Olympic Games: Security

Baroness Billingham Excerpts

Monday 16th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I can give my noble friend an assurance that everyone doing a job involving security will have adequate training and we shall make sure that people who do not have adequate training will not be accredited.

Regarding whether the G4S contract will be published, that might be a matter for both parties to consider after the event, so let us leave it until then. It might be that G4S wishes to publish it, or that some sort of post-mortem, as my noble friend is suggesting, might be appropriate after these Games. I do not think it is proper that we should create fears that are not necessarily there at this stage.

[Baroness Billingham]

My Lords, we are where we are, and I entirely agree with the Minister that this is not the time for looking retrospectively and trying to find out what happened. However, the fact of the matter is that every week, every day and almost every hour we hear things that are completely disconcerting to the general public and to the people who are going to be involved in the Games, both participants and spectators. The role of the Government should always be the safety of those people and it has to be their priority. I am sure that the more the general public read, the more they are losing confidence and faith in what the Home Secretary has been doing. Heaven knows how we got ourselves into this predicament. I do not want to put it too worryingly, but it looks as if we are almost in a national security crisis and I want to know how bad it has got to be before the Minister does something about that. Every single thing that we have heard today indicates that the security we have always promised to the people coming to watch these Games is not going to be in place. So what is the Minister’s next move—we want to know?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, again, I suspect that the noble Baroness is exaggerating by saying that every day there is some new problem. There were problems last week and over the weekend there were further press reports that have now been dealt with by my right honourable friend in her Answer, where she made it quite clear that most of them are completely untrue. Although I appreciate that not many have been doing it in this House, when I listened to the debate in another place there was a great deal of unnecessary point-scoring on questions of security. It is very dangerous of the party opposite. I can assure the House that we take security as the absolute top priority but we do not want to turn these Games into the security Games. We want to ensure that there is appropriate protection of individuals, and that will happen. That is why we have reacted as we did and why we set up the contingency plans that we have. They have come into effect as a result of the failures of G4S.