Police Commissioner for Bedfordshire saying — as he did this week — that motorway speed cameras might be recalibrated to extract fines from the tiniest infractions (with no mention of ‘road safety’).

Forgotten: The North Essex seaside town has seen the steady erosion of basic public services

Yet they also know there are plenty of police available to swoop on pensioners who remonstrate with feral youths, or to take sneak photos of celebrities from helicopters, or to round up journalists who talk to whistleblowers and so on. And sympathy is in short supply.

If Frinton was very multi-cultural or very troublesome, there might be grants and pilot schemes and shiny new infrastructure. But it is not.

This is forgotten England: one of those unglamorous, unsexy back-waters where nothing much happens and things just slowly become more and more rubbish every day.

The local GP surgery, for instance, once a partnership of doctors who tended families from cradle to grave, reached crisis point last year after the last permanent GP departed. Patients had to queue round the block at dawn to see a ‘locum’ doctor.

‘It was dreadful,’ says Tony Comber, chairman of the surgery’s patient participation group. ‘If you did manage to get in, these locums would just keep repeating, “You’ve only got ten minutes”, even when my wife was having an epileptic fit right there.’

The surgery has been taken over, in the short-term, by a local employee-owned healthcare provider, with three doctors hired until March and locums filling any gaps. But elderly patients, often with complex problems, yearn for someone who knows their medical needs.

It will be a familiar story to millions, of course, but it simply compounds the sense of neglect in end-of-the-line places such as Frinton.

Not in vogue: Quiet Frinton does not attract the attention of politicians, who prefer more fashionable causes

While other parts of the country look forward to expensive new railways or chunks of motorway, there’s nothing new heading in this direction. No one has mentioned an ‘Eastern powerhouse’.

The street lights go out between midnight and 5am to help the county council save money. The schools are overcrowded.

At the same time, central government is planning 10,000 new homes for the district, with no obvious employment for all the new arrivals, let alone extra health workers or schools.

I meet local councillors Jeff Bray and Richard Everett — both members of the Ukip opposition on the Tory-controlled district council — who say that Whitehall is clueless about the impact it will have.

Mr Bray represents a ward where an outlying village of 750 homes is on course to absorb 1,000 new ones. ‘Where is the infrastructure and who will live in these houses if there isn’t the work here?’ he asks.

To cap it all, local policing is shortly to go through the wringer.

Faced with making £63 million of savings over the next five years, Essex Police is about to cut 15 of its 25 walk-in stations and shed 190 of its 250 police community support officers (PCSOs). The nearest police base to Frinton-on-Sea, in neighbouring Walton, is to be sold.

Morale is nose-diving. While the national average for sick days has fallen to four per year, the rate among Essex Police officers has risen to 13. Among PCSOs it’s 17.5. By the standards of any organisation, it’s a scandal.

‘This is the England that the politicians take for granted,’ says local MP Douglas Carswell, who defected to Ukip from the Tories and is his party’s only MP.

‘These are people who have paid into the system all their lives. Now they find themselves let down by the sheer incompetence of the state and by a political class cocooned in another world, spouting figures handed to them by civil servants.’

It certainly helps to explain why so many people in Frinton have agreed to sign up with local security firm AGS, paying £2 a week in exchange for nightly street patrols.

Some people, though, have derided the idea as a waste of money.

And local politicians from all parties question it, especially since Frinton and Walton already use part of their town hall funding to pay for six extra PCSOs.

This week, at a hot-tempered public meeting in nearby Clacton, the Police Commissioner for Essex, Nick Alston, said he was ‘not a fan’ of the scheme and that it was a ‘surprising’ move given the extra PCSOs.

But, for many, it is simply a small price for reassurance in an uncertain world. Locals know the PCSOs are off-duty for most of the night and, by day, often travel by bus or bike. These private patrols have at least two vehicles going non-stop from dusk to dawn.

