UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be
published as HC 637-i
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
TRANSPORT COMMITTEE
TRANSPORT SECURITY
Wednesday 2 November 2005
RT HON ALISTAIR DARLING MP, MS NIKI TOMPKINSON and MR
JOHN GRUBB
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 -
75
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Transport Committee
on Wednesday 2 November 2005
Members present
Mrs Gwyneth Dunwoody, in the Chair
Mr David Clelland
Mr Jeffrey Donaldson
Clive Efford
Mrs Louise Ellman
Mr Robert Goodwill
Mr John Leech
Mr Eric Martlew
Mr Lee Scott
Graham Stringer
________________
Memorandum submitted by the Department for Transport
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Rt Hon Alastair
Darling, a Member of the House, Secretary of State for Transport, Ms Niki Tompkinson, Director of
Transport Security, and Mr John Grubb,
Deputy Director, Department for Transport, examined.
Q1 Chairman: I am delighted to see you this afternoon,
Secretary of State. Can I just make a
short statement. We are very grateful
to you and your officials for coming to see us today on the important subject
of transport security. I am going to
ask you to introduce your colleagues in a minute, but I just want to say that
transport security is a large and important subject, larger than we could do
justice to in a single session. For
that reason, the Committee will wish to conduct a full inquiry into transport
security in the coming period. The
single purpose of today's session will be to understand the Department's
security function better and to determine what added value it can provide for
keeping the travelling public safe, but I want to make it very clear to
everyone taking part that the House sub
judice rule prevents discussion in Parliament of specific cases which are
currently before the courts. The aim of
the rule is to safeguard the right to a fair trial and fair consideration of
events at an inquest. Our questioning
will take full account of the rule and it is of great importance that we have
it very clearly in mind. Finally, I
hardly need to remind you, Secretary of State, that the job of this Committee
is to scrutinise the work of your Department, something which we try to do
vigorously, but fairly, and I would like to place on record that we do
understand the constraints on you and your officials in open session when
discussing this subject. Equally, I
hope you will feel able to provide the fullest possible picture of the work of
Transec today. Secretary of State,
perhaps you have got something to say to us before we begin.
Mr Darling: I do, Mrs Dunwoody, with your permission, but
perhaps before I do that I could introduce my colleagues. Niki Tompkinson is the Director of Transec,
the Department's transport security division, and John Grubb is one of her
deputies. After I have made a few
introductory remarks, I think it might be helpful if Niki were to outline her
perspective to indicate the areas she proposes to cover, although of course we
are happy to answer any questions within the provisos you yourself have established. I wonder, Mrs Dunwoody, before we get to
that, if I could deal with one preliminary matter in relation to security
because I think it is relevant to your consideration overall, and that is in
relation to some tests and trials that we want to carry out on our mainline
railways and on the Underground. You
may recall that on 7 July and in the days afterwards I made the important point
that you cannot run a closed system, as we do in the airports, on the railway
system. In other words, you cannot have
a sealed system where you are reasonably satisfied that everybody going into
the system has been searched, either their bags or themselves; it just is not
possible. If you take the London
Underground alone, it carries something like three million people a day and, again
by way of comparison, Heathrow, as the Committee will know, is the busiest
airport in the world and Waterloo Station carries four times as many passengers
every day as Heathrow. I think if you
just keep that in mind, people will accept that it is not practical to run a
sealed system in any event with the mainline railway stretching over thousands
of miles; it is not possible to seal every bit of it. That said, there is new technology becoming available all the
time. The Department wants to make sure
that, as and when new technology is developed, we evaluate it and see whether
or not it would help us in reducing some of the risks that we know we have to
encounter. To that end, I need to tell
the Committee and, through you, inform Parliament that over the next few months
we will be trialling various security equipment on different parts of the
network. I am sorry that on Sunday
somebody chose to leak part of it to a Sunday newspaper which has given rise to
all sorts of wild speculation which is why I have said what I have said about
the impossibility of having a sealed railway system. I am afraid that is what happens when you have to take a number of
people in the industry with you before you make any announcement; somebody will
go to the business pages of a newspaper and you just have to live with
that. Perhaps I may just explain
briefly what we are proposing to do. We
need to test equipment and I can confirm that the first place we will be
testing is in Paddington Station on the Heathrow Express. We will be carrying out further tests of
different types of equipment at mainline stations and some tube stations.
Q2 Chairman: All mainline stations?
Mr Darling: Not all, no.
