Terrorism: Emergency Communications

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, for giving us an opportunity to discuss these very important issues. Perhaps I should declare an interest: when I was a senior police officer I was trained as a gold commander to deal with the kinds of incidents we are talking about. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, talked about Grenfell and the difficulty of changing the established policy of “stay put” to one of evacuation, and not being able to communicate it. He is right: this technology does exist. It has been discussed, yet no progress seems to be made. Clearly, there are circumstances in which it could be extremely useful. Of course, false reports have resulted in, for example, the Oxford Street stampede—false reports of a shooting took place, as the noble Lord said. Such misinformation being spread can actually come from official sources. I shall come back to that by way of example shortly.

Clearly, there are very serious concerns about the replacement for Airwave, the emergency services network, relying on a commercial 4G network rather than a dedicated emergency service and other public service system. Any reassurance the Minister is able to give on that would be welcome.

The noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, talked about the importance of practising for such emergencies. The noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow, talked about underpreparation for catastrophic events. Certainly, in my time as a gold commander, I spent many a happy weekend with other emergency services, local authorities and even representatives of the media, regularly exercising for these sorts of emergencies. I would be surprised if that does not continue to this day.

On 7 July 2005 I was in my office at Scotland Yard, having a meeting with the health service. My staff officer came in and said there had been a serious incident on the Underground. I thanked her but she insisted on me abandoning the meeting. I went to the first floor of Scotland Yard where a commander was in charge of a public order event at that time. The first information that we were given by London Underground was that there had been a power surge on the Underground. That was misinformation but it was the information that we were given. As I was talking to the commander, the explosion happened on the bus and I said, “Power surges do not happen on buses”, and we realised that we were under terrorist attack.

I agreed with the gold commander that I would do the press conferences for the Metropolitan Police. I went to the press bureau on the 13th floor and agreed with the head of public affairs that that would be the right course of action. We went to see the commissioner in his office. Although the commissioner insisted that he should do the media, I can remember his staff officer coming in and saying, “COBRA says the commissioner is not to do the media”, and the commissioner saying, “Tell COBRA I’m doing it”. Why did COBRA insist on this? Because in the immediate aftermath of such an incident—on 7 July, a series of catastrophic incidents—there is confusion and it is very easy to say, with the authority of the country’s most senior police officer, something that turns out not to be true. The “swift and authoritative voices” that the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, talked about are not always possible to deliver in the immediate aftermath of such incidents.

On that occasion, the information given by the commissioner was that there had been five incidents on the Underground. In fact, there had been three; two had happened midway between two Underground stations and people were evacuating from both ends of the train, making it look as though there had been more incidents than had actually taken place. I say to the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, that actually it was the attempted bombings two weeks later on 21 July when none of the bombs exploded and all the perpetrators managed to flee, rather on 7 July, when all the suicide bombers died.

It is essential that the emergency services are seen to be in control and to speak authoritatively about what has happened. In the initial stages, as a more junior officer, I prefaced everything I said in every press conference I did in the immediate aftermath with “from what we know at this time”. Such an approach means that when the smoke clears, the most senior police officer in the country can be seen as completely trustworthy and the reassurances he or she gives can equally be trusted.

Even a day or so later, what we believed to be the timings of the bombings on the Underground were proved to be wrong. They had actually exploded simultaneously, at a prearranged time agreed by the bombers. One of the bombers did not follow the plan and got off the Underground but when he realised that his fellow bombers had carried out their murders, he detonated his bomb on the bus, with devastating consequences.

I tell this story to emphasise that, while it is important that there is communication with the public to provide advice, guidance, instruction and reassurance, initially and for some time afterwards, it is not always obvious what has happened and therefore the advice, guidance, instruction and reassurance we can give are limited.

In addition to having mechanisms to get messages to the public quickly, it is important that we ensure that the information is accurate. Thankfully, the scenario that we are very wary of—that the initial explosion is perhaps designed to push people into areas where other devices are about to explode—did not happen in the Manchester Arena attack. If there was confusion, as the noble Viscount said, between the fire and rescue service and the other emergency services during the Manchester incident, it showed how important it is that such initial confusion is not communicated erroneously to the public, thereby undermining public confidence in the ability of the emergency services to deal effectively with such outrages and hampering a return to normality, which is the best response we can have to attempts by terrorists to disrupt our way of life.