The finest English writer of our time is Christopher Priest, and his favourite book of mine is Inverted World (1974), writes Mark Rowe.
It’s set in a future that hasn’t gone well. The narrator and his community live in ‘the city’, like a giant mobile castle that’s pulled along on rail tracks, that are laid on the landscape in front as the ones behind are taken up. No-one knows – neither the narrator nor we the readers – where they have come from, where they are going, even if they are on planet earth, why they keep going, and who started it all. The only imperative is to keep rolling. Until eventually – but that would give away one of the great and most moving endings in literature.
That can be a metaphor for any institution. After not many years, the founders have gone, and those in post can easily forget their purpose, apart from simply carrying the thing on. For an organisation with a duty to serve the public, the employees can easily serve instead only the interests of their organisation.
What are we to make of the body that looks after stadiums, the Sports Ground Safety Authority (SGSA)? Public bodies commonly offer their guidance and other documents freely, such as the data privacy regulator, the ICO. The SGSA, however, charges for its documents, notably the guide to safety at sports grounds, ‘Green Guide’ (£95), and more recently ‘Supplementary Guidance 03: Event Safety Management’, which costs £60. You can understand a charge for a printed document, for the paper and postage, but what’s the cost of a digital document? And shouldn’t the contents be free, as they’re of public utility? And as the SGSA is already funded by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, why does it want more money?
The SGSA doesn’t charge for you to read digitally recent published last year about ‘stewarding challenges’ which among other things found stewards aren’t paid enough. The SGSA charges because it can, because safety officers have to have to Green Guide to do their jobs.
The SGSA some years ago did give talks at security industry events; otherwise it’s ploughed its own furrow. Recently it announced (it’s a document you can read for free) ‘new policy guidance regarding the existing exemption in the Private Security Industry Act 2001 for in-house staff at sports grounds undertaking Security Industry Authority (SIA) licensable activities’. Ever since the SIA came into being in the mid-2000s, the connection between stewarding (to look after fire and other safety matters, and to provide customer service, such as directing ticket-holders) and security (searching patrons, ejecting the unruly) has been distinct enough in terms of roles; but stewards and security officers at sports, music concerts and other events routinely work alongside each other. They may wear different coloured jackets, but the distinction may be lost on the public.
For those who have it in for the SIA, look at stewarding for what the guarding sector would be like still, but for the founding of the SIA, 20 years ago. The badge has meaning; if you wear an expired one, or do security work without one, you can go to court and be fined. You know what the badge represents; some training (though the industry will always argue about what training, and how much) and a background check. By contrast, a steward should hold a level two certificate in spectator safety; in reality, an uninterested employer can always say that the steward is in the middle of taking it (you can have 12 months to take it) and the steward may move on. And so what? What are the sanctions? If you come across an SIA-badge person who does something wrong, you can check their number against a register on the SIA website. If you see a steward doing something wrong? The SGSA in its ‘exemption policy guidance’ says that it ‘has no current plans to develop’ the equivalent register.
Given the risks, stewarding at least arguably needs SIA-like regulation just as much as security guards, because crowd safety poses at least as much of a risk for the public as terrorism. That is not to deny the continuing threat of terrorism, given the thwarted attacks or near-misses such as Streatham High Street, and Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Although the proposed Protect Duty is in part a cynical move by the state to outsource the responsibility for protecting citizens to venues and businesses, at least the security services are still there to identify suspects, track their plots and have the police make arrests before an attack that security officers and stewards alike will probably be the first responders to.
Wembley Stadium on the day of the Euros final in July 2021 and the O2 Brixton Academy in December are cases of crowd disorder and crushes, a near-miss and fatal respectively. There, there are no suspects beforehand, no plotting (arguably; the Casey Review traced online talk before the final about gate-crashing); only otherwise outwardly law-abiding members of the public until – because the event they want to attend is sold out, and they try to barge their way in anyway, for a lark even – the crush.
Here is an example of a public policy non-answer; despite the forensically detailed report by Baroness Casey into the Wembley disorder, and Lambeth Council’s suspending of the licence of the Brixton Academy, what has changed to make another such incident less likely? How can blaming a concert venue help, when the crush was caused by ticketless, irresponsible young men?
To return to sports grounds, in July the Football Association denounced anti-social behaviour such as flare-throwing as unacceptable. As featured in the September print edition of Professional Security Magazine, it carried on regardless from the opening day of the season. A useful source here are vloggers, usually young men who – well down the football pyramid – post five to 20-minute videos on Youtube of each match, as filmed on their phones. While the footage can be wobblier than on BBC TV’s Match of the Day, you get to witness, even feel, like a fan among fans. It’s important to state that these vloggers are articulate and good-natured, and not hooligans, which makes it all the more telling that they show flares thrown (at opposition fans, or onto the field of play) without comment. Flares may even be mentioned in the strapline of the video, as something exciting. That is to say; flares have become normal (that is, the very opposite of the FA’s unacceptable). To return to the report on stewards on the SGSA website, stewards like others in event management say that returning spectators after covid have forgotten how to behave.
That’s not quite right; rather, a ‘small minority’ (a phrase routinely used by police and others to condemn hooligans) have used the covid break to assert new norms that suit their rowdiness. Why don’t the police, then, do their job of bringing to justice the few in each club – well up the football tier, perhaps as far as the Championship – who are most visibly behind the disorder, so as to deter others?
When watching video logs, well down the tiers of English football – and long before covid, disorder was in the lower tiers, though it had less of a profile given the general obsession with the Premier League – it’s striking to see police on duty make no effort to identify flare-throwers. You could say, police make inquiries afterwards, or search CCTV. If so, where are the prosecutions for throwing flares? Yes, it’s difficult even with wide coverage of CCTV at stadia to capture a person throwing, and make an identification. But then lots of crimes are difficult to solve; criminals won’t make it easy!? Rather than be level with people – and make it more possible for flare-throwers to get identified, such as by appealing for suspects’ names via a (free) hotline or app – the Football Association makes a public policy non-answer by sanctioning clubs for fan misbehaviour. Rather than going after the actual misbehaving fans. Criminal justice statistics can mislead. Police time and again go for what’s easy and suits them – arresting a man who makes a pitch incursion at the end of a game (meaning officers are not taken off duty much, to process the man), and leading to a banning order. An offence, yes, but is it the worst that goes on?
The same non-answer is happening over drink spiking. It’s difficult to gather evidence – a suspect will spike a drink surreptitiously. Even if you suspect your drink was spiked or you had a needle injected into you, in a venue, what venue will search its CCTV for the night. If the place is dark, what will the video show? Will the police go to this trouble of asking a venue? Especially if you like everyone else in the venue, had been drinking and getting intoxicated? None of this is to deny that spiking is an abhorrent crime; but only to state reality. No new law is needed; as it’s an offence to poison. Why then did County Durham and Darlington Police and Crime Commissioner Joy Allen express disappointment that the Government plans not to make spiking a specific offence? When any new or extra law will not make the least difference to those problems of identifying the criminals?
Crowd crushes, flare-throwing, drink spiking and other crimes are not easy to combat (and the prisons are full), but non-answers by public policy makers, refusals to face realities, are no help.