What is most important is that we are not in a position to be
introducing equipment across the network as we have in airports. This is testing individual equipment, some
of it new to the market and some of it we have used in the past in aviation
security. What we want to do is to see
how it might work in a bus station, how it might work in a tube station, and
bear in mind that these tube stations, for the most part, were built in the 19th
Century, long before any of this problem ever arose, and obviously the
environment in which some equipment works in an airport is completely different
from the sort of
environment that might work in a tube station in central London. Therefore, what we are doing is simply
testing different bits of equipment that will come on to the market, some of
which has been developed and some of which is being developed, but what I want
to emphasise again is, firstly, you cannot run airport-style security on the
railways, tube or overground, and, secondly, the tests are alongside other
security measures that we are taking, some of which are obvious, some of which
are not so obvious, which we do not tend to discuss for perfectly obvious
reasons. This is a commonsense approach. I think we would be open to criticism if new
equipment came along and we did not actually trial it and ask ourselves, "Would
it work? Could it help?" Immediately after the aftermath of the
events of 7 July, there was one particular company appearing to suggest that
they had kit which was ready to go if only the Department for Transport would
buy it. That is not so. Equipment that can screen three million
people a day without unduly inconveniencing them just does not exist at the
present time here or anywhere else in the world. Therefore, what we are doing is simply testing this equipment. The reason I wanted to tell the House was
that from time to time it will see this equipment, from time to time people
will be asked to take part in these trials, to be screened and so on, and it is
right that we should tell Parliament we are doing it. I will arrange for a fuller statement to be laid before the House
tomorrow, but I thought it might be useful for the Committee to know this.
Q3 Chairman: Can I just ask you very briefly, you said the
Heathrow Express, but is that both ends of the Heathrow Express, therefore, at
Heathrow and at Paddington?
Mr Darling: No, initially it will be at Paddington
Station.
Q4 Chairman: Anywhere else?
Mr Darling: This equipment will be at Paddington, but
over the next few months, and I do not have start dates, we will be trialling
equipment at other locations which we are still definitely to decide on. I should just emphasise again that this is
not in place of what is there already.
Some things will work, some things will not work, but if we do not test
it, then we will never know. This whole
business of how you reduce risk and have a grown-up discussion about these
things, some things are possible to operate, some things are not, and I just
want to test them over the next few months.
Q5 Chairman: Do we have any indication of how long the
trials will last?
Mr Darling: We think probably about six months.
Q6 Chairman: Who have you consulted about this? Have you had talks with the Commissioner of
Police?
Mr Darling: Yes.
Q7 Chairman: Also the Mayor of London?
Mr Darling: Absolutely, yes, and the Mayor, for his
interest, is absolutely happy about this.
He, like the rest of us, is determined that we should do everything that
is reasonable, but the Mayor has also made the point that you cannot operate a
completely sealed system as you do in the aviation field.
Q8 Chairman: Could you tell us who is going to evaluate
the results?
Mr Darling: The Department will and from time to time
obviously we will discuss with the police, we will discuss with London
Underground, we will discuss with Network Rail, with the train-operating companies
and various other agencies as well, but we want a thorough evaluation. The other thing of course we are discussing,
and we continue to discuss, with the people who are actually developing this
technology when new technology comes along is whether or not it is practical.
Q9 Chairman: I take it from what you have said that it
would be some mix of existing technology and some experimental?
Mr Darling: Yes.
I should also say that we will not always make an announcement before we
do it because that would be self-defeating.
Q10 Chairman: Yes, but it just would be helpful for the
Committee to know, and we assume there will be some indication, that if they
are major stations Parliament will at least be given an indication of which
stations will be involved.
Mr Darling: I can confirm that the first one will be
Paddington and then as and when we have decided on other stations. What I cannot promise the House is that we
will make an announcement in respect of every piece of equipment because there
remain some things we want to test, but we do not particularly want to
broadcast that we have that capability.
Q11 Chairman: Secretary of State, you have made the point
very correctly, and we are now talking millions of people, not ten, that it is
important to most major stations that passengers are not impeded.
Mr Darling: This is always the balance between making
sure that people can go about their lawful business, people can travel, and
reducing risk. At its extreme, the
safest form of transport is one that is completely shut down and nobody can
travel on it because not a lot can go wrong then.
Q12 Chairman: We have already tried that system!
Mr Darling: We have tried that from time to time and not
always because of this particular threat.
I think people would expect us to do things which are reasonable. People understand the risks under which we
live, but, as I say, there will be things that we need to test and we will not
be making a public announcement because we would be ill-advised to do so, but
other stuff is perfectly obvious.
Q13 Mr Leech: You have half-answered my question
already. Are you able to tell us what
sort or any of the sort of technology that is going to be used?
Mr Darling: Yes.
