Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
40-50)
MR TONY
BAPTISTE, MR
JOHN HIGGINS
CBE, MR DAVID
LIVINGSTONE MBE DSC, MR
HUGO ROSEMONT
AND MR
DOUG UMBERS
17 JUNE 2008
Q40 Richard Younger-Ross: Following
on from the homeland security point Robert made with the free-flow
of people across European borders, it is not that we need a European
homeland security but is there enough integration between the
British and the European?
Mr Higgins: I do not know whether
you are aware of it but there is a European sort of equivalent
to RISC that we are aware of. I am not sure that it is exactly
parallel but we have seen some industrial engagement at European
level.
Mr Rosemont: The European Organisation
for Security tries to look at that and certainly RISC is tied
into that through something called the National Security Platforms.
What that is trying to do is pull together the various industry
bodies that are trying to be representative of the broad security
industry in each country. There is a meeting today in Paris on
that; my colleague, Derek Marshall, the Secretary of RISC, is
attending. There are links through to RISC on that and certainly
through the RISC International group this is an active part of
the agenda in terms of how does the UK security industry support
some of those initiatives and support some of the border security
whilst representing industry as well. We are tied into that debate
at the same time as being tied into the new defence and security
organisation which is all about promoting industry in that particular
space.
Q41 Richard Younger-Ross: I am on
the European Scrutiny Committee as well as being on this Committee
so I am aware of a number of these issues. I was really asking
whether you think the UK Government is doing enough to input and
to enable that process.
Mr Rosemont: In the RISC International
group there is representation from the Home Office on that group
who specifically look into the EU research funding programmes,
the FP7 arrangements, as a single point of contact to the UK security
industry to help promote industry but also provide the opportunities
to engage with them. So there is a point of contact in that, that
is for RISC International across all the membership that we have
spoken about today, to make sure that that is communicated appropriately.
Q42 Linda Gilroy: Small and medium
enterprises are often very much the drivers of innovation and
in the early days of the Defence Industrial Strategy we had a
lot of concerns expressed, concerns possibly overcome to a degree
since then. The sort of architecture that you seem to be evolving
through RISC and in other ways seems to be very bottom up and
accommodating of small and medium enterprises. Am I right in what
I am describing and what do we need to think about in order to
preserve that extra agility that I think some of us feared would
be lost through the Defence Industrial Strategy?
Mr Higgins: I hope it will be
and as ever it will depend on the SMEs having time to participate
because these can be very time consuming exercises. It is certainly
open to SME engagement and I think the points David was making
about private contractors actively engaging with their SME supply
chain is another route to market as well that I think SMEs need
to engage in. I am hopeful, but we will see whether they really
have time.
Mr Baptiste: Most of the technologies
we are talking about are SME driven at the end of the day. They
are keen to work through the primes to get that visibility which
they could not leverage in their own rights, so it is working
well in that sense.
Mr Livingstone: The big primes
will only get engaged if they see the big programme and the larger
source of funding. The engine room at the moment for a lot of
new initiatives is the SME industrial base which manages to find
out what is required, comes up with a part solution or the full
solution and lift that into the new business process that is required
for our operations.
Q43 Linda Gilroy: The points you
were making about clarity of goal and where Government want to
go and get to is even more important for them.
Mr Baptiste: The SMEs will tend
to have a part solution and it is the primes that actually integrate
it in a way that is not just necessarily a product that you might
sell to somebody but very often a service is provided by the large
industrial organisations.
Q44 Mr Hamilton: Could I follow one
of the points that Robert began to allude to? On numerous occasions
you have mentioned the cross-department issues. One of you has
spoken about the organisational fracturing that takes place throughout
departments. At no time did anybody refer to the fact that we
are four different countries and in each of these countries there
is a different structure. Although security is reserved, the Scottish
police force come under the Scottish Parliament. We have also
the MoD which covers the coastlines of England and Wales and Northern
Ireland but do not cover the coastlines of Scotland, that is a
separate company sub-contracted in Scotland and that also covers
the oil rigs. Surely there must be a better way of working than
the fracturing that takes place with different departments, many
of whom do not have direct responsibility for Scotland anyway.
Is there not a better way forward? It should not take five years
to set up, we should have one department dealing with the whole
thing covering all parts of the United Kingdom. Surely there is
an issue of who you talk to, how you deal with that and at the
end of the day there is a fracture taking place and there is an
issue that you do not know who to talk to and there is an issue
about who gives answers.
Mr Livingstone: I do not think
I can argue that through the devolved administrations and the
mechanics of law enforcement compared to security that there will
be more stakeholders for a central response. I do not think al-Qaeda
respects the boundary or the border between Scotland and England,
for instance. The more fractures, the more difficult it is to
get that overall picture and a cohesive requirements capture from
across the law enforcement and security sections.
Q45 Mr Hamilton: Do you think there
should be a single police force covering all ports of entry into
the United Kingdom?
Mr Higgins: The trouble is that
if you combine organisations together to solve a particular problem
there are always people on the outside because if not you end
up combining everybody and then there are other aspects of the
challenge where you do want to combine different groups. I think
a much stronger answer is to try to make sure that you have everyone
behind the particular common causes and able to work together
in a coordinated way with budgets allocated to the perceived largest
problems. I do not really see that you can corral everyone together
into one big department, and even if you did you would end up
with a sub-structure within the department that would probably
be not a lot different from the way it is today. I think we need
a better analysis of the problems and the outcomes you want to
achieve and then the structures behind that rather than just assume
it is one department.
