It’s one thing to protect a place as sensitive and yet public as the Houses of Parliament; making it yet more difficult is that the protectors have to satisfy the users; in the case of Parliament peers and MPs who are jealous of their conditions and privileges, as a file at the National Archives at Kew shows.
The file Prem 16/1038 includes a review (marked ‘secret’, pictured) of security by a former Met Police deputy commissioner, Sir James Starritt. Then a committee of peers and MPs appointed in October 1975 reported about it to the House of Commons Speaker Sir Selwyn Lloyd, and his equivalent in the House of Lords, the Earl of Listowel. Among Starritt’s recommendations was a standing joint committee (for the Lords and Commons) on security; instead, parliamentarians decided on a merely informal one. Instead of a security coordinator (two had been employed since 1970, paid for by the Met, and whose role Starritt described as ‘advisory only’) Starritt proposed a head of security, who ought to be a police officer with the rank of chief superintendent. The security service of the Palace of Westminster ought to have wider powers of search, he wrote; although that was sure to be controversial given parliamentary privilege. Besides police, civilian ‘custodians’ covered the Palace; they came under the Department of the Environment; and, Starritt noted, received no formal training.
As a result, cooperation between custodians and the police was, as Starritt put it carefully, ‘at times reluctant’. He was proposing that the police would take responsibility for recruiting and training the custodians. According to Sir Robert Mark, the reforming Met Police Commissioner, the police at Westminster ‘have perhaps tended to live a separate existence away from the world of real policing’. He proposed regular rotation of the police there (as has happened after the murderer of Sarah Everard in 2021 came from the armed police there).
As so often, a development in a site’s security came after an incident – in the case of Parliament, a security coordinator, a former Chief Supt Gilbert, was appointed months after a CS gas discharge in the House of Commons in July 1970, by a visitor to the overhead gallery. The committee looking into Starritt’s report saw possible confusion over who would be in charge of a head of security. Would it be the police; or Parliament’s own, historic, officers, Black Road and the Serjeant at Arms? As a sign of a lack of coordination, custodians had personal radio sets, linked to a central security control room, while police had their own radio network, outside the Palace, and communicated with the custodians largely by telephone. Starritt recommended a common comms system.
Then as now, Parliament was a focus for protest, that Starritt termed ‘mass lobbies’. Police from Sir Robert Mark down gave evidence about how unsettling it was that some (unspecified) MPs encouraged constituents and other visitors to break the system of queueing for admission. Meanwhile the Serjeant at Arms (in charge of House of Commons running) admitted he was unhappy about the security of its outbuildings.
Starritt’s report amounted to 70 pages. He set out how the Serjeant at Arms (in the Commons) and the Lord Great Chamberlain (in the Lords) shared control of the Palace over the week, until 1965, when the Queen announced control was vested in the Speaker of the House of Commons, and the Lords’ equivalent. As for the uniformed presences, by Starritt’s time, custodians outnumbered the police who had been on duty since the earliest days of the Met Police in the 1830s. Starritt recalled a 1969 review by the Met’s crime prevention Chief Supt Marshall, about the safeguarding of parliamentary property, that noted that the police and custodians had three masters. The Lord Great Chamberlain was responsible for such areas as the Crypt Chapel (used for weddings and christenings) and Westminster Hall. Geographically, the Palace of Westminster (so called because once it was a royal palace) was ten and a half acres, beside the Thames; it had 1100 rooms and two miles of passages, 21 lifts and 100 staircases.
Photo-ID
Photo-passes had come in (almost 6000 in use). they had coloured backgrounds to show types of holder, such as journalists. Because a pass holder tended to use the same entrance, and the same member of the security force manned the posts, ‘a recognition of a person …. is a more reliable check than any pass’, Starritt noted. Every Monday about 200 day passes were issued for new employees; they entered and left by Chancellor’s Gate, and had their bags searched in the pass office. Then the new staff were given a pass on the second day of employment, and were not searched afterwards. On a normal day when Parliament was in session, an average of about 1450 members of the public entered after 2.30pm. That might rise to 2400 on big occasions such as Budget Day; per hour that meant 650-plus incoming. On an average day, 475 vehicles came through Chancellor’s Gate; and more through other dates into the underground car park. Police guarded the entrances, while custodians supplemented the police and patrolled and were partly employed on house-keeping. Besides, Black Rod and the Serjeant at Arms recruited door keepers; and the Royal British Legion Attendants Company (which later became the guarding firm Legion Security) provided for the Serjeant at Arms eight House of Commons car park attendants.
Significantly, unlike earlier security reviews, and as a sign of new threats in the 1970s, Starritt stressed terrorism, whether via a package in the post or a car bomb (which did occur in 1979 when an Irish republican bomb killed senior Conservative MP Airey Neave in the underground car park). Starritt pointed out a threat to ‘good order’ could also come from a ‘really plausible hoax bomb alert’, which would result in evacuation of the chambers, or other parts of the building; ‘an equally effective method of interrupting the business of Parliament’.