Some of the stuff that we will be testing is some of the stuff that we
use at airports. For example, people
will be familiar with the swab-testing we do of people's bags to see whether
explosives have been used. Again it is
useful to test that in an environment like a station where the air is of a
different quality, shall we say, than it is in a sealed area. We will also want to look at screening
equipment, what is practical and what is not practical. There is other equipment coming along that
we will want to look at as well and this should very much be seen as sensible
planning for the future.
Q14 Mr Leech: Is some of this technology stuff that people
will not have seen at airports and elsewhere?
Mr Darling: Well, it will be from time to time. I am grateful for that, but could I now turn
to the subject of your inquiry and, before I ask Niki Tompkinson to say a few
words, may I make some preliminary comments.
Transec is a division of the Department for Transport. It is headed up by Niki Tompkinson who
reports directly to me, although she is very much part of the Department for
Transport. It is not an agency or
anything like that, but it is very much a part of the Department and works with
other officials there. It also works
very closely with other Whitehall departments, with other agencies and of
course with the various transport industries. Originally when it was set up, it
was set up with very much aviation as the centre of its operations, but over
time, for obvious reasons, it has expanded into ports and into railways, though
the approach it adopts in relation to what it does will vary from time to
time. I think it is important to
emphasise that it is not a policeman; it is basically there to advise, to
inspect, to make sure the standards are constantly reviewed and put in place and
that they are actually operated. It can
only work with the full co-operation of other agencies and other industries,
which it does quite well. You will have
questions, which we will answer, on the budget and the number of staff, but
what I would say to you, Mrs Dunwoody, which may be of help to your Committee,
is that when I became Secretary of State just over three years ago, it was an
important part of the Department, but it did not take up over-much time. In the last few years it has become an increasingly
important part of the Department and takes up an increasing amount of my
time. I think it would probably be
appropriate at this stage, if it is okay with you, to ask Niki Tompkinson
perhaps to give an overview of what she does and then we can take it from
there.
Q15 Chairman: Yes, exactly right, Ms Tompkinson, would you
do that for us please.
Ms Tompkinson: I will try to keep my opening remarks brief
because I know you have read the memorandum that we sent along ahead. I thought perhaps I could make just four
points to begin with which outline the priorities that Transec has been working
to since 9/11, which was the watershed, I think, for those of us who work on
transport security. There are four
things we have been focusing on. The
first is to maintain and to develop the security programmes that were already
in place at that time and we have continued to build on those. I think it is fair to say that we started
from a position of strength on 9/11; we already had very well-developed and
regulated programmes, particularly for aviation, as the Secretary of State has
remarked, and we also had some security in place for passenger ships,
particularly the cruise ships, and we were already giving advice and guidance
to the rail and Underground networks, so those programmes were there and we have
been able to build on them. Domestic
aviation, which was our focus then and continues to be a prime focus for us
now, was really a model for other people and that has been one of our
strengths. We continue to put an effort
into maintaining that and other programmes and adapting them to new
circumstances, so one of the pieces of work we have to do on a regular basis is
to continue to review what the threats are, what we know about them and whether
our current programmes are fit for purpose, and that takes quite a lot of our
time. After 9/11, there was not really
a great leap forward in terms of our domestic aviation programme, but a
stronger focus certainly on in-flight security was the main lesson that came
out of that. I would say at that time
and now, standards of compliance were good.
We already had an inspection regime in place that indicated that and,
since then, we have had a number of outside audits and we have had Sir John
Wheeler's review in September 2002 which endorsed our programme on aviation. On the international side, this is an area
where we have actually increased more than on the domestic focus. Increasingly, we have felt that we needed to
give more advice and guidance to airlines and to the shipping industry in their
overseas operations, and we have now quite an extensive programme in place with
a number of individuals posted overseas to advise on transport security in the
regions where they are based. We have
also put more resource into working with international bodies, such as the
International Civil Aviation Organisation, and with the European Commission to
raise standards worldwide, so all of this is part of doing what we do, our
professional work, and making sure that we keep the standards high. That is the first point. The second point is we have put a lot more
focus on to new programmes, which has been another key priority since 9/11, the
work on the maritime programme, for example, the work that was promoted by the
UN, the International Maritime Organisation and by the European Commission to
extend the regime, which we already had in place, to cargo and other
ships. There is also a new dangerous
goods regime which has come in in the last year or so. Since Madrid, the bombings in Madrid, and
the events this year in July here, there of course has been an increasing focus
on our rail and Underground systems, the soft targets that we have there, and
in that respect we have now formalised the informal regime we already had in
place and those industries are now subject to formal regulation. We have kept this under constant review
since Madrid and a further review after July.
