All UK private security industry eyes and ears are on the moves towards a Protect Duty, which would place a legal responsibility on venues and other public places to guard against terrorism. Less noted is that earlier this week the Manchester Arena Inquiry sat for its final public hearing to hear what’s been done (or not) about its recommendations.
The Home Office is seeking to bring in a Protect Duty, as backed by the Manchester Arena Inquiry in its volume one report in summer 2021, and arising from the campaign by Figen Murray, whose son Martyn Hett (whose name has been given to the proposed Martyn’s Law) was among those who died in the Arena bomb of May 2017. Among the ‘monitored recommendations’ of the Inquiry’s volume one of three reports, in 2021, was that in-house CCTV control room operators should have to be SIA-badged; and that the Security Industry Authority should licence all security businesses, not just (as under the approved contractor scheme) those who volunteer. The Inquiry closed last year with its third volume. The Wednesday session heard updates about what various authorities have or haven’t done about the Inquiry’s recommendations. The session dwelt on how the Home Office has decided against those two recommendations involving the SIA, which left the Authority’s chief exec Michelle Russell ‘disappointed’, as she put it in a letter to the Inquiry, as read by counsel to the Inquiry, Paul Greany.
Shaun Hipgrave of the Home Office was among witnesses to give evidence to the June 7 session. When asked to explain why the Home Office had gone against the Inquiry’s recommendations, Mr Hipgrave answered that ‘Home Office and ministers have made this decision based on the broader protective security picture that we are looking at, and consider that the Protect Duty will supplement many of these areas around security standards’. In reply the Inquiry chair Sir John Saunders stated that he still found it ‘a quite extraordinary anomaly, that if you bring an outside company in, they have got to be trained in using CCTV, but if you use in−house people, just employ them directly, then they don’t have to do the training despite the fact they’re doing the same job. That seems a bit odd.’ When Hipgrave tried to say that the Protect Duty would ‘provide an improvement in standards’, Sir John cut him short by saying the Duty would not cover these two requirements.
On events licensing by local government, that could so with ‘comprehensive guidance dealing with what licensing committees should be looking at when they’re dealing with premises such as the Arena which might be a focal point for an attack’, Mr Hipgrave was unable to give a date of publication.
The session also touched on how the Inquiry’s many and wide-ranging ‘monitored recommendations’ – volume two’s totalled 149 – might be scrutinised, publicly, beyond the Inquiry, namely by select committees of MPs.
As across the years of the Inquiry, spanning the covid pandemic, evidence was broadcast to the Inquiry YouTube channel.
SIA statement
In a statement, the SIA told Professional Security: “The Home Office has confirmed that the SIA’s proposals for mandatory businesses licensing and extending in-house security licensing for individuals are not being taken forward. We are disappointed but remain committed as the regulator to doing all we can within the existing legal framework and powers and influence we have, to regulate robustly and improve public safety particularly, in light of the findings of the Manchester Arena Inquiry and other tragic events.
“We will now focus on developing a new voluntary business standards scheme which will see a fundamental reset of the existing scheme. As the only regulatory vehicle we currently have, to improve standards in businesses, this will signal a significant change in how standards are defined for security businesses, ensuring public protection is at the heart of the new scheme. This work will now be the focus of and dominate our business standards work going forward.
“We remain committed to playing our part to strengthen public safety. We continue to work with the private security industry, the police, and the Home Office in the pursuit of this goal. We will continue to do so in support of greater public safety for everyone.”
Evidence also came from Emma Reed, of the Department of Health and Social Care Director for the Emergency Preparedness and Health Protection Directorate (on how the Protect Duty will require venues to have adequate healthcare, regulated by the Care Quality Commission); Dr Shirley Hopper, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency Deputy Director of Innovative Medicines; Jo Gillespie, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Deputy Director of Corporate, Policy, Strategy and Resilience Division in Resilience and Recovery Directorate; Dr Pamela Hardy, Chair of the Faculty of Pre-Hospital Care of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh; Tracy Nicholls, Chief Executive of The College of Paramedics and Keith Prior, Director of National Ambulance Resilience Unit; Paul Mott, Head of HM Prison and Probation Service Joint Extremism Unit (JEXU) on checks on visitors to the prison estate, and communications by all prisoners, in case of radicalising influence on those outside or visiting prisons, by prisoners; Sachin Shah, Deputy Director of the Counter-Extremism division within the Department for Education, on schools’ recording of concerns of ‘violent extremism’; Supt David Pester of GMP; Chief Constable Pippa Mills and ACC Peter Lawson of the National Police Chiefs’ Council; Matthew Parr of His Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue; Chief Fire Officer Chris Lowther of the National Fire Chiefs’ Council.
Visit https://manchesterarenainquiry.org.uk/.
The Home Affairs Committee of MPs began hearing evidence on Tuesday as it carried out pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Protect Duty, as set out in the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Draft Bill; transcript on the UK Parliament website.
Photo by Mark Rowe, Manchester Victoria station.
