The
Chairman: Have we exhausted the new duty on police
authorities, the appointment of chief officers and collaboration? If
there are no further questions, perhaps Mr. Ruffley or
Mr. Brokenshire will bring in the other two witnesses on
airport
security.
Q
11James
Brokenshire (Hornchurch) (Con): May I say that it is a
pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Sir Nicholas? First, I
would like to ask the relevant witnesses if they agree with the premise
that the current situation, in relation to policing at airports, does
not work, is not effective and requires
reform? Robert
Siddall: Yes, I think we would agree. We worked
closely with Stephen Boys Smith, whose review ultimately triggered this
legislation, and since his report, we have also worked with Government
officials. Our take on his review was that we agreed with the diagnosis
but not the prescription. The current system of designation is in need
of overhaul—it does not work particularly well—not least
because it creates a distortion among airports, as our own members will
testify, as some are not designated and some are. Time seems to have
rather passed by the reasons for those particular nine being designated
as of today. So yes, we would agree.
James
Brokenshire: What would you say are the principal
impediments, or what would you say is most in need
of—
The
Chairman: Order. Would the hon. Gentleman and the witness
speak up so that we can ensure that everything is taken down
accurately?
Q
12James
Brokenshire: Thank you, Sir Nicholas. I was simply asking
the witness what is the primary area of concern not addressed by the
Bill’s proposals, given the issues he has highlighted?
Robert
Siddall: Perhaps I can give an overview, then ask my
colleague, Ian Hutcheson, to provide an additional perspective. The
problems that have dogged the policing of airports for twenty-odd years
are clear, and there have been any number of working groups,
committees, and so on.
There are two
fundamental problems. First, when deciding how an airport should be
policed, in the final analysis, it comes down to a subjective
judgement, which may rely heavily on the personal views of police
officers involved with that airport or in the final instance, the chief
officer of the force where the airport is situated. There is therefore
a degree of subjectivity, which has caused problems. The second big
issue is that for designated airports today, one party pays while
ultimately, the other is making the lion’s share of the
judgement on what the resource numbers should be. Those familiar with
quality management in industry might remember its original strap
line—“Quality built in.” What we are seeing with
this legislation and the previous regime, is that because of the
design, disputes are built in. One party pays and another makes
judgments. In business, that would be known as the principal agent
problem, which means you have two parties whose interests are not
exactly aligned. That is the fundamental flaw in the
arrangements. Ian
Hutcheson: Robert has hit the key points, as the
current arrangements rely heavily on personal relationships. The debate
about accountability in relation to the Bill is interesting. In many
respects, accountability is at the heart of some disputes in the
policing of airports—what accountabilities lie with the chief
officer, and what accountabilities lie with an airport’s
managing director? Despite 18 months of debate, we are no clearer on
those issues. In fact, the latest position is that they should be
decided locally. That could lead to accountabilities being different
all around the country, which I do not think would be very
good. The
other aspect is that knowledge of one another’s business will
help to develop relationships. Too frequently, police forces seek to
replicate the policing structure of a basic command unit or a small
town in an airport that does not require all those levels of policing.
Again, that comes down to a subjective judgment. There are no
structures or methodologies that you can fall back on to say who is
right. My fear is that the Bill does not change any of that. It
introduces an executive committee and formalises the multi-agency
threat and risk assessment, but multi-agency threat and risk forums
have been operating at the designated airports ever since Sir John
Wheeler recommended them. They have been extremely useful in informing
the debate, but not at all helpful in dispute resolution.
Although the
Bill addresses the designation and de-designation issue, and all
airports will be susceptible to having police on a regular basis, my
fear is that it does not remove the subjectivity to which Robert
referred or the reliance on personal relationships. Today’s
overall economic climate will put pressures on the individuals in those
negotiations, and I fear that there will be more disputes than ever
before.
Q
13James
Brokenshire: Would it be fair to say, in characterising
what you have said, that the arrangements rely on the personal
relationships between each of the relevant partners and that the
proposals risk upsetting those relationships and making them more
difficult? Ian
Hutcheson: I am not saying that they will make them
more difficult. The relationship between Heathrow and the Met, for
example, is so mature that it can stand some of those pressures, but
where you seek to establish new relationships at airports that have
never been policed on a regular basis, the overall operational
environment will put real strains and stresses on the attempts to set
up the relationships on which the police at the airport
depend.
Q
14James
Brokenshire: Mr. Whatton, perhaps I can ask you
about the impact that the changes will have, as they are in essence
mainstreaming airport policing much more than has ever been the case.
What sort of impact will that have on the individual forces
affected? Dave
Whatton: We welcome the proposals that the Bill puts
forward. That has been an ongoing issue for several years, and we are
getting to the point where we can take it forward in a meaningful way.