The third point I just wanted to make briefly is that a key focus for me
and my team has been to build Transec in order to build all this work; it could
not have been done without that. We
inherited a strong team, I think, just after 9/11, people who knew their
business very well, and we wanted to build on that, but we have increased from
a staff of 81 to 200 now to do that work.
Finally, again a point that I think the Secretary of State has also
made, the key focus for us is to strengthen our links to other agencies. We do not work in isolation, we never have
done and we certainly do not do now. We
cannot ring-fence just our activities as being the only way to deliver
transport security, so we have been building increasingly close links and
synergy with others, particularly the border agencies, the police and customs,
as well as of course our very good relationship with the industry itself. That really is just to set out my stall, if
you like, the areas that I have been focusing on, and I am happy to take
questions on any of that.
Q16 Chairman: You have mentioned railways and the Underground,
both of which of course are "soft targets".
One could say that with the terrorist attacks on 7 and 21 July, we got it
wrong and we have actually failed.
Ms Tompkinson: I would not say that we have failed. I think those attacks, terrible as they were
with the number of deaths and injuries caused, were the type of attack which it
would have been extremely hard to avoid anywhere on any system in the
world. Our focus on the Underground and
rail has been on other types of attacks to ensure that other sorts of security
are in place. One of the things that we
constantly remind ourselves of is that whatever the attack is today, there have
been other types of attack that we need to protect the transport industries
from and we cannot just focus on the one that has happened and there are things
that we do which will prevent other sorts of attack.
Mr Darling: I would just make one point in relation to
the Underground. I am quite clear that
one of the reasons that the emergency services and the people working on the Underground
were able to respond so well on 7 July is because of the training and the
exercises that were carried out in the preceding few years, and also because
three years ago we were concerned about the ability to conduct that sort of
rescue. A lot of expense was incurred
and effort was put in to improving the equipment that the emergency services
carry. Of course I accept that that is
dealing with the aftermath of an incident, but, from my own observations, had
this happened three years ago, then of course the men and women working in
these services would have performed heroically, as they did, but their
preparedness was much better than it was and I think that is an essential part
of what we do. For Transec, part of its
job is to look at this response and to ask, "How can we make this better?" as
well as of course looking at things that can deter and prevent these attacks
taking place.
Q17 Chairman: Have you in effect made your training
programmes better and improved on them since then?
Mr Darling: Yes, I think all the emergency services after
7 July had, as you would expect, the debrief to look at what could have been
done better and I think that process is continuing in that they have not
reached a concluded view there, but I know that three years ago a lot of the
kit they actually carry now just was not available. There is a huge amount of work which has gone in sometimes, I
must say, rubbished by commentators outside when we test these things where
people have said, "Look, there isn't a risk.
You're just exaggerating these things", but I am very glad we did that
work because I am quite sure it has contributed to what I think, on any view,
was quite a heroic effort on 7 July and in the days and weeks after that.
Q18 Mrs Ellman: In your memorandum, you talk about achieving
a balance between security for the public and burdens on industry. How do you assess where that balance lies
and is it not a concern that if decisions are taken on a commercial basis, it
is likely that security will be at risk?
Mr Darling: No, and I will ask Niki to say something in a
moment about that on the operational side.
What that means is, as I was saying earlier, you have to strike a
balance between what is a reasonable proportion, what is a reasonable position,
if you like, on passengers and on an industry and where you tip over into something
that is just unreasonable and is causing so much inconvenience that it is not
worth it. For example, I will use the
example of screening which is now commonplace in every airport around the
world, but 30 years ago there was a big debate as to whether or not that was a
big imposition on people to have to go through detectors or it was an
imposition on the industry to put that in, but most people think that is
perfectly acceptable. You can imagine a
situation where you could introduce more screening, perhaps 20 minutes per
passenger to screen them, and you say, "Is it worth doing that? Would you actually find something? Is it worth virtually bringing an airport to
a halt by doing that?" These are
judgments that you have got to exercise all the time, but I can think of no
instance where people have said, "Well, actually we would really like to do
this. It would be really first class,
but it's too expensive". It is a
judgment reached, there is no science behind it, it is really a commonsense
judgment.
Q19 Mrs Ellman: Are you saying that there are no instances at
all where it was felt that, for security reasons, something should be done and,
for commercial reasons, the operator concerned did not want to do it? They may not have put it in that way.
Mr Darling: No, I cannot.
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.
There no, 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 Cobra 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.
Q40 Mr Donaldson: So are you saying that Transec at the moment
does not require airport security to take photographs of passengers travelling
on internal journeys from one UK airport in Great Britain to another UK airport
in Great Britain?
