As has been the case for most industry professionals, the ongoing furore surrounding the security of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games has dominated my conversations both in and out of the office.
Rarely does a day go by when I’m not questioned about what I would have done differently and, perhaps more importantly, what lessons should be learned.
Before I start I would like to state that, despite G4S being a direct competitor of Corps Security, I don’t intend to use its current predicament to score points – but I’m not going to try to defend it either.
Having not been party to the decisions that took place it would be unwise and unhelpful for me to add further speculation – the general news media can do that for us. However, we cannot ignore the facts and there are a number of key questions that need to be answered before we can fully understand what went wrong.
Establishment of a syndicated arrangement
In December 2010, G4S was awarded the entire project management contract for London 2012 security. Given the scale of that project, it begs the question as to why a syndicated arrangement wasn’t put in place from the beginning?
Doing so would have allowed a number of companies to operate together in a spirit of co-operation and collaboration in order to meet the security needs of the biggest single event this country has ever witnessed. It was a question I pondered then… and one that I keep coming back to.
Perhaps the answer lies in the perceived ease of only having to deal with one service provider. Originally, G4S was contracted to provide 2,000 Security Industry Authority (SIA)-licensed security personnel, with an additional 8,000 sourced from the Bridging The Gap programme. This scheme offered students the opportunity to undertake door supervisor training, which is part of SIA licensing, followed by Skills for Security’s National Occupational Standards-aligned course.
The students that took part were exempt from any requirement to be Security Industry Authority-licensed under the terms of a Statutory Instrument.
Even though G4S was responsible for role-specific training of Bridging The Gap students once recruited, on that basis could it have fulfilled such a contract? Absolutely! It’s the biggest company of its kind with a global workforce of 657,000 employees and the capability to meet these requirements.
Changing of the guard
This all changed, though, in December 2011 when, for reasons not yet fully explained, G4S was subsequently made responsible for supplying up to 10,400 security officers for the Games – including new recruits, existing employees and subcontractors.
It was also given management responsibility for 735 existing officers at the Olympic Park, up to 3,700 Bridging The Gap programme graduates, 1,000 Wilson James personnel, 5,000 Armed Forces personnel and 3,000 ‘games makers’.
Factor-in incumbent security staff at various other venues and the total number of security personnel G4S would be required to manage was approximately 23,700.
At this point it should have been clear to all concerned that for one company to provide 10,400 personnel was impossible within such a short period of time. This prompts two further questions: Why the sudden leap from 2,000 to 10,400, and why was this decision taken just seven months before the event was due to start?
Had this decision been made a year earlier, it wouldn’t have been a problem. There are about 380,000 Security Industry Authority licence holders in the UK, so to find 10,400 for London 2012 would have been easy enough.
However, for one company to take new industry entrants and put them through four days of training for the SIA licence (along with further training specific to both the Games and their individual tasks) with only a few months until the opening ceremony, it was never going to happen.
Despite this, Home Secretary Theresa May claims that G4S “repeatedly assured” ministers it would “overshoot its targets” for security staffing.
Stronger defence of the realm
Once the true scale of the problem came to light, I was disappointed that G4S chief executive Nick Buckles didn’t do more to defend his company rather than just holding his hands up and declaring the situation “a shambles”.
Although at the Home Affairs Committee hearing Buckles also said that G4S’ reputation lies “in tatters”, the repercussions of this episode stretch much further.
We have all been tainted by the negative publicity it has caused, and we will all have to spend the next couple of years repairing the damage.
Peter Webster is CEO of Corps Security
*This blog originally appears on the dedicated website Corps Thinking
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