The habitual secretiveness of the Home Office is tiresome, writes Mark Rowe.
Reflecting on yesterday at the Aucso university security managers’ association conference, I was struck by the gormlessness and secrecy of the two Home Office speakers during the afternoon discussion about the proposed Protect Duty, better known as Martyn’s Law. One of the Home Office speakers said that the law – published last year as a draft, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill – would not be ‘around preventing’, but preparing (for a terrorist attack). Come off it!
Apart from the final volumes of the Manchester Arena Inquiry, all the transcribed evidence appears not to be online any more. But to turn to the very first page of the preface of volume one, from 2021, the Inquiry chairman Sir John Saunders wrote of putting the events before the suicide bombing of May 22, 2017 under ‘intense scrutiny’, ‘because, without examining what went wrong and why, I could not identify improvements’. Volume one, as Sir John added, was about ‘the missed opportunities for detecting and stopping’ the suicide bomber’. Volume two was about the emergency response; and most recently in March 2023 volume three was about ‘whether the Security Service and Counter Terrorism Police could and should have prevented the attack’, with the sub-title ‘radicalisation and preventability’. In other words, while the inquiry did cover preparations, as it covered innumerable things that had bearing on the attack, the Inquiry was all about asking; how was this allowed to happen?!
The same overwhelming demand to know why lives were lost, will go for (God forbid) the next act of terror in Britain. The world’s media and the anguished bereaved will not ask, how well was the university prepared? Were enough first aid kits around? They will ask above all: why was this not prevented? And if the regulator proceeds on any other basis public opinion will lambast it.
Which brings me onto the habitual secrecy of Home Office officials that was not questioned by the Aucso audience, either out of politeness or because it’s all too taken for granted. Who’ll be the regulator? Mr and Mrs Home Office couldn’t give any details. When might the law come in? Same again; a fobbing off answer, ‘when parliamentary time allows’. Are we to believe that the Home Office has no idea, has given no thought, to who the regulator may be? Presumably it has, and in truth it refuses to give any detail. Because if it did share its thinking, people would have opinions about that, that the Home Office would then have to take into account, or (perish the thought) accept were better than their ideas.
Because the Protect Duty is not only about potentially saving lives from acts of terror. A legal responsibility on hundreds of thousands of premises to protect against terrorism, from theatres and cinemas to shopping centres and concert halls, will affect millions of people over their working lives. Many, or most, of them do not know that yet. For private security, the regulator (the Security Industry Authority? The Health and Safety Executive? The National Protective Security Authority? Or a body formed for the purpose?) will be the biggest deal since the SIA began, 20 years ago. Private security managers and others who will have the Protect Duty on their plate will want this public policy as right as can be.
Or is what the Home Office comes up with impossible to improve upon? Their record is not good (as the Home Office speakers did acknowledge); when their draft Bill went for ‘pre-legislative scrutiny’ last summer, the Home Affairs Select Committee called it not fit for purpose leaving the Home Office with a choice: of going out to consultation (a second time) taking us past four years since then Home Secretary Priti Patel announced the first consultation and a mind to make the Protect Duty; or, members of parliament like the committee members throwing out their first effort, for asking too much of small premises such as parish and church halls (the sort that hosted the most recent terrorist attack, the murder of MP Sir David Amess). Which goes to show that there is no ideal answer; a Duty will require compromise and will not please some. The best, or least worst, public policy arises out of openness.
The words of the journalist Chapman Pincher in his book Too Secret Too Long 40 years ago about the secret services in the Cold War remain true:
Up to and including the 1950s – and continuing beyond – British governments of all colours treated the public, Parliament and the Press with disdain, almost amounting to contempt, concerning those operations of the Government machinery carried out in secret. Contrary to the situation prevailing in the US, where some public right to know is enshrined in the Constitution, British administrations took the view that there was never any requirement to tell their people anything which Whitehall regarded as its secret preserve. No announcements regarding secret matters should ever be made, even when the need for secrecy had totally evaporated. If such matters were ever to become public it should only be through historians riffling through papers released 50, or even 100, years after the events concerned.
Photo by Mark Rowe: the Home Office, Westminster.