A point of Starritt’s was of wider application, in time and place; in a democracy, he accepted that total security was ‘unattainable …. and the basic problem is therefore how to provide the necessary degree of security without seriously impeding democratic rights’. Starritt repeated the need for ‘compromise’, between free access and total security. He had evidently surveyed the site; he noted accumulated stores, such as a stack of chairs in a corridor of Westminster Hall, that could hide a bomb. As a way of detailing how protection measures might have to be accepted ‘as unwelcome restrictions’, Starritt went through the categories of who entered the precincts, in terms of risk. According to Starritt, checking the credentials of everyone that presented themselves at the Palace, such as those with an appointment, was ‘impracticable and undesirable’. As for what tech was around to help, for the showing of proof of identity Starritt wrote of a Cardkey system of inserting a pass into a machine. But a pass without a photograph (to confirm the holder was who was supposed to use the card) could be abused, he added. The Palace issued photo-ID using a Polaroid product. The photo measured 3cm by 3cm on a card 7cm by 4.5cm, in a heat-sealed plastic envelope and showing the Palace insignia, name, title and signature of the holder. Starritt admitted disadvantages; such ID passes were in use in countless other places; and the miniature photo sometimes didn’t look much like the genuine holder. But, the regular security staff soon learned to admit the ‘person rather than the pass’. Starritt suggested that a pass ought to be renewed with photo every five years.
Starritt proposed detection of explosives and firearms at the perimeter access points other than those used by ID pass holders, despite the ‘inevitable’ delay. He stated that ‘a great deal of sophisticated and reliable equipment is now available commercially for detecting metal and vapour from explosives’, as used at airports. Starritt suggested a throughput was possible of at least six people a minute. As the site had a peak of 950 visitors an hour, that would require three checkpoints.
Starritt considered a bomb- and bullet-proof screen between the front of the galleries and the House of Commons chamber roof (as was fitted in 2004 due to security concerns over protest about the war in Iraq). Starritt noted that the Department of the Environment said the weight would be prohibitive; hence Starritt favoured instead ‘stringent’ screening of people at the perimeter; and again at the entrance to the galleries. As for vehicles, Starritt proposed a security checkpoint with equipment to check all types of vehicle; and recommended a x-ray screening machine for any letters. As for recognising the 1300 peers and MPs who regularly attended, Starritt noted how staff took pride in being able to recognise them (and doing services for them such as calling taxis). As Starritt pointed out, Dickens had called Parliament the best club in London; in other words, to leave the file for a moment, not only was it a political debating chamber, it was like any other club in central London – with a difference. Starritt went into some detail about parliamentary privilege as it would affect security. If someone refused to be searched, could they be kept out of Parliament? But then might Parliament’s business be hindered. As MPs had heard in a debate about photo-passes of July 25, 1974, to discourage people from going to Parliament would be a triumph for ‘terrorist gangs’ as one MP put it. Put another way, Starritt acknowledged the force of tradition. He did argue for a head of security instead of a coordinator, who would communicate formally and informally, about planning, and reporting and recording of incidents.
Starritt noted that the security staff were entirely male; yet at times of high risk, for personal searches of women the Met Police had to use female officers. Granting power to search those coming into Parliament, then, would require female staff; and the custodians were nine under establishment, Starritt pointed out. He recommended recruiting women for those nine. (As an aside, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 had only just come in.)
As for tech, one of Starritt’s 36 recommendations was that Parliament should at least consider CCTV, ‘at all vulnerable places’, including the underground car park. He did acknowledge various aesthetic and other (unnamed) considerations, but suggested a visit to the operations room at New Scotland Yard (in other words, the Met was an early user of CCTV, and had pioneered its use in the 1960s).
Starritt went into some detail about improvements to physical security, such as the wall and fencing surrounding New Palace Yard that could be scaled by intruders, particularly at night. He recommended a ‘microwave barrier or some other suitable form of intruder detection system’. Likewise when the Thames-facing terrace was not in use, it should be protected by microwave barriers, he added.
As for traditionalists resisting such changes, Starritt stated that 617 of the 635 MPs held and used photo-passes, which compared with about a thousand passes for their secretaries (which might double as wives). Journalists had about 280. A total security force of 224 had passes; 61 police, 106 custodians, 31 door keepers, 17 attendants and messengers, and nine British Legion attendants. Up to 200 contractor passes were in use at a time; and 20 for Hansard shorthand writers. The Post Office made 13 deliveries a day by van; their drivers had to show their Post Office passes. Each day, up to 20,000 letters and packages came to the House of Commons, sorted there by Post Office employees, who handed to police anything suspicious. Police then might open it; or use a metal detector. ‘Sniffer’ machines were around; the best known was by a Royston company, Analytical Instruments Limited (AI for short). A Pye machine was in use in Northern Ireland, and by the Met Police Bomb Squad.
This round of security review, as so often, was prompted by events. Labour leader Harold Wilson as prime minister had made a statement in the House of Commons on April 8, 1974, about the theft of a sheet of headed notepaper from his office, when he was in opposition. The case was highly controversial, though the theft was of little value; Wilson said his staff were cleared by the police and there was no need to check his office’s typewriters (for who typed what). Wilson wrote and got acknowledgements from the Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe and Conservative former PM Ted Heath, about a security assessment to be carried out by Starritt. Then on June 17, 1974 Irish republicans exploded a bomb which caused injury and fire damage. In an immediate debate in the Commons, the leader of the Commons Ted Short ‘agreed that the incident raises the whole question of security in the House and in the precincts’.
