All who wish the proposed Protect Duty well ought to be haunted by the Grenfell Tower tragedy, writes Mark Rowe; as a case of something not unrelated to security – fire safety – that had a regulatory regime that went fatally wrong, and years later is unresolved still (and with the prospect of yet more years before resolution).
It is therefore worth considering at length the beginning of the speech to the House of Commons on Monday, January 30, by the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Michael Gove:
“It is a basic requirement of any civilised society that people should feel safe in their own homes, but for too many people for far too long, that has not been the case. As I have said before, so I say again: this has been a collective failure. Those in government who made the rules did not make them clear enough. Those who built our homes did not build them well enough. Those who made the materials that contributed to the construction of those homes often made them unsafe; at times, knowingly so. Those who were to check the work undertaken did not always check thoroughly enough. Of course, those who own the buildings have sometimes managed them so poorly that people have been left unsafe, and too many of those owners have still shirked their obligations to make people safe.
“The only party to the crisis who do not share in the responsibility are the blameless leaseholders and the tenants who live in those buildings.”
As Mr Gove set out, the ‘building safety crisis’ goes far beyond one block of flats, Grenfell in west London, and the financial and human costs arising from the fire there in June 2017 (‘I expect developer remediation to be worth more than £2 billion of investment in safety and to protect people in hundreds of buildings’).
Here I want to consider the inspection and regulatory regime that sits between those that set the rules (our elected representatives in Parliament) and those making the checks of building work (people with clipboards or equivalent). What badge will be on their jackets, who will issue their ID cards, what will be the title of their chief if there’s ever some media furore demanding a public response?
In December when the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary Suella Braverman committed to the Protect Duty, a Home Office accompanying ‘factsheet’ stated that there would be, in the jargon, an ‘inspection capability’, ‘to seek to educate, advise, and ensure compliance with the Duty’, that would ‘use a range of sanctions to ensure that breaches are effectively dealt with’. Will that be a new body, or will the task go to an existing one?
The Building Safety Act 2022 named the HSE (Health and Safety Executive) as the new building safety regulator in England (note; not the rest of the UK; while the Protect Duty is due to be UK-wide). That Act requires you (the dutyholder of a high-rise building) to store information about a building. ‘This information should be accurate, up to date, accessible and kept digitally.’ This is known as ‘the golden thread of information’, updated throughout the building’s life cycle. While that, and the HSE’s work generally around workplaces, may tie in with what’ll be required under the Protect Duty, it may not be practical to ask even more change of the HSE in the mid to later 2020s.
Here are other possibilities.
The Security Industry Authority: it already does inspections, typically of pub and club doors checking SIA badges. The SIA is nearing its 20th birthday – its launch conference was in April 2003 – and nothing stands still forever, and its remit and powers could do with a refresh as the security sector like any other has changed greatly. If the SIA got the task of setting or inspecting to standards for buildings, that’s a considerable extending of its work. Would that mean at least a temporary loss of focus on its day job, of regulating ‘licensable sectors’, door supervisers, contract security officers, and video surveillance control room operators, not forgetting close protection operatives. A halfway house might be if some knowledgeable and experienced SIA personnel went to work for a Protect Duty regulator?
Local government: A council Environmental Health Officer (EHO) visits cafes and take-away premises to carry out a food hygiene inspection, and will give a rating of one to five under the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS). Might those officers carry out inspections of site security, while they’re on their rounds?! Again, adding a role runs the risk of making the officers jacks of two trades and masters of neither. A Protect Duty inspection regime may draw on the food hygiene rating example – customers can see the rating displayed in the premises window, and can make a decision whether to go there. Likewise there ought to be a procedure if a business wants to appeal against the rating. How will it all be paid for? The Local Government Association did ask, in its less than enthusiastic response to the proposed Duty when the Home Office went out to consultation in 2021. And repeated in December when Sunak and Braverman stated their commitment to a Protect Duty.
Police: the Home Office promises that Government will ‘expand the support available to those responsible for delivering security in public places’ so that they can meet the Duty. ProtectUK (‘a central, consolidated hub for trusted guidance, advice, learning and engagement’) ‘will serve as the ‘go to’ resource for free, 24/7 access the latest information on protective security and will be regularly updated with new engaging content and increased functionality’. As ProtectUK is a police website, and each force has CTSAs, counter terror security advisers, why not have the police do the inspecting as well? As a researcher puts it in the March print edition of Professional Security Magazine, CTSAs ‘tell me that despite their best efforts, the pressure was always on them for quantity of events over quality, with minimal evaluation of learning. This emphasis stifles innovation and the development of new and improved products’. That doesn’t sound like already very busy CTSAs can take on more.
Police Crime Prevention Initiatives is a UK company that has various crime prevention schemes, some more widespread and well-known than others: such as Park Mark for car parks, and the Licensing Security and Vulnerability Initiative, Licensing SAVI for short. Might they do something similar for the varied venues and businesses that will fall under the proposed Protect Duty? Once again, bid scaling up would be required.
Whether one of these three or some other inspection body gets the nod, as with the story of the SIA, or indeed many things, including the internet, decisions made early on, perhaps with surprisingly little thought, can return to haunt. As someone remarked to me recently, the internet could in the beginning (and set up in a matter of minutes) have required users to identify themselves, rather than allowing anonymity, and all the social ills arising. As for the SIA, a licensing regime based on the individual (typically among the lowest paid in work) rather than the employer (including multi-national corporations) has been consequential, as was the decision not to badge in-house officers even if doing the same work as an SIA-badged contract worker; one of many things gone over in the Manchester Arena Inquiry.
