Bruce George and Baroness Henig were the first two speakers at The Security Institute conference in Buckinghamshire. Mark Rowe offers a sketch and adds something of the talk outside the conference room.
It’s fair to say that if Bruce George and Ruth Henig were boxers, they would be in different weight divisions. The term ‘political beast’ may seem tailor-made for Bruce George, the long-serving Labour MP for Walsall South. He was typically blunt and intemperate – though not malicious – when his speech opened the institute’s annual conference at Great Missenden. It’s the village where the writer Roald Dahl lived. Down the road from the venue is a Dahl museum with a café called the Twits, which one event attender enjoyed beforehand.
Bruce George laid into the Security Industry Authority for shortcomings while laying much of the blame on the political masters at the Home Office. As TSI chairman Mike Bluestone hinted after Bruce George’s half-hour, Bruce George is not one to sit on the fence.
How did Baroness Henig react, taking the floor straight after? Also in character, sticking to her prepared talk rather than exchanging fire with Bruce George, and going through where the SIA is going in the next 12 months – which was after all the title of her talk.
At the tea break – after Prof Chris Kemp of hosts Bucks New University spoke about courses offered with Skills for Security and the (fast expanding) University of Worcester – there seemed little doubt among the audience who had ‘won’ the bout between Mr George and Baroness Henig. ‘Five-nil to Bruce George,’ one said to me.
I said nothing, but I disagreed.
For starters, to take the two speakers – one a veteran elected politician, another an academic historian placed in the unelected House of Lords – you might think it obvious to guess which one harped on about the past (albeit the recent past, but well gone in terms of practical politics) and which one stuck to the present and forseeable future, and incidentally giving a short class in Westminster and Whitehall politics. In fact Baroness Henig – as Bruce George was careful to mention, in the unelected chamber of the Houses of Parliament – was the one in the present and Bruce George oddly stuck in the past in that he was going over the making of the original, 2001, Private Security Industry Act (PSIA).
The baroness as some call her has in truth quite as much experience as Bruce George in getting democratically elected, on Lancashire County Council (and it’s worth adding at this point that both are Labour; Baroness Henig is a working peer). It’s also worth pondering that far from every shire county councillor gets to sit in the House of Lords.
It may have been my interview with TSI chairman Mike Bluestone (in the July print issue of Professional Security Magazine) that Baroness Henig was referring to when she mentioned that Mike Bluestone called the decision by the SIA not to badge in-house security guards, ‘political’.
Baroness Henig called this both right and wrong – wrong in that it was not a party-political decision, but correct in that it was done in terms of what was politically feasible. As she has said before in private conversation and in public, and said again to the conference, one thing that matters is the postbag of MPs. (In other words, public, voters’ opinion. Are people writing in to their MP complaining about the scandal of in-house security officers not being licenced, while contract are? Are there protest marches?!)
As Baroness Henig said, MPs are being ‘deluged with complaints’ about wheel clampers, or vehicle immobilisation in the civil service jargon. "That’s how the system works. MPs put pressure on government; and ministers say something must be done." So, if the SIA does anything in the next six months, it will be about wheel clamping.
The upcoming general election by next year may well bring an end to Labour and bring in for the first time since 1997 the Conservatives. This was one of the talking points outside the conference room. Bear in mind that Labour brought in the PSIA and SIA and the previous 18 Conservative years did not. Besides, David Cameron’s Tories are making noise they will cut quangos, like the SIA (though there may be more political heat than action in that respect – The Spectator magazine of that week called on a Tory government to ‘destroy’ quangos. Instead, the Conservatives if in power may simply replace Labour people such as Baroness Henig with their own equivalent people.)
It was significant in this regard that, as at the SIA annual conference in Manchester in May, Baroness Henig was careful to talk in terms of meeting the Hampton review and Hampton principles, which all quasi-autonomous government bodies such as the SIA are required to follow. In other words, the SIA is taking care not to stick its head out in case it’s chopped in any quango cuts.
The able event chairman Martin Smith after the Henig and George speeches asked the two – because it had been quite a spectacle between the two – if they were still friends. The responses of the two, now seated again, were illuminating. After a pause Bruce George – arms folded – said they were. And Baroness Henig said, ‘Fine.’ While civilities were thus observed, plainly it would take more than a debate to resolve differences.
For there are differences. While Bruce George long campaigned for a cowboy-free security industry, even he in his speech acknowledged MPs are, because of their expenses claims and travel, not shall we say without blemish. And while Bruce George repeated that the PSIA was ‘so bad it’s good’, don’t the MPs, as the ones who vote on our laws, take any responsibility there?
As for the SIA, while it was not said in as many words on the day, an underlying and insoluble problem was laid out: who is the master of the SIA? Is it the public? The Home Office, the political masters? Is it the private security industry? Or is it, more narrowly, the varied and not necessarily connected sectors of the security industry that pay their application fees that allow the SIA to run? One person at the event suggested in conversation that the SIA should be like the DVLA – that is, simply dishing out (photo-ID) badges, rather than setting standards. The DVLA does not try to tell us how to drive our cars.
To go in that direction, too, would be a political decision. A business knows its masters are its customers – lose them, you go bust. Likewise a government – lose too many voters, you’re voted out next time. But the SIA?
At the event, and previously, people have asked me oddly often how much longer Baroness Henig will stay, the SIA having indeed seen several chief executives and other chairmen so far. To repeat, the upcoming election may affect Baroness Henig’s stay rather than how well she does; otherwise, her record – as a councillor and academic historian – suggests that she is a stayer.
If the security industry doesn’t like the SIA-regulation it is getting, it had better make its mind up whether what it prefers would involve even more regulation or rather less. Because that, too, is a political decision.
