Memorandum from London TravelWatch (TS
14)
As you know, London TravelWatch is the official
representative body for the travelling public of London.
We have noted with interest your Committee's
decision to hold an inquiry into "steps taken to protect
the travelling public from terrorist violence", and welcome
this initiative. We have studied your Committee's preliminary
report on UK Transport Security, published last month, and keenly
await the findings of its further work on this topic.
Passengers in London (including those on flight
PA103, which took off from Heathrow before exploding over Lockerbie)
have had the misfortune to be the victims of such actions more
frequently and on a more savage scale than anywhere else in Britain.
So we are acutely aware of the importance of doing all that is
reasonably practicable to deter and forestall them.
But, at the same time, we recognise that a difficult
balance has to be struck between the need to secure the safety
of passengers and staff and the need to ensure that the transport
systems continue to function with a minimum of inconvenience and
delay. They are the arteries which make possible the economic
and social vitality of our city, and any avoidable congestion
of them must be prevented. Indeed, it is precisely because of
the damage which flows from interruptions to the free flow of
transport that those who wish to launch attacks on us all make
the transport systems their first choice of targets.
As a lay body, we are not in a position to offer
informed comment on the specific matters listed in your Committee's
notice, since these are addressed primarily to the role of the
Government and to the lessons learned by both it and the industry
from the experience of other countries which have also experienced
such attacks. But there are two basic principles which we believe
should be observed in the development of counter-terrorist programmes,
and which we commend to your members' attention.
First, we believe that the eyes and ears of
the millions of daily users of London's road and rail networks
are a vital resource. Passengers must continue to be given every
encouragement and opportunity to report suspicious objects and
patterns of behaviour, and their alertness should be regularly
reinforced by appropriate announcements, posters, etc. This campaign
should be coupled with one reminding them of the need to ensure
that they do not inadvertently cause alarms and delays through
innocent actions which could be capable of misunderstanding, eg
by leaving bags unattended on vehicles or at terminals.
Second, we believe that counter-terrorist systems
and procedures should be as unobtrusive and unobstructive as possible.
No reasonable person could object to the installation of passive
detector equipment of the kind now commonly found at the doors
of shops or public libraries to prevent theft (any more than there
is any objection to the now-widespread use of CCTV through the
transport industry). Nor is there likely to be much complaint
about the presence of sniffer dogs, if they are kept under proper
control.
But, equally, it would be impracticable to introduce
into mass transit systems the kind of security checks (including
bag scanners and body searches) now installed at the public entrance
to the Palace of Westminster. It has been the clear view of London
Underground in its discussions with us that none of the detector
technology now on the market is suitable for use at the entrances
to its stations or on its trains. As a member of Comet (a world-wide
consortium of major urban metro operators), London Underground
is aware of the global state of this art, and we have no grounds
on which to challenge or disbelieve its judgement.
At its invitation, we have recently met Transec
(the security division of the Department for Transport) to discuss
its plans for the forthcoming trialling of explosives detecting
equipment at a number of locations on the rail system, starting
with the Heathrow Express platforms at Paddington. The purpose
of these trials is to assess how well equipment which is already
in use in other, more closely controlled environments (such as
the departure gates at Waterloo International and many airports)
performs in the challenging context of ordinary railway stations
where it may be affected by dust, variations in temperature, electromagnetic
radiation, etc. Passengers will be invited at random to submit
themselves and their luggage to scanning, but participation will
be entirely voluntary. Part of the purpose of the test will be
to discover not only whether the various devices to be tested
are capable of detecting explosives reliably when they are present
but also whether the number of "false positive" readings
can be kept to a level sufficiently low as to be manageable.
As far as we have been able to ascertain, such
equipment has not been deployed for routine use in any mass transit
system in the world, and we would have considerable reservations
regarding any proposal to introduce in it London unless the obvious
problems of delay and congestion can be overcome. We agree that
it is important that the Department and the public transport industry
should be in the forefront of any potentially useful developments
in this field, and we will observe with interest the outcome of
these trials (and a parallel programme of qualitative research
to passengers' attitudes and perceptions). But, for the time being,
we feel that it is necessary to reserve judgement on whether and
when—if ever—the technical state of this art will
be such as to make the general introduction of detectors onto
stations (and even, potentially, onto vehicles) a realistic possibility.
December 2005
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