Ms Tompkinson: It is not one of our requirements, no, that
is correct.
Q41 Mr Donaldson: Do you not think that needs to be reviewed?
Ms Tompkinson: Well, it is not my requirement. Are you saying that we should be doing it to
all passengers or that we should not be doing it to some?
Mr Donaldson: I know we have had a problem in Northern
Ireland, and thankfully most of the problem has gone, but I am not aware, for example,
that al-Qaeda operate in Belfast and, therefore, that there is a particular
risk from an al-Qaeda attack on a flight from Belfast into Liverpool,
Manchester, London or any other UK airport.
Therefore, I am asking you why it is deemed necessary only to photograph
passengers travelling to and from Belfast and not to photograph other
passengers and do you believe, therefore, that the risk of a terrorist attack
from Glasgow, say, to London or from Leeds to London is less?
Q42 Chairman: If it would be helpful at some point, perhaps
you could actually give us a brief note in confidence about that.
Mr Darling: I would make an observation here. Niki is making the point that a Transec
requirement is not for photographing.
What she is saying is that there may be other agencies who may be very
interested in who is flying into Belfast for reasons that you will be more
aware of than I. However, it is not our
policy at the moment to photograph people going from, say, Edinburgh to
London. I may say for the sake of
completeness, because some of you may have observed this, that there are a
number of airports where an enhancement of security when you go through the
security check at Gatwick and Birmingham, for example, is that you are
photographed and it is on a bar chart, so they can see it is the same person
going on to the aeroplane as the one that checked in through security. The reason for that is with airports being
large shopping centres with all sorts of people milling around, it is quite a
useful thing, but, no, we do not insist on everybody being photographed. Obviously these are things that people
consider, but I think there is a specific reason for being very interested in
who is flying across the Irish Sea and I think you will know why that is.
Mr Donaldson: I understand that, Secretary of State, but I
am somewhat surprised that some of these measures have only recently been
introduced when it is clear that the threat in respect of domestic terrorism is
significantly less now than the threat from international terrorism.
Q43 Chairman: I think the Committee has a right, Secretary
of State, to ask you about the security treatment of passengers going through
domestic airports.
Mr Darling: Of course it has.
Q44 Chairman: We would welcome a note on that.
Mr Darling: If you would like a note, we can certainly do
that.
Q45 Chairman: I think it would help.
Mr Darling: I think we had better check with the people
who might be requiring these photographs.
Chairman: Yes, but we just need a clear explanation of
this.
Q46 Mr Scott: Secretary of State, are we liaising with
other countries who have experienced homicide bombings, particularly on buses,
and do we liaise with their agencies as well and take some advice on perhaps
some techniques they have? I am
thinking of Israel who have experienced this for many, many years.
Mr Darling: Across government, and indeed Transec, we do
keep in regular contact with their counterparts and from time to time it may be
specific incidents or it may be things in general which are discussed because
quite obviously we should learn from their experience. Sometimes there are direct lessons to be
learned, sometimes there are not.
Q47 Clive Efford: Could you explain why the annexes breaking
down Transec's total running costs, expenditure, programme expenditure and
human resourcing, which feature in the annual reports of 2001 and 2003, have
been dropped in the 2002 and 2004 reports?
Ms Tompkinson: I think when we did the more recent report we
felt that perhaps too much detailed information had gone into the earlier
reports and particularly now we wanted to get something that we put on to our
website which would be very accessible to the general public. If you would like to see that detail of
information again for the current years, then we would be very happy to provide
that if it would be useful.
Q48 Clive Efford: Is it an onerous task to produce that
material?
Ms Tompkinson: It is not particularly onerous, no. It is another job to do and it is the sort
of work that we would do in-house. We
were trying to strike a balance between getting information out into the public
domain on our website and what we thought would be of interest to the public
and relevant to their interests and maybe it was at the expense of providing
information which would be of use to this Committee.
Q49 Clive Efford: Your business plan is security-classified and
not publicly available?
Ms Tompkinson: That is correct.
Q50 Clive Efford: How can we be assured the format accords with
best practice?
Ms Tompkinson: As the Secretary of State said at the
beginning, my directorate is very much part of the Department, so within the
Department I am subject to all of the usual rules and regulations and oversight
of any part of the Department. I have to
produce an annual business plan according to exactly the same criteria as other
parts of the Department, the only difference is it is classified because of all
the material we bring together and it will tell you something about the
vulnerabilities we perceive which we are working on. The management board looks at all of the directorates' business
plans, it certainly looks at mine. We
have to put in a return every two months to say how we are making progress
against some of the key items, and I have regular meetings with the
Director-General I work to within the Department and the Permanent Secretary to
assure them the work is in hand and being completed.