‘I’m all for them, especially in a place like this which is a bit out on a limb,’ says local resident Ken, who works for a courier firm.

‘Sometimes, I am on the road at 4am and I like the fact that you see these patrol cars driving around.’

At the Jade Chinese restaurant on Connaught Avenue, owner David Lau says AGS did an excellent job with a violent customer a few weeks ago. ‘They were here in two minutes and sorted it out,’ he says, adding that the police arrived 15 minutes later.

He believes the police are doing their best but fears that planned reforms will only reduce their presence. ‘Without the police, what can we do?’ asks Mr Lau.

A few doors up, Suga Jay, owner of the Premier Convenience Store, praises AGS for tracking a couple of hoodlums who kicked in the door of her shop to steal a six-pack of beer.

Not all agree. ‘I’ve worked in many cities and Frinton is very safe,’ says Will Hopkins, supervisor at the town’s solitary pub, The Lock & Barrel. ‘This is just feeding paranoia.’

As I drive around Frinton with AGS boss Steve Beardsley, it’s clear that many people — especially women — are glad to see his vehicle with its fluorescent police-style livery. There are waves from mothers outside a local primary school. ‘Saw you on the telly last night!’ shouts one, who has seen him on one of umpteen news reports.

At a building site for 13 new flats, Mr Beardsley stops to talk to the foreman who congratulates him. He hasn’t lost so much as a bag of cement since the patrols started.

Local councillor Giles Watling isn’t so impressed, though. The former actor in the TV soap Bread, who was a Tory candidate at the last two parliamentary elections, says: ‘This is a beautiful place where people live very happily. I’m uncomfortable that the role of the police is being taken over by an organisation which smacks of vigilantism.’

However, Mr Beardsley, 50, stresses that crime is low and that he is neither a vigilante nor a quasi-cop. ‘We are certainly not the police, but we work alongside them,’ he explains.

‘Vigilantes take the law into their own hands, whereas we leave that to the police. We are eyes and ears and a deterrent.’

His team of two former soldiers (ex-Guards) and two civilians is licensed by the Security Industry Authority (which answers to the Home Office).

All have first-aid training and are undergoing extra accreditation to join Essex Police’s Community Safety Scheme. This will give them powers such as issuing fixed penalty notices, but there is no question of any powers of detention.

‘At most, we might make a citizen’s arrest, but only until the police turn up,’ says Mr Beardsley, who carries no weaponry beyond a walkie-talkie and a camera. (As a member of the local RNLI lifeboat crew, he also has a bleeper for emergencies at sea.)

A grandfather and former trooper in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, Mr Beardsley saw action against Saddam’s forces during the First Gulf War. After ten years, he left the Army for a career as a bodyguard for a Middle Eastern family and sundry celebrities. He then spent six years organising security on ships in the lawless seas off East Africa.

On one occasion, it really was a case of ‘repel boarders’ when Somali pirates attempted to capture a tanker he was protecting with three other ex-soldiers.

‘We weren’t allowed weapons then. But if a skiff full of pirates came alongside and they saw us up there with razor wire, a bucket of fuel and a flare gun, they would usually disappear. It’s all about deterrent. It’s the same here.’

Having returned home to Essex to set up AGS, he received a contract to protect a £36 million sea-wall construction project along several miles of coast. When the work was completed this year, several locals said they would miss the patrol cars, so Mr Beardsley offered them a permanent service.

Once 300 Frinton households had agreed to pay £2 a week for multiple nightly patrols, he was under way. And it is catching on. This week, a similar service has started in the neighbouring town of Holland.

So what happens if AGS sees something dubious at a house that hasn’t signed up? ‘We look for anything suspicious anywhere and, of course, we’d call the police. It’s the same if anyone’s left a car window open or a side-gate. We just knock on their door and tell them.’

In other words, this is not just about crime: it’s about neighbourliness. Not so long ago, people would have relied on friendly local services or next-door neighbours for this sort of mutual aid.