CONTEST 2023 is one of those UK Government strategy documents that’s necessary yet few if any will ever read it from digital cover to cover, even if they work in that field, writes Mark Rowe. Inside it is a detail that raises questions about what demands might be placed on the country’s private security sector in a national crisis, and how the sector could possible meet the emergency demands.
CONTEST, briefly, is a 20-year-old strategy developed after the 9-11 terror attacks, and 7-7 in London, brought in a new era of terrorism; it has four ‘pillars’, for countering the threat at every stage – Prevent, Pursue, Protect, and Prepare. Some are more controversial than others, as aired by Home Secretary Suella Braverman in a speech this month to launch the new document. Again briefly, two are William Shawcross’ Independent Review of Prevent – are people in schools, universities and healthcare, who have a legal responsibility to report suspicions of radicalisation, equipped, or do they feel constrained by political correctness – and under Protect, the proposed Protect Duty, or Martyn’s Law as campaigned for by Figen Murray, that has reached draft Bill stage as the Terrorism (Protection of premises) draft bill.
While a Protect Duty, if passed next year, would be the most significant development for UK private security since the coming in of the Security Industry Authority (SIA) in the mid-2000s, the other ‘pillar’ of relevance to private security is ‘Prepare’, its aim as defined in the document as ‘to minimise the impact of an attack and reduce the likelihood of further attacks’. That takes in the likes of testing and exercising, ‘including the findings of the Manchester Arena Inquiry‘, according to the document, although in his final session of the Inquiry, the chair Sir John Saunders found numerous examples of painfully slow official progress in acting on the Inquiry’s many recommendations.
As the latest Contest document says, ‘non-specialist’ first responders may well be the first at the scene of an ‘incident’, terrorist or otherwise. Hence the equipping of civil society ‘with the tools to react safely’, through the ProtectUK app. A chemical, biological or radioactive incident could be malicious due to a terrorist; or an industrial accident. Then comes paragraph 127 worth quoting in full:
Should the scale or severity of an incident exceed the capacity of civilian responders, a Military Aid to the Civil Authority request can be made to seek further support from the armed forces, including the backfill of armed police. The UK’s armed forces play an integral and vital part of the Prepare system in their own right. For example, mitigating potential airborne terrorist incidents (eg, hijackings), or the provision of render safe capabilities for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive devices by Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD).
While mentions of the private sector are dutifully sprinkled over the strategy, the private security industry is only mentioned through the rather esoteric National Canine Training and Accreditation Scheme. Paragraph 127, then, leaves unasked the question: if the military are ‘back-filling’ for armed police – to put the jargon in plain English, if armed soldiers are on duty in public, because more armed uniforms are required in the aftermath of a terror incident, to reassure the public at train stations and the like, who’s back-filling the military?
The covid pandemic threw up numerous uncomfortable signs that the British state is short of capacity; and / or the capability to deploy capacity well and ‘at pace’. If Britain should have to deploy significant numbers of troops, as it last did in Iraq and Afghanistan, how well will the armed forces and society as a whole cope?
Part two: If it came to article five. Part three: British resilience.