Q51 Clive Efford: So your department is treated exactly the
same as others? For example, you have
departmental targets?
Ms Tompkinson: Yes.
Q52 Clive Efford: Is Transec's work included in the public
service agreement for the Department for Transport?
Ms Tompkinson: There is not a public service agreement for
Transec's work, no.
Q53 Clive Efford: Is there a specific reason for that?
Ms Tompkinson: I will have to take advice on that within the
Department. I will have to give you a
note on that.
Mr Darling: We do not have a public service agreement for
every single thing we do and I am not sure this is an area which readily lends
itself to that, but if your Committee were to come to the view we ought to have
one, I am sure we could add it to the list of the ones we have.
Q54 Clive Efford: It is an area we might explore in our
report. Secretary of State, Transec has
200 staff currently, which seems quite modest compared with the growth in
demand for work in the area of security on transport. Are you confident that is a sufficient number of staff? If not, what do you intend to do in the
future to address that?
Mr Darling: I made the point at the start that Transec
does not operate on its own, it uses other agencies, other parts of the
Government, and Transec has increased in size quite dramatically over the last
three or four years. If there was a
case to be made for employing more people to do activity, that would be
something we would certainly look at. I
suppose that is an area where you would have to agree with me, Niki, but as far
as I know you are very happy with your staffing levels.
Q55 Clive Efford: I was going to ask that. Are you completely satisfied, Ms Tompkinson,
that you have sufficient staff and the correct skills base to fulfil the
role? If not, in what areas do you feel
you need more staff and more trained staff?
Ms Tompkinson: I am satisfied with the numbers we have and
Transec has been ring-fenced within the Department alongside the Accident
Investigation Branches. We have been
ring-fenced in terms of any headcount exercises, so we have not had to make any
cuts at all. Our establishment of 200
has been preserved and if I need more I know I can make a case and bid for it,
and that would be scrutinised alongside other bids.
Q56 Chairman: It may be ring-fenced but if you are 0.125
per cent of the budget of the Department, they are not taking an enormous risk
in ring-fencing you really, are they?
Ms Tompkinson: In terms of the current scrutiny of headcount
within the Department, yes, we are now quite a considerable proportion of DfT
Centre, which will be a fairly modestly sized central department of about
1,700, of which we are about 200, so that is quite a large proportion. In terms of the skills set, we recruit
people into Transec who either have the right skills or can be trained in our
sort of work, and I ensure we do not take risks by bringing people in who I
think are not up to the job. So our
recruitment process is a very careful one.
Mr Darling: It is a fairly specialist unit. The point about ring-fencing is important
because, as you know, all government departments are required to reduce their
general Civil Service headcount, but Transec is exempted, because it is a front
line service, and patently it would be unwise to be reducing the staffing
there. It is quite important. It did not have that security even 18 months
ago. It is relatively recently we got
this agreement with the Treasury but it is quite important in terms of the work
being carried out.
Q57 Clive Efford: How do we compare with similar organisations
overseas in terms of size and skills?
Ms Tompkinson: Most of my opposite numbers overseas are
envious of the amount of resources I have.
Chairman: I think, Ms Tompkinson, you are ruining the
future of your unit.
Q58 Clive Efford: You are forgetting that between 1994 and 2001
your department was reduced in size by about 20 per cent, so perhaps that was
not the best answer. Are all your staff
permanent or are some seconded?
Ms Tompkinson: They are mostly permanent. We have a few secondees who come in and do a
specific job and then leave again but the vast majority of the staff are
permanent.
Q59 Mr Martlew: I have been very impressed with your
presentation and it appears you are upping security especially on the
Underground and we talked about the new facilities being tested out at
Paddington. If you look at the
terrorists we are dealing with, they go for the soft target, and I am not
saying you should not be doing this, but I have a concern that perhaps too much
of the concentration is on London and on the Underground. We have a Metro in Newcastle and a tram
system in Manchester. If the terrorists
are going to go for the soft option, surely they will move away from the
Underground, which is fine and I do not disagree with that, and they will look
at these other vulnerable areas. A
perfect example is that everybody has buses and there was a bomb on a bus.
Mr Darling: I was conscious just before you spoke that
this has been a very Londoncentric discussion so far and it is important to
emphasise everything we have said so far applies to the transport network the
length and breadth of the country.
Obviously in aviation, which we touched on with Mr Donaldson, once you
are in the system, you are in the system, so we are interested whether you get
on at Heathrow or get on at Stornoway.
