Our regular writer Una Riley finds herself visiting the European Union Parliament (EUP) building a lot, to do with the industry body Euralarm.
To kill the proverbial two birds with one stone, while there she speaks to the man in charge of security. From the March print magazine.
While there I could not help myself from thinking about just how difficult it must be to secure such a building. So I decided to catch up with Fernando Suárez Mella who is the head of the Security – Unit (DG I – Presidency) of the European Parliament. Fernando has held this awesome position since 1990. Spanish by birth and married with three children, fluent in both French and English with a working knowledge of Dutch and Italian, Fernando is part of those language elite that we English feel so inadequate in contrast to … well I do, anyway! But one thing is for sure, Fernando is a true security professional. When the members travel so does Fernando: the European Parliament has three places of work: Brussels (Belgium), Luxembourg and Strasbourg (France). Luxembourg is home to the administrative offices (the ‘General Secretariat’). Meetings, titled ‘plenary sessions’, take place in Strasbourg and sometimes in Brussels. For those of you who have not visited the EU parliament building it is an experience in itself. I think that every EU citizen should try and check it out. As a security professional you would appreciate the enormous task concerned with the day to day running of this establishment. As I stood in the main entrance of the building in Brussels I could not help observing the people traffic; people speaking in many languages, walking up to security guards and expecting to be understood. I have to say the guards appear to have a lot of patience and understanding. They are the front line and the public that congregate in the entrance can sometimes get exasperated and take it out on the nearest guard! I wanted to know if this establishment was run differently from any other comparable business or commercial organisation. With the hustle and bustle and the plethora of languages spoken, it appeared difficult to compare it to anything that we know. Just observing the guards I thought: what an exhausting job it could be. How do you know who should be there and who shouldn’t?
Badges
I asked Fernando how he coped with securing entry and exit, let alone the rest of the security business! “Where do I start? This was a fundamental security issue when I started that became more of a staff management project later on. For instance this building allows the public access; it is a place of the people – not only staff. Initially if you were internal staff you had a red badge, if your were external you had a blue badge, if you were the wife of a civil servant you had a blue badge with a white stripe and so it went on; we had 94 models of badges! I have reduced that figure to eight. My business is security; I don’t need to know the profile breakdown, from a strictly security point of view, I only need to know where you are within the house. My guards only need to know your right of access, whether you are allowed to be in a certain place. For that I don’t need to know if you are the wife of someone or the assistant of someone else. Of course the people we do need to recognise are the members. A parliament without members will not be a parliament!” Fernando said.
Customer service
With a laugh in his voice before he went on: "This is essentially something that needs to be understood. Some colleagues believe that we do a lot of things for the members … obviously we have to! They are the reason we exist here in the first place – they are the institution. We don’t want them to have to go through specific security checks because they are the owners of the house. However, there are occasions such as when baggage is introduced. From a risk perspective all baggage should be checked, but as we know it is not unusual to place your bag on the ground and pick up someone else’s luggage and walk off and visa versa; this has happened many times to many people. However, at the moment the MEPs take responsibility for their baggage and we do not interfere with it; this is the decision of the authorities. To change this I have to convince them of a risk factor which outweighs the consistent approach that we have at present. It is always the balance that one has to take into account. Because of the characteristic of the institution we could just focus on security but we have to have in mind the service that we deliver to the users whether they are members, colleagues, external visitors, diplomatic visitors and VIPs. We are not here to complicate their lives but to facilitate their needs. So there is always a degree of flexibility that needs to apply. The whole idea is to be a customer-oriented service without losing the security aspect. In order to enable the service delivery to our clients we want them on our side and that you only obtain if you make him or her comfortable with the methods you are taking. Sometimes this can result in loss of time in order to accommodate the requests that you have. In an institution like the EUP the daily number of requests in amazing; it’s incredible and very demanding. We try and sometimes we fail but we endeavour to get it right first time. Sometimes it may appear that we complicate the lives of our members and our users due to security but I fight against this. It drives me nuts if I hear that our customers may not be happy because we have applied security and as a consequence we have complicated the life of someone. That makes me very upset