FIFA World Cup 2006 Consular Services
for British Nationals in Germany
Report to the Foreign Affairs Committee
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE OCTOBER 2006
INTRODUCTION
1. This report is an account of our work
to deliver our consular objectives for the FIFA World Cup 2006
in Germany:
— to prepare for a safe and trouble-free
World Cup for travelling British fans; and
— to ensure that those who do get into
difficulty during the tournament, and their families, get the
most effective consular support possible.
2. It concludes by drawing out the lessons
we learned from the operation, and how we intend to use those
lessons in preparing for future tournaments, most immediately
for the European Championships in Austria and Switzerland in two
years' time.
3. UK Government planning for the FIFA World
Cup involved a number of players, notably the Home Office, the
Association of Chief Police Officers, UK Football Policing Unit,
UK police (including British Transport Police), the Crown Prosecution
Service and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. This
report focuses only on the consular operation to provide assistance
to travelling supporters in difficulty in Germany, and on activities
such as public diplomacy where they contributed to the success
of that consular operation. However, the FCO, through the British
Embassy in Berlin, played a much wider role alongside this consular
responsibility, including in helping to co-ordinate the efforts
of other Departments and in maximising opportunities from the
tournament to enhance the British-German relationship.
PLANNING THE
OPERATION
4. For every major international football
tournament since the European Championships in 2000, we have appointed
a dedicated Football Attaché to the relevant FCO post or
posts to lead preparations. Our Football Attaché for the
World Cup 2006 took up his post in Berlin in July 2005. Supported
throughout by a Sports Liaison Officer based in Consular Directorate
in the FCO in London, the Football Attaché began work on
the budgetary, staffing and other practical planning required
across our network in Germany in preparation for the World Cup.
He also began a programme of regular attendance at England fans'
events, and contact-building with the FA and supporters' groups,
which proved important channels of communication in the run-up
to and during the tournament.
5. Once the draw for the World Cup was made in
December 2005, we knew where England's three first-round matches
would be played, as well as the venues for either of their two
possible routes to the final. The Deputy Head of Mission in Berlin,
with the support of the Football Attaché, took on overall
direction of the planning and operations for the tournament. Within
that, our Consulate-General (C-G) in Dusseldorf led on preparations
for England's games in their consular district: Frankfurt and
Cologne in the first round, then Gelsenkirchen in the quarter-finals.
The C-G in Munich led on the games in Nuremberg (first round)
and Stuttgart (second round), and would have done for the semi-final
in Munich had England got there. The Berlin Embassy led on preparations
for the other quarter-final and the final in the Olympic stadium.
6. From immediately after the draw, the Ambassador
in Berlin and other senior officers from the network in Germany
undertook an intensive programme of visits to the England venue
cities to gain the co-operation of, for example, local mayors,
police chiefs and FIFA organising committee representatives. A
particular focus of this activity was to stress how England fans
had changed over the past years, with arrests and disorder in
the most recent tournaments at record lows. These visits proved
important in getting across to local German authorities that they
should judge England's travelling fans by their behaviour, not
their reputation—something which contributed to the highly-successful
policing of England fans in the tournament itself.
7. We had decided during our early planning that
our consular operation in Germany during the World Cup would be
led by a mobile team of consular staff setting up temporary consulates
in the England venue cities on the days before, of and after their
matches. This team would work in conjunction with a 24/7 call
centre at the Embassy in Berlin, which would provide a single,
Germany-wide emergency number, field all initial consular enquiries
during the World Cup, and act as the co-ordination centre for
the response to any major incident affecting British nationals
during the tournament.
8. Mobile team members were drawn from our existing
network in Germany. Twelve temporary duty staff were sent out
from London to fill their normal positions in the Embassy in Berlin
and Consulates-General in Germany for the duration of the tournament.
This arrangement ensured that those staffing the mobile team had
the experience and local knowledge necessary to fulfil their roles.
It is worth noting that even if we had had permanent staff in
place in more cities—for example, if our consulate in Frankfurt
had not closed before the tournament—we would nonetheless
have needed to rely on mobile teams. The scale of the operation
was such that no single post in Germany, not even Berlin, had
a permanent complement of consular staff capable of dealing with
the demands posed by an England fixture.