It is completely unfair on the communities we serve that nine airports
have a requirement for policing and a methodology, and that a large
number of airports that have grown up since the designation was brought
in have significant risks but do not have effective mechanisms for
managing them in order to protect the public. One of the key aspects of
that process is that it will apply across the board.
However,
there are a couple of things that I would like to raise. With regard to
the conversation we had about collaboration a short while ago, one of
the issues is that experienced officers are taken away from communities
or other roles to fulfil the new specialised roles to deal with
organised crime. Exactly the same applies to airport policing, so no
chief constable will want to put additional police officers into an
airport unless there is a real need to do so to protect the public. It
is not about growing police forces through the back door, because the
individual staff have to come from somewhere else.
That means
that we need to take serious decisions before we put any staff into the
airports and transfer the costs across. It requires knowledge and
openness, and these provisions mean that police officers, as well as
senior staff in airports, the airlines and the industries concerned
will have access to secret and sensitive information so that we can all
properly assess the risks and come up with solutions, which might not
mean extra policing. There might be other ways of doing this, such as
investing in CCTV or other hard, protective measures: it does not
automatically have to be police officers on every occasion. It means
that we have to assess risk properly, then take forward, in agreement,
measures to protect the public against the risk that we identify. One
of the stumbling blocks that there have been for some time is the issue
of accountability. Previous legislation was clear that the chief
constable or his staff were accountable if they identified a risk and
did not put in effective measures to mitigate it. If there was a
disagreement among airport operators, and other issues arose, there was
real lack of certainty about who was responsible for any
decisions.
The decision
by the Secretary of State to take on the dispute resolution process
and, ultimately, the accountability for the decisions that arise from
that, has cleared up the ambiguity as far as we are concerned. We do
not expect lots of disputes to develop: we expect people to work
together effectively to come up with reasonable measures to protect the
public. However, now there is ultimately a mechanism by which a dispute
can be resolved. Whoever resolves it, the payments proceed as a result.
Airports are not the same as other areas of the community, and the cost
of policing for them should not be put up nationally in some places and
in other places by local taxpayers through the police authority and the
precept. We need that fairness and equality across the board, and we
fully support the proposals.
The
Chairman: Before we continue with the questioning I remind
witnesses and Members that we have just under a quarter of an hour
until I must bring this set of questions to an
end.
Q
15James
Brokenshire: May I put one further question to
Mr. Whatton as a supplementary on the risk of additional
pressure being brought to bear, and on the limitations of front-line
officers? Do you have any concerns that by changing a situation by
establishing formal airport security plans, perhaps for airports that
do not have such arrangements, a temptation or feeling will be created
that there is a requirement to place additional police resource in such
airports? That is not necessarily because there is any flaw in the
judgment on risk assessment, but simply by virtue of there being a plan
in place the subconscious impact may be greater focus, exposure and
perhaps public scrutiny.
Dave
Whatton: I do not think that there will be any
increase in police officers or resources going into airports just
because we have a plan. Additional resources may need to go in, because
we have, by this process, identified genuine risks against which we
need to protect the public. The plan per se will not bring in any
resources, but if we identify risks which we did not know about
beforehand then, quite properly, we need to do something about
it.
Q
16Paul
Holmes: I have just one question on funding for security.
The Airport Operators Association believes, as would any business, that
policing should all be done through central funding and that you should
not be picking up the tab. Can you justify that approach with
airports? Robert
Siddall: It is probably a more nuanced position. We
accept that there is a degree of local decision making, because the
whole process is based on MATRA, which looks at local threat and risk
assessment. I would not say that we are set on some kind of central
solution with regard to funding. However, that is a position that we
have held because we got to a point where we lost so much faith in
these arrangements, that we felt the only way to solve that was by some
sort of central levy. There are two aspects: security is paramount and
our first concern is absolutely that passengers can travel safely and
securely. However, while that has to come first, we do have an eye to
affordability, especially in the current climate, as Mr.
Hutcheson has mentioned.
These
arrangements create a problem, as it is not clear that there will be
value for money. Despite what Chief Constable Whatton says, if you
consider this objectively, you have to ask why would police forces not
put lots of officers into an airport, apart from the fact that those
resources might be limited, so a decision has to be made about that.