because the reaction that they might have in the future will be that security is incompetent and stupid; not that we are providing a service. It can sometimes be very difficult, let me give you an example: every member and official works in three places due to the unique way that parliament works. We are all given trunks that carry our papers from place to place, Strasbourg to Brussels when we move up and down. These containers of course should be stowed in the individual’s office and not in the corridors constituting an obstacle to a prospective evacuation. However, they are permanently in the corridors because people like to have them to hand and outside their working space. Therefore, people do not realise that in the case of a fire the panic that could ensue would create more damage than the fire itself! I took the decision to put back into the offices all the trunks that were outside the offices. Well, you would not imagine the number of protesters and complaints that I got because I was applying the rule. These complaints included members, one in particular said, ‘I will ask the Secretary General to open a discipline committee against you!’ That is how I was able to understand that it was not his fault; but indeed my fault because I never really explained to them the consequences of their actions pertaining to fire and security. Of course to me it is easy to see the risks but what I had to do was raise the level of awareness that enabled everyone (the customers) to buy in to what I was trying to achieve. From then on I tried to explain to the user or customer in a productive manner what we are doing and why, otherwise they do not understand and can not see the added value of security.”
Evacuation drills
I asked how Fernando overcame that attitude. “I am in the process of planning a series of evacuation drills so that people will have a self-realisation concerning this matter and then I will come back to the measure once people have realised what it takes to evacuate a building of this magnitude. It is a continuous training that you have to do.” I suggested that Fernando send the members around to our [Euralarm] presentation on March 28, where we will have visuals of how fast a fire can take hold. Fernando replied: “I seriously hope that it will never take an incident to raise the level of awareness. I am afraid that it was a terrible thing that something like September 11 had to happen for all of us to become more aware. With safety measures we have to remember not to lose the relationship between efficiency, security and cost. In a building like ours you can protect it in a perfect manner to the ultimate degree but it will become like Fort Knox which is not the purpose. It also has to be understood that there are limits to what the internal service can deliver. One of my current objectives is to increase the relationship with national authorities. We have three very different situations; in Brussels we have a building that is in the middle of the town, we do not have a perimeter of sorts. I therefore agreed with the Belgian authorities that they have a responsibility for our security outside our premises. I think that the relationship between an institution like mine and the national authorities needs to be more direct, confident and reliable. This relationship has improved and is improving but as always it takes the co-operation of people and the building up of relevant contacts in order that we can work together in the future, this can be complex and difficult at times. This is the difference between public and commercial organisations. In the commercial sector it is called team-building and networking and they carry out this function extremely well but it works differently in the public sector. Having said that, in France it works extremely well because I think that the French authorities are aware in Strasbourg of the level of risk that the parliament may represent [for] the city and they put an enormous amount of investment by way of resources into protection when we meet in Strasbourg. As I said, I want to build good relationships with the authorities because after all they are the last resort of responsibility for the safety of the institutions.”
Communicating message
We went on to discuss various methods of communicating the message to the authorities at local and national level. Fernando sees this area of relationship building and communication as crucial to his objectives for the future. Although the relationship is sound and established in both areas, Belgium tends to be more complicated due to the division of powers between the region, the government, and the communes. In fact the EUP building is split between the territory of two communes and there are two major organisations that are involved, the local police and the federal police besides the internal minister so it makes it more difficult not from a relationship perspective but from a structural service delivery mechanism.
Hopeful
Fernando said: “As you know in security the fewer people involved the better and in Belgium it is a bit more complicated. I think that we need to understand the organisation of the Belgian authorities and that is not a criticism, but in a few weeks I will know if I have or have not been successful. Hopefully Parliament will have an agreement on the perimeter and all the security measures and circumstances of our institution for the first time. We are still not there and there are complicated issues that are still under negotiation. With flexibility I am extremely hopeful that things will progress soon.”
Continued next month.