9. As planning progressed, we worked closely
with the Football Association (FA), EnglandFans (the FA's official
supporters club), and the Football Supporters Federation (FSF,
which represents unofficial England fans), to plan our detailed
deployments for the tournament itself. We were able to get representatives
of the FSF to accompany the Berlin Embassy staff on several of
their planning visits to the venue cities: this helped to ensure
that the practicalities of our operation—where we set up
offices, where we placed staff etc—would reflect the needs
of the fans.
10. The fans told us that, while many of
those travelling to Euro 2004 in Portugal had combined their trips
with family holidays, those going out to see games in Germany
would be much more likely to shuttle between Germany and the UK,
or between Germany and attractive neighbouring cities such as
Amsterdam and Prague, and would travel by a wide variety of routes.
This had two important consequences for our planning:
(i) Emergency Passports (EPs), valid only
for a single journey to the UK, would be inappropriate for most
of those who required replacement travel documents during the
tournament: fans would want replacement documents which allowed
repeat trips. We decided that we would therefore offer Temporary
Passports (valid for multiple journeys and for a one-year period)
through the mobile consular teams and the Embassy in Berlin during
the course of the tournament. This was the first time that we
had offered this service on a mobile basis. Fees for Temporary
Passports are set higher than those for EPs to reflect their greater
cost. Full 10-year replacement passports were also available through
the C-G in Dusseldorf, the centre of our passport-issuing operation
in Germany, in the usual way.
(ii) The tournament would have an important
impact on neighbouring posts to Germany, particularly those in
countries with road-transport links from the UK (France, Belgium,
the Netherlands), with cheap flight destinations close to Germany
(eg Poland), or with cities attractive to fans (eg eastern Europe,
particularly Prague, and Amsterdam). We therefore included our
Posts in the neighbouring countries to Germany in our plans for
the tournament. We tasked them to make sure their own contingency
arrangements were tested and that they had adequate staff in place.
We also used them to distribute our information material or messages
to fans. The UK Football Policing Unit (which reports to the Home
Office) also placed liaison officers in a number of neighbouring
posts for the duration of the tournament.
"AVOIDING PENALTIES"
CAMPAIGN
11. We decided early that a targeted pre-tournament
communications campaign would be essential, both to help fans
stay safe in Germany and to manage their expectations of, and
demand for, our support.
12. Our target group—travelling football
fans—is resistant to standard government information (our
research shows that people are less likely to check travel advice,
get insurance etc when travelling on this kind of trip). We had
to find ways of communicating travel safety messages that were
attractive to fans, and therefore likely to be read and retained.
13. Building on a successful experience
from Euro 2004 in Portugal, we designed a credit card-sized foldout
information card as the central tool of our communications campaign.
The card (copies are enclosed with this report) included information
which fans would want—on the venue cities, useful phrases
in German, notes on local laws and customs and handy directions
to stadia etc—as well as information on travel safety, and
on what British consular staff could and couldn't do when things
went wrong. The card gave prominent place to the single, Germany-wide
emergency number that we had put in place for the course of the
tournament.
14. We signed up a range of partners to
ensure that the card got to as many travelling fans as possible.
The FA sent it out with tickets, and helped us to distribute cards
at the England team's warm up games in Reading and Manchester
earlier in the summer. We distributed 133,000 information cards
at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Leeds Bradford, Birmingham,
Luton, Stansted, Liverpool and Manchester. This included 23,000
at Heathrow alone, where the cards were given to fans on British
Airways, Lufthansa and British Midland flights to Germany and
neighbouring countries using marketing staff at check-in queues
on key travel days to matches. We used airport information screens
to display the Germany emergency number to travellers and encourage
them to programme it into their mobile 'phones. We distributed
over 4,000 cards through ports across the UK, working through
the police. Some 50,000 cards were also distributed to fans in
Germany, mostly at arrival airports. Our World Cup information
card won the Gold award for best consumer promotion at the Chartered
Institute of Marketing: Travel Industry Group's Awards this September;
and the campaign has been shortlisted for the Whitehall and
Westminster World Civil Service Awards 2006.
15. There were a number of other elements
to the "Avoiding Penalties" campaign:
— A text message alert service in partnership
with the Football Supporters' Federation and T-Mobile, to which
fans could sign up to receive football and travel safety news
on their mobile phones while in Germany. Whether or not they had
signed up to the service, every T Mobile user arriving in Germany
received a text message with the Berlin Embassy's 24-hour help
line number—helping us get that number out to a huge number
of fans.
— FCO and Berlin Embassy staff attended
a number of England fans forum events in the month leading up
to the World Cup, to promote our travel safety messages, set out
what we could do to help those in trouble, and distribute the
information cards.
— We offered a mobile travel advice
service with Pixaya to which fans could sign up.
— We developed a "Skinker"
(downloadable desktop news alert service) in partnership with
Talk Sport Radio, who promoted it to their listeners and through
their website. Some 8,000 users downloaded this service and received
updates from Talk Sport on the England team and other football
news interspersed with key safety tips for travelling to Germany.
— We co-sponsored the FSF's England
Fans' Guide to Germany 2006 and launched it jointly with the
FSF, the Home Office and the footballer Tony Adams at the FCO
in London. This, and a separate media event for the campaign involving
the footballer David Platt at White Hart Lane, gained significant
media coverage for our travel safety messages including the front
page of the Sun.
16. Feedback from fans and others suggests
that our communications campaign was a success. The widely-advertised
24 hour emergency number in Berlin received the great majority
of calls from fans in difficulty during the tournament, showing
a high awareness of this number. Most fans in Germany had got
the message about, for example, the illegality of Nazi salutes.
The low levels of avoidable consular cases and of disorder overall
throughout the tournament are, in our assessment, due at least
in part to the success of our pre-tournament communications and
our engagement with local authorities and police.
17. Our media handling and public diplomacy
work before and during the tournament was also aimed in part at
reinforcing the success of the consular operation—whether
by breaking down stereotypes of England fans in Germany, publicising
our consular effort, or helping to manage expectations of what
help the Embassy in Berlin could or couldn't provide if things
went wrong.
TRAINING
18. The World Cup operation involved staff
from across the British Embassy in Berlin and Consulates in Germany,
supported by others in London and elsewhere. Many of these staff
are not regular consular officers and required training to enable
them to carry out their duties through the World Cup. In preparation
for the tournament, we therefore:
— trained 80 call handling staff to
man the 24-hour emergency number at the Embassy in Berlin. These
were drawn from mainstream Berlin Embassy staff and their spouses/partners
and families. Training consisted of sessions on the basics of
consular work and what we can and cannot do to help people, plus
role-plays with actors to help staff prepare for dealing with
difficult, traumatised or abusive customers;
— offered in-house media training for
consular staff deployed on the ground during the tournament, to
help them deal with press attention;
— delivered specialist refresher training
to those issuing mobile temporary passports during the tournament;
and
— provided the necessary refresher
training for the temporary duty staff sent to Germany during the
tournament to fulfil a range of roles in support of the Berlin
Embassy and Consulates.
TESTING OUR
CONTINGENCY PLANS
19. On 3 May 2006, following the majority
of our training, we conducted a major crisis exercise in Germany
to test the World Cup-specific emergency plan, which we had drawn
up to shape our response to any major incident affecting British
nationals during the tournament. This simulated two bombs exploding
in bars full of England supporters in the city of Cologne. We
used around 40 actors to play injured and traumatised British
nationals and to simulate a media pack around the scene of the
"incident". The call handling centre in Berlin was transformed
into a crisis management centre for the duration of the exercise,
with large numbers of staff volunteers from the FCO in London
and others calling to play the roles of family members worried
about loved ones involved in the attacks.
20. The exercise fully tested our crisis
management and contingency procedures for the World Cup. The mobile
team in Cologne, directed from the Crisis Management Centre in
Berlin, was able to deploy rapidly to the scene of the incident
and offer support to those British nationals affected. Call handlers
at the Embassy in Berlin were able to deal with a large volume
of calls from the "public" (ie our volunteers). We also
learnt a number of lessons from the exercise, which enabled us
to refine our preparedness before the World Cup actually kicked
off. For example, we improved our call handling arrangements to
allow the call centre to operate more reliably and flexibly. And
we strengthened deployment plans for the mobile team on the ground
in the light of the (realistic) scenario that some would, as in
the exercise, be stuck in the Stadium or other venues and unable
to go to the scene.
21. The Embassy in Berlin conducted a further
"desk-top" contingency exercise with the Consulates-General
in Munich and Dusseldorf on 9 June, the day before England's opening
match against Paraguay.
SERVICE DELIVERY
DURING THE
TOURNAMENT
22. The mobile consular team covered five
England matches: the three first-round games in Frankfurt, Nuremberg,
and Cologne; the second-round match in Stuttgart; and the quarter-final
in Gelsenkirchen.
23. The team started its work in earnest in Frankfurt
on 8 June, two days before the first England game. Operating from
offices provided by our newly-appointed Honorary Consul, they
remained open until the morning of 12 June. This operating pattern
was maintained in other venues, offering a full service in each
venue city the day before, the day of and the day after each England
match.
24. The core of the 16-18 person team, which
included the Football Attaché and a member of the FCO technical
branch usually based in Berlin, travelled across Germany, usually
having less that 24 hours at home between five-day deployments.
In Nuremberg and in Stuttgart (the second-round game) as in Frankfurt,
our Honorary Consuls provided office space for the temporary Consulates.
In Cologne and in Gelsenkirchen (England's last game) the team
used hotel conference rooms.
25. In addition to issuing temporary passports
the team provided a full range of normal consular assistance including:
— issuing emergency passports;
— offering advice on transferring
money;
— contacting relatives and friends
and ask them to help with money or tickets;
— providing lists of lawyers, interpreters
and doctors;
— notifying next of kin of accidents
or death and advising on procedures;
— visiting those arrested or imprisoned
or hospitalised;
— passing messages to friends or relatives;
and
— speaking to local authorities in
certain circumstances.
26. Statistics on the mobile team's work during
the tournament are attached at Annex I.
27. The 24/7 call-centre in Berlin was maintained
until England were knocked out of the tournament, then scaled
back to operate on an early morning to late evening basis, and
reinforced again around the time of the final in Berlin. It proved
an enormously valuable resource both in handling calls from fans
in difficulty (many of which could be resolved without intervention
from staff on the ground eg queries about how to transfer money)
and in co-ordinating the distribution of work to the mobile teams.
Statistics on the call-centre's activity during the tournament
are attached at Annex II.
28. The Germany operation was backed up in London
by a dedicated World Cup/Germany Unit in the FCO's Consular Directorate,
which was in place from 7 June until 7 July. Staff there worked
on a shift basis to provide an extended daily service, working
in conjunction with the FCO Response Centre for out of hours service,
seven days a week. The Unit worked with the Call Centre in Berlin
and, like Berlin, had a specific, single number for members of
the public to call: it also took on much of the work of liasing
with the UK friends and relatives of consular clients in Germany.
29. For much of the tournament, we operated comfortably
within the resources available to the mobile teams and other parts
of the operation. However, at times (particularly around the time
of the Stuttgart match when a relatively high number of British
nationals were detained) they were fully stretched. This suggests
that we got our risk assessment for the staffing levels of the
mobile team about right. However, this will always be difficult
to predict (see lessons learned below) as demand for assistance
can vary considerably throughout such a tournament and an element
of contingency is necessary to deal with any major incident.
30. In addition to the mobile team, the Embassy
in Berlin had a separate, reserve group of staff on stand-by throughout
the tournament to deploy to the scene of any major incident in
Germany. Although this group was not used, it was an essential
contingency measure and could have dealt with, for example, a
coach crash or other major incident in another part of Germany
if this had occurred during the World Cup.
COSTS
31. We allocated £500,000 from the resources
of Consular Directorate for the World Cup. This covered mainly
extra staff, pre-tournament publicity campaigns, transport and
accommodation for the mobile teams. As final invoices are paid,
our latest forecast is that this budget will be 6-8% underspent.
32. In addition to the direct financial costs
of the tournament there were substantial opportunity costs for
the Embassy in Berlin in re-prioritising other work in order to
focus on the World Cup. This is an important factor for any post
to take account of in planning for an operation on this scale.
However, we estimate that these costs were more than outweighed
by the positive gains for the bilateral relationship and the image
of the UK in Germany which flowed from the success of the tournament
and not least from the generally excellent performance of England's
travelling fans. And for Berlin Embassy staff, working on the
World Cup offered valuable opportunities: they have gained new
knowledge and experience, with many more now having been exposed
to consular work and the customer care and other skills it requires;
a better level of preparedness for emergencies; and a strengthened
sense of team spirit having gone through a testing period together.
Work is in hand to make sure that these gains are recognised and
maintained.
LESSONS LEARNED
33. We conducted a full review of lessons learned
from the World Cup at a meeting in Berlin immediately after the
tournament, and have held a separate review in London of Consular
Directorate's part in the preparations and the operation itself.
34. The main lessons which we have learned from
the tournament are as follows:
— The mobile team approach, using
staff with the right local knowledge drawn from across the German
network and temporary Consulates in the venue cities, was the
right one for a tournament on this scale. It allowed us to deliver
a fast-moving and flexible service where it was needed. None of
our permanent posts in Germany could have coped from their usual
day-to-day resources. This lesson is even more important when
looking at countries where the FCO's network is smaller eg Austria/Switzerland
for Euro 2008.
— It is difficult to make good predictions
about what the demand for consular assistance will be. The first
three games were relatively light compared to what we expected;
but the detentions in Stuttgart on the weekend of 24-25 June stretched
our mobile teams and call centres to full capacity. We were right
to staff the mobile teams on a risk-assessed basis; there will
always need to be an element of spare capacity during "normal"
working of the teams, on a contingency basis, so that they can
deal with peaks in demand.
— Such a potentially demanding event
requires central direction (in this case by the Embassy in Berlin)
in order to join up the efforts of a range of posts and partners.
This could be reinforced for future tournaments by formalising
an arrangement with a single senior point of accountability ("Senior
Responsible Owner"), probably the Ambassador.
— The single initial point of contact
for British citizens seeking advice or assistance (dedicated telephone
number) worked well and helped us to reduce the demands on the
mobile teams on the ground.
— Pre-tournament publicity aimed at
preventing trouble, reducing risk and managing expectations pays
off. There is real evidence that our "Avoiding Penalties"
campaign and our engagement with fans helped to reduce the demand
for our assistance during the tournament, and helped those fans
who did get into difficulty to contact us easily and effectively.
This kind of communications strategy, using a range of means for
getting messages across and a number of partnerships with fans
groups, the FA, airports etc will serve as a model for future
tournaments.
— Early planning is essential. Though
we were able to put in place all the measures flowing from our
contingency exercise on 3 May, timing was tight. We should conduct
training and crisis contingency exercises earlier in future tournaments
than we did for this World Cup, to allow more time for the lessons
learned from them to be implemented.
— Proactive public diplomacy and media
handling before, during and after the tournament (including close
co-operation across Whitehall and with other stakeholders eg Home
Office, the Police, fans and the FA, local authorities in the
host country) is an inextricable part of successful consular service
delivery at large-scale sporting occasions like the World Cup.
This cannot be emphasised too strongly.
— The Football Attaché was
fully stretched and at times found it difficult to combine engagement
with fans and organisers with co-ordination of the consular logistics
(deployment plans etc) across a the network of our posts in Germany.
For future tournaments we should consider reinforcing this function,
for example with an additional member of staff.
PASSING ON
THE LESSONS
35. We were able to involve consular staff from
our posts in Austria and Switzerland in one of the mobile team
deployments during the tournament, to expose them to some of the
challenges that they will face as they begin to prepare for Euro
2008. We are putting together for them a library of key documents
(job descriptions, budgets, logistics plans, communications plans,
contacts, etc) which they will find useful as they begin that
planning. The Embassy in Berlin has already shared lessons learned
with our Posts in Vienna and Berne.
36. Our full-time Sports Liaison Officer in Consular
Directorate in London will maintain the knowledge gained and lessons
learned from this tournament and provide continuity between tournaments
and matches. With the qualifiers for Euro 2008 due to begin soon,
this officer will be the focus of continual refinement of our
plans and collection of lessons learned to ensure that we build
further on the successes of previous tournaments.
CONCLUSION
37. The World Cup consular operation was an enormous
success. We were able to deliver a flexible, mobile service which
put our resources where they was most needed and offered travelling
fans the right level of support. We minimised the number of those
having to turn to us for help, through a highly targeted and effective
communications campaign. We had well-tested plans in place to
deal with major incidents such as a terrorist attack occurring
during the tournament. Above all, our staff performed exceptionally
well under often high levels of pressure and of media and other
scrutiny. We have learnt lessons from this tournament which will
inform our planning for future such events.
38. The World Cup operation can also be seen
against the FCO's objectives of increasing the professionalism
of our own staff. It provided staff in Germany, in neighbouring
posts and in London with the opportunity to improve our project
management and contingency handling expertise; and to develop
the leadership qualities which are part of those skills.
39. We would welcome any comments or questions
which the Committee has on this report.
Annex I
| Post |
| | | |
| Mobile team | |
| | |
| Venue | Berlin | Dusseldorf
| Hamburg | Munich | Overall
| Cologne | Frankfurt | Gelsenkirchen
| Nurnberg | Stuttgart | Overall
|
| Case Type | |
| | | |
| | | |
| |
| Prison visits | |
| | 2 | 2 |
| | | 1
| 87 | 88 |
| Prison-related assistance |
2
| | | |
2
| | | |
|
9 |
9 |
| Prisoners contacted | |
5
| |
10 |
15
| | | |
| |
0 |
| | |
| | 0 | |
| | | | 0
|
| Emergency Passports issued |
15
|
6 | |
14
|
35 |
8 |
|
7 |
3 |
9
|
27 |
| Full biometric passports issued |
|
44 | |
|
44 | |
| | | |
0
|
| Letters issued to help BNs return to UK |
0 | |
0
|
2 |
2
|
2 |
2
|
9 | |
1
|
14 |
| Recovered passports handed in |
18
| | | |
18
|
1 |
3
|
1 |
4
|
3 |
12
|
| Temporary Passports issued |
18
| | | |
18
|
7 |
3 |
|
7 |
6 |
23
|
| Passport-related assitance |
| |
1 |
|
1 |
8 |
6
|
2 | |
1
|
17 |
| | |
| | 0 | |
| | | | 0
|
| Lost property handed in |
35
| |
5 |
|
40 |
1 |
| |
2 |
|
3 |
| Lost property inquiry | |
| | |
0
|
1 |
3 |
|
1 |
1 |
6
|
| Missed coach assistance | |
| | |
0
| |
1 |
12
| | |
13
|
| | |
| | 0 | |
| | | | 0
|
| Missing person report | |
| | |
0
|
1 |
2 |
|
3 |
1 |
7
|
| Stranded Minor | |
| | | 0 |
| | 1 | |
| 1 |
| Medical Assistance | |
| | |
0
|
1 |
1 |
| | |
2
|
| Uninsured hospitalisations |
|
8 |
3 |
|
11 | |
| | | |
0
|
| | |
| | 0 | |
| | | | 0
|
| Other assistance | 114 | 26
| | | 140 |
3 | 6 | 2 |
| 1 | 12 |
| Total | 202 | 89
| 9 | 28 | 328 |
33 | 27 | 34 | 21
| 119 | 234 |
| | |
| | | |
| | | |
|
Annex II
A BREAKDOWN OF CALLS RECEIVED IN THE BERLIN CALL CENTRE
DURING THE FIFA WORLD CUP 2006
| Lost/Stolen Passport | 187 |
| Lost/Stolen ticket | 20 |
| Lost/Stolen Money/Credit Cards | 40
|
| Directions to stadium | 4 |
| General information | 62 |
| Medical information | 4 |
| Report of Illness/Injury | 8
|
| Report of Assault | 6 |
| Report of Arrest | 85 |
| Report of Death | 2 |
| Report of Missing Person | 37
|
| Other | 320 |
| Total calls recorded | 775
|
| |
| 