In relation to the Underground system, the Glasgow Underground is
regulated; it is a fairly recent thing we have introduced but it is treated in
the same way as the London one in terms of the attention we give to it. As is publicly known, there have been
terrorist activities in cities outside London and we do work both as a
department and also as Transec within the Department for Transport with local
authorities and with police outside London.
You are absolutely right, you cannot assume that any part of the
transport network is immune from attack, you have to proceed on the basis there
is a risk right across the network no matter where it is. Indeed some of the measures we are currently
contemplating in relation to railway stations will cover stations well away
from London.
Q60 Mr Martlew: Just on the bus side, the point was made
before about attacks in Israel and we did have one of the four attacks on a
bus, is there enough effort going into that?
Mr Darling: It is something again we keep constantly
under review. For example, a few years
ago CCTV on buses was pretty rare, but London will have very shortly all its
buses with CCTV and outside London increasingly new buses come fitted with
CCTV. I am bound to say it is mainly to
stop hooligans and vandals but it serves the same purpose. We are acutely aware of the risk. We are also aware, and this comes back to
the discussion with Mrs Ellman and Mrs Dunwoody at the start, it would be
rather difficult to screen everybody before they got on a bus. In Israel they have particular measures
which include soldiers on buses but, as we can see, no matter what you do there
will always be a risk.
Ms Tompkinson: On the point about what do we do to find out
more about the whole question of suicide bombers and what can be done, that is
very much a matter for the police and I know they have done a lot of work with
colleagues overseas, and Israel is a case in point. We have spoken to Israeli counterparts briefly on this but there
is a lot of work going on to look at suicide bombers which could manifest
itself not just on the transport network.
In terms of buses, we have recently put out some written guidance to all
bus operators which is based very much on the programmes we run on the rail and
Underground networks, so they have some security guidance and best practice to
work to. I think we will be doing more
of that over the coming months.
Q61 Mr Martlew: Earlier, you said your guidance was
instructions, that you had the right to do that, is that what you are doing
with the bus companies?
Ms Tompkinson: No, we do not have powers to give
instructions to bus companies, whereas we do on the rail and Underground, and
we have taken powers to be able to extend that to the light rail systems, to
the tram networks.
Q62 Mr Martlew: Are you thinking of extending it to buses as
well?
Ms Tompkinson: We are certainly thinking about it, yes, we
are.
Q63 Chairman: Bus companies are not open to a lot of
persuasion.
Mr Darling: It depends.
Q64 Chairman: There cannot be that many wanting to get to
the House of Lords, surely?
Mr Darling: If you take the CCTV, an increasing number of
bus companies can see the merit of having it for non-terrorist reasons, and
there are other things we want to encourage too. If we think we need powers to tell people what to do, we will
take them.
Chairman: We will remind you of that.
Q65 Mr Goodwill: On 9/11 the buildings withstood the impact of
the aircraft, it was the fuel fire which actually brought the buildings
down. Having worked as a tanker driver
and trained in hazardous chemicals I can imagine probably better than most the
effect of a chemical attack or a fuel tanker being driven into a building or
exploding in an area of high population.
Given we have in the region of seven vehicle hijackings a month and it
is much easier to hijack trucks than it is aeroplanes, have you assessed the
risk to people from vehicles being hijacked and looked at areas such as better
secure parking overnight for tankers, a clamping down on the way people can
obtain operators' licences by unconventional methods and better checks on
drivers and driver training schools to stop this one happening?
Mr Darling: We have discussed this a lot. I will ask John Grubb to comment on this.
Mr Grubb: We have recently introduced a system of
regulation for the transportation of dangerous goods and high concentrate
goods, which includes the tankers you mentioned. That does include the development of security plans which are
both how these tankers are handled in the depot and what you can do on the
road, which is of course limited, but it does include secure overnight parking
and arrangements when these vehicles might be left in a situation where they
might be vulnerable. We do have a
system of compliance now with the Department's agency for spot checks to see
these arrangements are in place. It
does include making all the background checks you can do on drivers and
satisfying yourself as best you can.
There are also arrangements which we have discussed and agreed with the
police as to what we might do in a response situation where a tanker may be
hijacked and you cannot obviously foresee that, and that is what we have just
recently done and published.
Q66 Mr Goodwill: Are you aware of the unconventional means
which can be utilised by some companies to obtain operators' licences? For example, one company goes out of
business and they sell the limited company along with the operator's
licence. Maybe the Secretary of State
would like to look at that and clamp down on that. There are these licences which are being advertised openly in the
commercial press.
Mr Darling: We are and this is something which VOSA,
which is the appropriate agency in the Department, is very aware of. For every reason you can think of, that sort
of activity needs to be stamped on, not just because of terrorist implications
but because it is bad for the industry generally.
Q67 Graham Stringer: I wanted to follow up on your answer to Mr
Martlew's first question, that when you get on any aeroplane you are in the
system, and previously you talked about aviation being a closed system, but it
is more closed in parts of the system than other parts, is it not? If you get on at Heathrow, Gatwick, New
York, there is tight security, if you get on an aeroplane in Africa - Kinshasa,
Nairobi - the security is not as good in most cases. What are you trying to do to improve that?
Mr Darling: You are absolutely right that the system is
only as good as the weakest link in it.
It is one of the things I am concerned about, but it is not just the
stereotypical airport you describe in areas where there may be a lack of
awareness, there are other countries in different parts of the world which
ought to be aware of the problem and ought to be doing more than they actually
do. Part of it is inter-governmental
pressure, partly it is at departmental level and also the European Union itself
is trying to drive up standards, but it is a matter of concern.
Ms Tompkinson: You are absolutely right to flag this up, it
is one of the areas of greatest concern to us and we put a lot of effort into
trying to tackle it. It is a difficult
area for the reasons you have said, any airport can be the weakest link As I mentioned in my opening statement, we
now have a number of people based overseas to work with host countries and to
work through the Foreign Office. The
Foreign Office also have in every post overseas an individual whose designated
post is aviation security officer, so wherever you have a UK embassy or high
commission there is someone in there with some aviation security responsibility
although it will not be their whole job.
In addition, we have a small number of people who are there full-time,
they are aviation security experts, they have been trained in Transec and
posted overseas to work with the host countries in their region to advise them
about better standards of security.
That is something we have to do through negotiation, host states have
responsibilities for following international regulations, standards set by ICAO
or the European Commission in Europe.
We feel we can add value by working very closely with countries to
advise them on how they could do better and, if need be, make some additional
resources available to them. One of the
things we do routinely is invite the officials from those countries to visit
the UK to see how we do security at our airports so they can learn from that
and we can talk to them on that. We
also have one person whose full-time job it is to look to see where the
Government could make some modest investment, through a fund available in the
Foreign Office to practical projects overseas.
So if a country cannot get its security right because it has a lack of
resources, equipment or training, then we can help them with that in a very
practical way.
Q68 Chairman: Secretary of State, can I ask about your
National Security Committees? Do you
appoint the people who sit on them?
Mr Darling: We bring them together; the Department brings
them together.
Q69 Chairman: Who appoints them?
Mr Darling: It is more of an invitation than an
appointment.
Q70 Chairman: Could you tell us what they do and what
things they look at?
Mr Darling: There is one for aviation, one for railways
and one for maritime. It is a forum to
enable them to discuss current issues, to discuss future developments. For example, in aviation they discuss things
like ---
Q71 Chairman: Do they make recommendations? Are they accountable to anybody?
Mr Darling: It is more of a forum where you can bring
people together.
Q72 Chairman: Even fora occasionally produce results.
Mr Darling: These ones do. In fact we would not have them if they did not have some purpose
because I can think of better ways of spending a couple of hours than endless
discussions. They have proved to be
pretty productive actually and they sometimes do result in things which
otherwise would take months to agree.
Q73 Mr Leech: I wanted to pick up on the point about people
working abroad in other countries. Is
that just outside the EU? Anyone who
has been on holiday to the Mediterranean would probably agree that some of the
practices in some of our EU partner states are not as good as they could be.
Ms Tompkinson: We do not have anybody based within
Europe. It is obviously very close to
us so we can make visits to our European counterparts. We work very closely with the European
Commission. They have their own
programme of regulation, 23/20, on which of course the UK's national programme
is based - or their programme is based on ours, it depends which way you look
at it. So there should be the same
baseline measures in place across all European countries and countries should
be adhering to that. It is the
responsibility of the European Commission if countries are in breach of the
European regulations to tackle that.
Q74 Chairman: Secretary of State, you and your colleagues
have been very good and helpful to us but I think there are a lot of questions
we still have to ask and this is probably not the time. I know you have been travelling overnight
and I think you have been holding up astonishingly well; you did not even drop
off in the middle of anything the Chairman was asking you. Could I therefore ask you, before I let you
go, if we can send you a series of questions about one or two other aspects and
you could send us some notes?
Mr Darling: If you let us have the questions you would
like further details on, we would be very happy to let you have that information.
Q75 Chairman: Thank you.
This is the beginning of quite a big amount of work and we are grateful
to you.
Mr Darling: You may want to come back on some specifics.
Chairman: I think it is quite possible we will want to
do that. In the meantime we are very
grateful to you, Ms Tompkinson and Mr Grubb.
