The Commonwealth Games 2026 – and the entire Commonwealth movement – are in trouble, writes Mark Rowe.
Most obviously the next Games is in jeopardy because, with a couple of years to go, it has no host; and the clock is ticking. Big projects typically over-run (how is HS2 doing?!). But a sporting event cannot push back its date a week or month (the exception to the rule is the Tokyo Olympics, held a year later due to the covid pandemic) – athletes prepare to a peak, the broadcasters, advertisers and spectators make their plans; stadia are built, and locked down in the days before, all to timetables. The previous host, Birmingham, picked up the 2022 Games with four years to go after Durban in South Africa pulled out; and as Professional Security Magazine reported afterwards, having four years to prepare the security and more generally was a struggle. As a rule of thumb, such big rolling events as the Olympics or Glastonbury (or your town’s annual fete) start the planning for the next, more or less as soon as the doors close on one. The Commonwealth Games organisers already have had a year to find a new 2026 host; soon it will be impossible, or prohibitively expensive, to pull a Games off from scratch.
Could Glasgow, host in 2014, do another, as mooted? The idea is that the city’s authorities could do one cheaper than 2014’s. I am sceptical, having walked through an office in Glasgow city centre that security and other Games managers were using. The furniture was obviously second hand and as for how cramped the workers all were, let’s just say cat-swinging opportunities were few.
Security at Games is always a big cost and always over-runs, commentators say; with an implied reproach – how dare Security come in the way of all the fun, and competition! Security management does feel the injustice of the implication that it’s a ‘cost centre’, part of a project only grudgingly. The guarding of the week or two of events is only part of what’s necessary; no-one is watching when the venues have to be protected afterwards, until they’re handed over to the previous or new users – without embarrassment or worse of climate change protesters, squatters or graffiti artists trespassing. At least days before, sites need locking down, and anyone coming in – all the delivery trucks – need searching. Organisers can budget quite precisely for the amount of perimeter fencing needed (pictured: Glasgow 2014), and guards on gates; except that fencing and other suppliers will always raise their prices – where else are the Games organisers going to turn, especially as the clock ticks down – and (as at Birmingham 2022) security workforces will want higher pay (and will ‘walk’, for other jobs paying more, if not satisfied, meaning someone has to pay to hire again). Hence over-runs are so common, quite apart from if the UK official terror threat levels rise.
If not Glasgow, where? Only a handful of cities could claim to have the physical infrastructure, means or ambition. Edinburgh, London, Manchester (in 2002) and Cardiff already have. To rank that short list in terms of number of SIA licence holders, as of August 2024 according to the Security Industry Authority’s figures, Edinburgh is 24th (with 3252 of the UK’s 440,000). London, naturally, has most; then Manchester and Birmingham. Fourth and fifth are ‘Slough and Heathrow’; and Luton (presumably both as a result of the airports); then Glasgow. Other potential Games hosts, Liverpool and Newcastle, are eighth and 13th; Sheffield, tenth, Leeds eleventh, and Bradford seventh. If you add those three Yorkshire neighbours’ SIA-badged together, their total of 18,120 licence holders would make them fifth nationally, suggesting potential for a joint bid; which would take some arranging at any stage, let alone as late as this.
Quite apart from private security capacity, what of the police? As reported in Professional Security last year after Birmingham 2022, the one who owns the security risk and signs off on it is the local chief constable. London is the obvious place in the UK for any Games; Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley told the June meeting of the London Assembly’s policing board that his force had a £400m ‘gap’ in its budget of over £4 billion; a gap that was not going away in the next few years. Police, given all that’s on their plate, will not clamour for the chance to host a Commonwealth Games.
Glasgow 2026 might have the worst of both worlds – too soon after 2014 to attract a paying audience to a once in a generation event; too late to draw on knowledge. Police move on in task or move up in rank even faster than private security people – although the stewarding company Showsec can point with some pride to their continuity in management, even they would struggle to have institutional memory of when they stewarded the Manchester 2002 Games. Besides, threats change. In Glasgow 2014, the acts or terrorism still in mind were 7-7, and more locally the airport attempted car-bomb attack of 2007; the marauding knife attacks of Borough Market and Westminster Bridge in 2017 had yet to occur.
Why bother to host? For all the talk (as after London 2012) about ‘legacy’, locals seem to be unable to say what good the Games brings; far from all even attend to have memories. For a region’s security guarding companies, a Games can be a source of work – well beyond the week or two of athletes and world attention; and even if guard firms don’t win actual Games contracts, related work will be around, for those jumping on the Games bandwagon. The clock, meanwhile, is ticking.