There is only one case going through this process that has not obtained
an agreement through custom and practice—Prestwick airport,
which is one of the nine designated airports. If it had not been for
the frenetic activity of officials in recent months, that case would be
in dispute. Unsurprisingly, the problem is that the police would like
to put a great many more officers in than the airport believes is
appropriate. To me that seems to be a case in
point. That
is one side of the coin. The other side is that we accept that airports
should pay where policing is appropriate for risks that occur on the
airport. However, a great deal
of the policing will be for counter-terrorism
measures, which are somewhat subjective and perhaps more vague than
other measures in terms of making the linkage as to what you get for
what resource. We feel that that is also partly a threat against the
state. We feel that that should be looked at in that way. We are not
simply saying that we do not want to pay for any of this: it is a more
complex picture than
that. Q
17Paul
Holmes: What would you change in the Bill to deal with the
difficulties as you see
them? Robert
Siddall: That is a very good question—I wish
that I had a good answer. The Bill designs in a problem whereby one
party pays and another effectively decides the resources. We would like
to see the Government stop and look at alternatives such as using
British Transport police to police airports, which is an alternative we
pushed in the days of the review. We felt that Stephen Boys Smith
dismissed that too lightly. That would be one example. The other is to
go back to looking at some kind of central
system.
Q
18Paul
Holmes: But why would using British Transport police not
give rise to exactly the same problems? The police would want to
over-egg the security, which is their job and you would not want to pay
for that, which is your
job. Ian
Hutcheson: The earliest part of the debate was about
collaboration as a driver for economies of scale. The deployment of a
single force across the UK’s airport would bring economies of
scale to airport policing that the current arrangements do not. It is
very much a local negotiation on risk and who can negotiate the
hardest. You may not always get the correct deployment of police. One
area that is particularly difficult is the deployment of armed police
at airports. There seems to be a growing view in the police service
that all airports need to have armed police. The airport operators see
armed police very much as a deadly force and the last resort: there
must be other ways of mitigating risk. Armed policing is a very
specialist skill. Permanently to deploy armed police at airports could
lead to the de-skilling of these officers. That is something that we
would like to look at. If you had a national approach to the policing
of airports, it could be built into
that.
Paul
Holmes: Could I ask Bob Jones to come in? You reacted to
one of the comments
earlier. Bob
Jones: The Committee would find it interesting to see
the level of resource put in by airport operators, particularly to the
non-designated airports, including some very hard negotiations by some
of the designated airports. I understand from my Scottish colleagues
that the offer at Prestwick was of no support whatsoever to local
policing. In places like Merseyside, the agreement is one funded by the
police authority and by the airport operators. That is the information
that I have from my colleagues who are involved in those negotiations
from our side.
The Stephen
Boys Smith review not only analyses a problem, it puts forward some
potential solutions. We have had major problems with designated
airports having some degree of legal framework to ensure that there is
a commitment, including a financial commitment from the airport
operators, while the non-designated airports, many of which now have
much greater passenger numbers
than many of the designated ones, do not have the problem. It is a
question of fairness. It is a question of fairness for the airport
operators, as well as particular police services, to ensure that they
have a standard legal framework: it should not be the case that some
airports are designated and some are not. If you looked at the figures,
I think that you and the public would be concerned about the low levels
of support for policing, particularly at non-designated airports, but
also at some designated airports. If that became a matter of public
knowledge, there would be a greater clamour to move this legislation
forward as quickly as possible. Our only
slight reservation, probably contrary to the airport operators, is that
the current system effectively requires unanimous agreement. That is a
commendable desire, but it effectively results in a position where
there is an individual veto. The appeal against that is extremely
cumbersome and mechanistic, and can drag on for a considerable period
of time, when there may be an important security risk that needs to be
addressed in the short term rather than going through such a cumbersome
process. I would hope that the Committee looks at the arrangements for
resolving those issues where there is not unanimous
agreement. Robert
Siddall: I disagree with a lot of what was just said,
although I can see why that perspective is taken. If we look at the
Prestwick case—I do not think it is appropriate to bring all
that out in front of the Committee—Prestwick airport, as an
operator, has played a constructive role in those discussions with
Strathclyde police. In fact, in the first instance, it believed that it
had reached an agreement with Strathclyde police. I do not believe that
it can be the case that it offered no input at all; it believed it had
reached an agreement, which was overturned on the appointment of a new
chief officer. That tells us something about the subjectivity problem
that was raised earlier.
If we look at
other non-designated airports and their reluctance to fund—I
fully agree with Bob Jones that that is true in many areas, although
the picture is patchy—there are examples of good relationships
where police are funded at airports, and I can cite a few. Where there
is reluctance—and I agree that there is—part of the
reason is that this problem has not been solved. The reluctance arises
because the airport fears that, as soon as it sits down at the table
with its cheque book, it will suddenly be staffed out with a large
number of officers. That stand-off remains until we solve this problem.
That tells us that there is a problem—it does not tell us
something about the solution. As for designated airports being
under-resourced—that would be an issue if it were a matter of
public scrutiny—perhaps Ian Hutcheson could comment on
that.
| 