Mr Rosemont: I agree entirely
with what John has just said. At the SBAC we are looking to the
response to the Sir Ronnie Flanagan's review into policing specifically
on that matter. The Home Secretary's tabled response on that is
that central procurements may be appropriate in certain circumstances
and I think SBAC's membership would want to reflect that so if
there are operational requirements above and beyond where central
procurement is appropriate then that would be the case, but perhaps
it is not a one size fits all situation in terms of the governance.
Mr Jones: To what extent is the subject
really high up on the agenda either in the Scottish Administration
or Welsh Assembly, for example? Is there somebody who is actually
in overall control of security policy in Scotland or Wales?
Chairman: This may not be a question
for you; it may be a question we have to put to others.
Q46 Mr Havard: We have been doing
an inquiry about ISTAR and we looked at UAVs. UAVs are a good
example in one sense. They are going to be used by, presumably,
the police forces; electricity companies may want to use them
in order to survey their pylons and lines; all sorts of people
might want to use these from private industry, private individuals,
police forces, the military, whatever. Presumably from your point
of view as industry, if you are going to produce a family to do
all of these different things, at a time of crisis they could
well be integrated in order to give information. Here is an example:
how do you as industry go and say, "Is there a central procurement
structure for a decision like that? Why are the police force buying
all these things if they could borrow them?" That is presumably
the sort of example we have at the moment and you have no focus
or focal point or several focal points; is that part of the problem?
Mr Livingstone: Yes. I have been
involved in a programme which has been industry led to take a
concept which works very well for the police and then to walk
that concept round the other stakeholders in the agencies who
are involved in the overall intelligence response. However, that
is a time consuming process in itself in its stakeholder management
to try to describe the benefits to all. It is a complicated process
and you have to have pretty good knowledge of how the stakeholders
operate individually before you can then get them all pointing
the same way and then start to discuss and demonstrate business
benefit to all out of a single concept. It can be done though.
Mr Baptiste: It is the problem
of cross-over technology or cross-over capability which was touched
on by Mr Key. There are a lot of examples from the military into
civilian space and the UAV is a very good example. How you actually
manage that is an issue and how you actually cover the culture
differences as well is another problem and we do not have an answer
to it. If we can crack it there is a lot of capability out there
that could be moved across.
Chairman: There may be a role for the
Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre based in the security service.
Q47 Mr Jenkin: Has the regionalisation
of the emergency call centres thrown up more problems or has it
resolved problems? I guess one or two of your companies have been
involved with it.
Mr Umbers: I am not sure that
we have a strong view; we are not directly involved in that particular
programme. What I can say is that that will create issues locally
but nationally it is precisely the kind of joined up procurement
that we are looking for. If you go back to Mr Havard's earlier
statement, the police, for example, with their radio system have
something called Airwave that operates across the police network.
It was put in by the predecessor of the National Police Improvement
Agency which is a cross-police organisation. There is an example
of central governmental operation that is ensuring the commonality
of systems and interoperability of systems are being put in across
the country. I am sure there is some short term pain in that programme
and there will be some dissatisfaction locally, but I think the
medium to long term picture looks good.
Q48 Mr Jenkin: Looking at the experience
of other countries, is industry better involved in this aspect
of public policy in other countries? Do we have something to learn
from them?
Mr Rosemont: It seems to me that
there are different models and it is quite difficult to make a
judgment on the effectiveness of them. I mentioned colleagues
in France today. In France there is a High Committee for Civil
Defence which pulls together various regional tiers of government,
critical national infrastructure, private providers and also industry
and that has been in evidence since 1982 and is a maturing body.
This is what we are trying to do with the RISC model, building
on that, and I think in certain areas we are doing similar activities,
for example advising a group on CBRNE across the multiple agencies.
That is a similar activity as to how the High Committee in France
works. Where it is slightly different is that in the UK, UK industry
through the trade associations is financing the RISC and the RISC
model and the French model, for example, receives some state funding
on that. That is not a value judgment; it is more of an observation
as to how it is actually structured.
Mr Umbers: I am aware of the Scandinavian
models, one is total defence and one is societal security. I think
it is an attempt in Sweden to create a joined up approach to the
security challenges they face. It will be very different in scale
potentially to the types of challenges that we face, but I think
it could be worthy of further exploration.
Q49 Mr Jenkin: Are you aware of any
particular technologies that we are not exploiting in the UK which
are being exploited in other countries?
Mr Baptiste: There is a lot in
the States now; there is a lot of technology coming through in
the States. They have got over the hump, if you like, of establishing
the Department of Homeland Security and there is a lot of capability
out there which is worth noting.
Q50 Mr Jenkin: Can you be specific?
Mr Baptiste: Particularly around
the communications space again. The sort of thing I was talking
about earlier they actually deployed in Hurricane Katrina and
that made a big difference there on the ground in terms of getting
a horizontal communications network going. There are other ISTAR
type capabilities which they are using as well.
Mr Livingstone: I always caution
against this glittering prize of grabbing a technology from another
country, bringing it in and then trying to make it fit somewhere
into the business process of whatever you are trying to do in
order to make things better. Quite often some of the technologies,
particularly in command and control, do not fit because of national
procedures themselves and this panacea, once introduced into service,
actually creates a little bit more confusion. That also goes for
more tactical technologies as well. They have to fit into the
business process of what you are trying to do before you go out
and buy them.
Chairman: That is an extremely helpful
concluding answer to a very helpful session. Gentlemen, thank
you very much indeed for opening our inquiry in such a beneficial
way.
| 
