Olympic Games: Security

Debate between Lord Dannatt and Lord Henley

Monday 16th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, the noble Lord overstates his case, and overstates it rather badly. There is no question of privatising the police force, as he claims, although obviously there are certain parts of police work that can be done by private sector companies. That does not mean we are privatising the police force, which is a separate issue and nothing to do with what is happening here.

We are talking today about the security of the Olympics and different bits of security that will be carried out by different people. As the noble Lord knows perfectly well, private companies are always brought in to provide most of the basic security at any major sporting event in terms of checking bags and checking people as they go in. This is what happens at Wembley, at test matches, at Wimbledon and on many other occasions. The Olympics are no different, except they are bigger.

We entered into a competitive process with a number of companies—G4S won and it has not delivered as it should have done. We have made this clear today and in earlier Statements. We have appropriate contingency plans in place to make sure that if G4S failed in part of its job we could meet our obligations to have an appropriately secure Olympics. That is what we are going to have, so I think the noble Lord going on a rant of this sort is not helpful and does not do any good. We had made sure that we have answered all relevant questions—that is what we hope to do to as well as providing a properly secure Olympics.

[Lord Dannatt]

My Lords, I am sure that the Members of this House want to see a safe and secure Games, and that the last-minute increase in the size of the Armed Forces participation in the security operation will help to guarantee this. It is sad that we have had to have these sharp discussions in advance of the Olympics, attracting negative publicity, but that is life. I am sure the Minister would agree that there should be an investigation after the Games as to how we got into this position. Not wishing to prejudge that, I would like to place it on record, as the Minister did in his Statement, that when the Games were awarded to London in 2005 it was said that they would be civilian-run. However, that defies recent history about very large sporting events such as other Olympic Games. Was it not complacent of the Government of the day not to have planned from the outset for considerable use of the military, which has experience of dealing with large numbers of people and of using a clear chain of command, and might well have prevented the situation that we find ourselves in now?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord for his words, particularly when he says that we should not at this stage be making negative comments about the Games. We want them to be a good set of Games—we want them to be secure, but not to be seen as “the security Games”. I am also grateful for his comments about what happened at earlier stages when we were not in government in terms of the original plans for the Games and how they were set up.

It is quite right that we are making use of contingency plans to bring in extra military service personnel to help out on some aspects of the Games, and that earlier on we brought in an extra 5,000 specialists from the Armed Forces to address security matters that only they could ever have dealt with, as we see from HMS “Ocean”, moored in the Thames, and other things that the private sector obviously cannot produce. We are talking here about providing some extra military personnel to deal with the problems created by the issues that G4S had. I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments.