Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
RT HON
ALISTAIR DARLING
MP, MS NIKI
TOMPKINSON, AND
MR JOHN
GRUBB
2 NOVEMBER 2005
Q20 Mrs Ellman: It may
have been an underlying reason.
Mr Darling: I can think of many
cases where the operator has groaned and said, "Surely you
don't expect us to do this", and we have said, "Yes,
we do", and they have done it. For example, now in more and
more airports we insist on segregation of incoming and outgoing
passengers, and that is expensive because it means you have got
to build basically two corridors. Of course the industry will
say, "That's expensive and we've got to find that money",
but we take the view, "Well, you've got to do that because
we think that's sensible". Maybe we have not been in a situation
where we have thought of something which we think is so good that
we should do it and the industry is saying, "Well, it's out
of the question because it would cost trillions of pounds",
and so on, but at the end of the day we are all on the same side
in this, whether an airport operator, for example, or a train-operating
company, the Government, Transec and so on, and we try and do
things which are sensible, which are proportionate and which work.
There is no science to this. You cannot do a nice calculation
and come up with the answers and proceed on that basis, but you
just have to exercise a degree of commonsense, I think.
Q21 Mrs Ellman: Transec
can only make recommendations, can it not, so do you think there
is a case for strengthening it?
Mr Darling: No, we can tell people
what to do.
Ms Tompkinson: We can indeed tell
people what to do because we issue directions to the industry
which do require them to carry out the measures that we have advised.
To come back to your earlier point, the way we manage it is to
work very closely with the industry, so we are trying to develop
some new measures, for example, and we do not just sit down and
do it on our own, but we will work with the industry. We share
the problem with them, brief them on the threat, make sure they
understand the sort of threat that they might be under, and then
we can work with them to try to devise a measure that will meet
that particular risk that we all share.
Q22 Mrs Ellman: Are you
working with airline manufacturers and looking at design materials
to withstand explosions?
Mr Darling: That work goes on
all the time. I think Transec will naturally take an interest
in that, as do airlines, as the purchasers of a number of these
aircraft, and ourselves, but yes, we do and all the time the manufacturers
are coming up with a better design not just against any explosives,
for example, but also the better design of aircraft to deal with
the normal conditions they encounter.
Q23 Mrs Ellman: Transec
has a lot of different organisations in it, has it not, but do
those work well together and how well is that linked to the Security
Service?
Ms Tompkinson: Transec is one
organisation, not a mixture of organisations. It is one part of
the Department, so it is just a separate directorate. People within
Transec come from either elsewhere in the Department or from other
departments or from outside where we recruit people from industry.
We are all there as mainstream civil servants as part of the Department
and we are not a mixture of organisations. We work very well with
the Security Service and other intelligence organisations, and
that is a key part of our work, to make sure that we understand
the sort of threats that they can describe and assess for us,
so that relationship is a very close one.
Q24 Chairman: Could I
ask you whether you would be surprised to hear that British Airways
said that to their knowledge, "no regulatory impact assessment
has ever been undertaken to demonstrate that the additional requirements
are either proportionate or reasonable to address the assessed
threat. If such an assessment has been undertaken, its analysis
and conclusions have not been shared with the industry, nor was
it consulted"? In the light of what you have just said, does
that surprise you?
Ms Tompkinson: I think it does
surprise me hearing it like that. Formally, yes, they are correct,
we have not gone through the sort of process which I think you
are describing there, but the work that we do with the industry
would always take into account whether or not they say they can
deliver it because our view is that there is no point asking them
to deliver a measure if it is going to bankrupt them or they simply
cannot do it, it is not doable. It comes back to finding out what
can be done and what cannot, and we are working with them to an
accommodation. As we have said already, this is not a science,
it is an art, and when we are discussing with the airlines, the
airports and all the other industries what to do, we are very
interested in the end objective, and then there will be different
ways of meeting that objective, so we might start off with one
idea about how we might meet that objective and the industry might
have an alternative idea which would be equally good and we would
be very happy to go with that as well.
Q25 Chairman: It just
seems to be a little bit surprising in view of what the Secretary
of State said, that they could not actually recall a regulatory
impact assessment.
Mr Darling: Well, I am not surprised
at that. If you look at the way this has evolved over the years
and increasingly over the recent years, it tends to be at each
stage, at each development in the light of threats and in the
light of actual incidents that security has been tightened. Therefore,
we have not, I think, carried out a formal regulatory impact assessment
and I just wonder what we would actually find if we did one. I
may say that, on most occasions, most British airlines are more
than happy to co-operate with the sort of things we have developed
because, as I said earlier, I think, in reply to Mrs Ellman, we
are actually all trying to achieve the same end and there is a
premium on airlines doing as much as they can to make travel safe
because that gives their passengers confidence.
Chairman: I think what everyone feels
if they are of general intelligence is that they probably did
not perceive that.
Q26 Mr Clelland: If we
had been having this discussion before 7 July, then the description
that you gave of well-developed and regulated programmes might
have instilled some confidence among the Committee, but we now
know of course that they were absolutely no use to us at all on
7 and 21 July, so why should the Committee have confidence that
these well-developed and regulated programmes will be any more
efficient in the future?
Ms Tompkinson: The answer to that
is that our programmes are very sort of wide and varied. The events
of 7 and 21 July were specific circumstances, an attack on a local
network which, as I said, is probably the most difficult one to
prevent at the time that it happens, but that does not mean to
say that the other measures that we have in place are not valid,
but we have to take into account other types of attack and other
threats to the network, whether it is a closed network like aviation
or the open network. Of course what is never known, and it makes
it very hard for us to assess the success of our job, what is
never known publicly, and we do not know either, is what has not
happened and what attacks have been prevented. That is a completely
open question.
Mr Darling: I am not sure I share
the analysis behind your question. Yes, it is true that these
attacks happened and it is patently obvious that it was not possible
for us to forestall these attacks in the first place and, as has
been said on many occasions before, a terrorist only has to be
lucky once. There are, as Niki has just said, a number of occasions
when we can be reasonably confident that things that we did stopped
things happening, although it is very difficult to prove a negative,
if you like, and it is extremely difficult to prove when we cannot
discuss these things in open court, as it were. If you are operating
an open network, like the tube or the mainline stations, what
you are aiming to do is to try and cut down the risk as much as
you possibly can through intelligence, through conventional policing,
specialist policing, measures that we impose on the operators
and so on, but, as I say, what you cannot do is seal off the system
from attacks completely. You cannot do that short of shutting
down, which I do not think anybody would advocate at all, but
that is not to say that we cannot improve and we cannot do better
and each day we try and do that, but I think we are very aware
that we are living under a very different risk from the one that
we have lived under for the last 30 years with Irish terrorist
groups and so on, and I am afraid it is one that we are going
to be living under for the rest of our lives and probably our
children's lives as well. We just have to make sure that on each
and every occasion we learn from what happens and we try to shut
off options, but, remember, there are people out there who, if
you shut down one option, are looking for another one and that
is just something we have got to be vigilant about.
Q27 Graham Stringer: Does
the Government have a view on extending the use of mobile phones
and the technology required to use mobile phones into the Underground
system?
Mr Darling: Yes, and here there
are two things. One is that we are looking at the lessons which
have been learnt after 7 July with mobile phones and I think it
is common knowledge that in the immediate aftermath of those attacks,
just about everybody in London and everybody who had a relative
or a friend in London got on their mobile phone, but the network
can only take so much and we need to look at that. There are a
number of steps which are on the way which will, I think, help
us if we are faced with a similar situation in the future. The
point about the Underground itself is that, as you know, the attempt
to replace the communications between control rooms and trains
with a PFI contract ran into all sorts of difficulties. However,
that contract, which has been operated by TfL, has now been reconstituted
and I think they are confident that by the end of 2007 there will
be a new system in place which will allow them to have a far more
up-to-date and better communication system than they have at the
moment. I may say though that on 7 July itself, although there
were some difficulties, that was not in itself a major difficulty
that the emergency services had to face. Once they were clear
what had happened, they were able then to get on with it and deal
with it and they were able then to put temporary arrangements
in to restore communications, especially in some of the tunnels
where the explosions had disrupted the communications that otherwise
were working. Niki, is that a fair summation?
Ms Tompkinson: Yes, I think that
is right.
Q28 Graham Stringer: That
was very interesting, but it is an answer to another question
which I might have come to. What I was thinking about was extending
the technology so that you and I could use our mobile phones in
the Underground and that technology might be used to trigger a
bomb to go off if you were to allow the radio waves to go down
the tunnels. Does the Government have a view about the extension
of that to be able to use mobile phones?
Ms Tompkinson: Again it is a balance
and, yes, it is one way of triggering a bomb, but it is not the
only way and there are plenty of other means of triggering a bomb.
You balance that against the benefits that there are to people
if they can use their mobile phones on the Underground, not least
of which is that, if there is an incident, people need to contact
other people, so I think from a security point of view I would
not put up a case to prevent the use of mobile phones on the Underground,
no.
Q29 Graham Stringer: Are
you satisfied with the quality of the coverage of the CCTV in
the Underground system?
Mr Darling: The answer to that
is that it is being upgraded at the moment. We have had to move
very quickly. Post Madrid, I think there was a realisation that
we need to have modern and up-to-date CCTV in most parts of the
network and there is a plan underway to do that which London Underground
are putting in place. As you will know, because of the legacy
arrangements, there are many different types of CCTV where some
are pretty old-fashioned and some are very modern and very, very
good. There is a general plan to upgrade them both on the Underground
and on the mainline stations and in other places where we think
we need to do that, but I think the answer to your question just
now is that improvements are being made, but an awful lot more
improvements need to be made in the future.
Q30 Graham Stringer: Is
there a schedule for those improvements?
Mr Darling: There is a programme
to work through. Both Network Rail have one and London Underground
have one as well.
Q31 Graham Stringer: When
will the system be to the Government's satisfaction?
Mr Darling: The answer to that
question is it probably never will be because, as more and more
kit comes on to the market, you want to get better and better
stuff. Again without going into detail for obvious reasons, there
is CCTV that can do things that two or three years ago would have
been unimaginable.
Q32 Graham Stringer: Can
I ask you, on a completely different point, Secretary of State,
whether you have read the 9/11 Commission's report? It is probably
the most frightening report I have ever read, very clearly written,
and it showed that there were all sorts of communication problems
within the United States between the different agencies there
and air traffic control and the defence system. Can you assure
us that in a similar situation, were it to happen in the UK, the
British Government has learnt from that and that there would be
good communications between the different agencies?
Mr Darling: Yes, and obviously
it is not just this country we look to and incidents that we have
had over the years, and of course we look not just at the United
States, but there have been many incidents around the world. I
suppose, Mr Stringer, one way of answering this, without being
complacent in any way at all, is that on 7 July we were able to
respond very quickly once it became apparent that there had been
these attacks because we have tried and tested in exercises as
well as sometimes in incidents bringing people together, the key
agencies, both ministers and people from the police, the emergency
services, the transport operators, bringing them under one roof
under the COBR system. We were able to work very closely together
to be able to discuss what was happening and how we respond to
it, how, within an hour of the attack, we were planning for the
recovery and so on, and all these things could be done because
we had brought the people together. Although, if you look at a
sort of chart of who does what in Whitehall, you might come to
the conclusion that there seems to be a lot of different bodies
doing different things under different chains of command, in practice
it is not quite like that and all these services work very closely
together. One advantage I think we have got which the United States
did not have then, and it is getting a lot better now, is that
the United States had a lot of agencies that were fairly freestanding
and fairly independent of each other and some of them jealously
guarded their independence. I think on an occasion like 9/11 or
any other, this is not the time to be standing on ceremony; you
are in it together. I think although there are lessons we need
to learn after 7 July and there are improvements that need to
be made which we could identify on the day needed to be looked
at, I think, generally speaking, our response was seen by people
in this country and also, incidentally, by the United States,
especially in the light of their recent experiences and civil
problems in New Orleans and so on, and they have been asking themselves,
"How do we better organise central government and its agencies
to pull in the same direction?" Now, I am not being complacent
and, yes, there were problems, but it was striking how, by the
fact that in this country we can get people under the same roof
very quickly, you can actually make things happen quickly.
Q33 Graham Stringer: That
answers the question really about training, and you did not mention
air traffic controllers, but you think that it was a similar scenario
to 9/11?
Mr Darling: Yes, absolutely.
Q34 Graham Stringer: Okay,
I accept that. In an equivalent situation to 9/11, are you confident
that all the IT systems are up to communicating across the different
agencies and making sure that there is a unified response?
Mr Darling: Well, I will ask Niki
to talk about the IT. The day we all have the same IT for everything
is probably a very, very long way off for obvious reasons. I think
what you need to recognise is that there are some things that
IT is important for, for communication, and there are other things
where there is no substitute for word of mouth and actually having
people sitting in a room, talking to each other and saying, "What
do we do? What's happening? How do we react to these things?"
As I say, we are always looking at these things, always testing,
and just about every month there is a separate exercise going
on, testing these things, and that does actually sometimes expose
difficulties. Niki, do you want to deal with the IT point?
Ms Tompkinson: Yes, the point
to make is that obviously increasingly people are dependent on
IT systems to operate and to communicate with each other, and
those IT systems can themselves be threatened, so they can be
vulnerable. There is an organisation within government which exists
purely to advise industry and critical national infrastructure
on their IT security, so we do not have the expertise in Transec,
but it is an organisation that we work with and it is within the
Security Service. They have the expertise there and they work
directly with the industries to advise them about these systems
and they can put out alerts if they are aware of any particular
threats or viruses that are coming.
Q35 Mr Donaldson: Intelligence
has already been established as being an important element in
thwarting terrorist attacks. Indeed our experience in Northern
Ireland is that, through intelligence-based counter-terrorist
measures, we were able to thwart four out of every five terrorist
attacks in the Province. Therefore, what steps is the Department
and also Transec taking to ensure that there is close liaison
with the Security Service on the question of the flow of intelligence
to your organisation?
Ms Tompkinson: The flow is very
good indeed and very immediate. The threat from international
terrorism is assessed by an organisation called JTAC, the Joint
Terrorism Analysis Centre, which is a number of different organisations
which have come together to form the definitive assessment of
the threat from terrorism. Within Transec I have a small threats
team who liaise directly with JTAC and indeed they are double-badged,
if you like, in that they are members of JTAC as well as members
of Transec, so they sit in Transec all the time, but they go regularly,
daily, to JTAC to receive intelligence briefings and they have
direct access to all of the intelligence, and we can commission
assessments and we can ask for clarification of any of the information
we do not understand. It is a very close link, so my threats team
have a link between the intelligence agencies and the rest of
Transec, and if there is new threat information, we get it immediately
and we can then translate it into, "Do we need to respond
to this? Is there something we need to do? Who do we need to talk
to in industry? What are the measures we need to take?" It
is very quick and that operates 24/7.
Q36 Mr Donaldson: What
is the current intelligence assessment of the present level of
threat from a terrorist attack to the UK transport system?
Ms Tompkinson: I do not think
that is a question for me to answer in this forum. Clearly since
the attacks in July it is well known that the threat remains very
real, as it did before, and we need to take all measures to counter
that.
Q37 Mr Donaldson: How
much credence do you place on intelligence assessments that come
to Transec?
Ms Tompkinson: We place very high
credence on them, but we understand that again intelligence and
the assessment of intelligence is an art, not a science, so you
know what you know and the assessments are made with the best
possible expertise and in the light of all the information that
is available.
Q38 Mr Donaldson: To what
extent is security at airports, and particularly airports in the
UK that deal largely with domestic passengers, influenced by those
intelligence assessments?
Ms Tompkinson: The regime that
is in place at airports is standard at all airports, so we do
not have different security in place for domestic as opposed to
international, so they all operate the same regime. We have a
layered approach to security, so there are basic security programmes
in place and then additional layers of security on top of that
and that is where we are at present because we consider we are
at a heightened threat from terrorism. We can adjust the measures
if new information comes in, but essentially it is the same across
the board at all airports.
Q39 Mr Donaldson: You
say that, but if I am a passenger travelling from London to New
York, I join a queue to go through the security system and all
the passengers have the same experience. However, if I am at Liverpool
Airport travelling to Belfast, I have to join a different queue
because I am going to Northern Ireland and I have to go through
an entirely different security check where my photograph is taken,
whereas if I am a passenger travelling to Glasgow, my photograph
is not taken at Liverpool Airport or at Manchester Airport, so
how come at the domestic level you have a different regime operating
at many of the domestic airports in the UK which treats Northern
Ireland passengers separately and differently and at a higher
level of security than for the passengers travelling to other
UK internal destinations, if, as you say, the level of security
is the same for domestic and international passengers?
Ms Tompkinson: The regimes that
I am talking about are the physical security regimes that we regulate
and they are the same for all airports. There may be additional
measures in place, and I mentioned earlier that we work closely
with the control agencies, the border agencies, such as the police,
immigration and customs, and they may have different requirements
which may be over and above or different from our own, and that
might explain some of the different measures that you see. However,
in terms of DfT's programme that we require of the industry, it
is uniform throughout all the airports.
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