Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-193)
MR CHARLES
FARR, OBE AND
MS GILLIAN
MCGREGOR
26 FEBRUARY 2009
Q180 David Davies: If you broke down,
say, the white community into, for want of a better expression,
social classes, and if you took—I hate to use this sort
of Victorian terminology—the group of people who are on
very low incomes and usually out of work, and then looked at the
percentage of young males between 18 and 24 in prison from that
community, you would probably find it was at least as high, if
not higher, would you not?
Mr Farr: Yes, you probably would.
Again, this is why the Ministry of Justice would be able to give
you more exact figures on this, or indeed we could if we prepared
them. The only other thing I would add, and it goes back to your
question about radicalisation, is that there is a direct relationship
between criminality and radicalisation and it is not just in this
country; it is overseas as well. In other words, people who have
criminal records, and criminal records not related to terrorism,
appear to be vulnerable to radicalisation more than many others.
We think this is because they find in terrorist networks a refuge
from the blame that otherwise gets attached to them in the community
as a result of their criminal activity. They may not have been
convicted but simply the isolation and alienation that can happen
in a community as a result of their criminal activities can drive
them into a terrorist network and can drive them towards Islam
as a sort of solution to some of the problems they face. I am
simplifying it hugely, but criminality and radicalisation—there
is a causal relationship there that greatly interests us.
Chairman: We will move on to Olympic
security if we may.
Q181 David Davies: Did you welcome
the decision to move responsibility for the security of the 2012
Olympics to the OSCT, and have you been given extra money to deal
with the responsibility?
Mr Farr: In the early stages of
OSCT I felt that we simply were not resourced to deal with an
issue of the complexity of the Olympic security programme. This
was when I arrived, which was the middle of 2007. We were 160
people when we began, very few, transferred from all other bits
of Whitehall. We did not have the staff, we did not have the expertise,
we did not have the wherewithal to do it, and for that reason
the programme was left with another, more mature bit of the Home
Office, something called CRCSG, which you may be familiar with,
which broadly speaking deals with conventional crime and policing.
As we progressed through 2008 two things became apparent that
we had increasingly the people and the expertise to enable us
to address that programme ourselves, so by the end of 2008, we
took the decision that the organisation was mature enough to absorb
that function. It is a long way of saying, was I happy to do it?
Yes, I thought it was essential that we did. We could not have
done it very much earlier because you cannot run a programme like
that with a brand-new organisation. In December last year we made
the decision to move it over within the Home Office. On the question
of resources, we simply (although it was not simple) took everyone
who was working on the Olympics already into something called
the Olympic Security Directorate and absorbed them into OSCT as
a self-standing directorate. We have got five directorates. We
simply added a sixth, and that was fine.
Q182 David Davies: They answer to
you, of course?
Mr Farr: Yes, via the SRA.
Q183 David Davies: You set parameters
and they report back as to how they have got on without you telling
them to do it?
Mr Farr: Yes, absolutely. We inherited
the entire envelope budget, which is £600 million, as you
may know, for the security of the Olympic Games. Was I happy?
Yes. Did I think we could have done it earlier? No. Did we need
to do it earlier? Not particularly, and I think we have made very
good progress. Yesterday we had the key ministerial meeting which
signed off the framework documents for the security strategy.
I am about to brief Pauline Neville-Jones on it and we have got
a press briefing this afternoon. I think it is in good shape and
I am quite pleased with the progress we have now made.
Q184 Ms Buck: I think in large part
you have covered the questions I was going to ask. Is there anything
else that needs to be developed in terms of co-ordinating the
different agencies with security responsibilities, and where do
you see that going?
Mr Farr: We are about to publish
a strategy which I think is quite interesting. It is quite complicated,
120 pages, 45,000 words. We have never done anything like it before.
Q185 Chairman: Have you a date for
that?
Mr Farr: The second half of March.
Of course, there is no point in publishing a strategy unless it
gets traction with the people to whom it is relevant, and that
is the next key test for us. The strategy has been developed across
government, 21 departments, and local government and the international
picture as well, but it is only as good as the degree to which
it is adopted by everyone seriously. We have spoken a lot about
this during this meeting. I think our ability to encourage other
departments to play their part in this is necessarily variable.
Some departments are much more aware of it because of the programme
than others, and the challenge for the next couple of years, having
rolled out the strategy, is to make sure everyone participates
in it to the extent that we require.
Q186 Chairman: Just coming back briefly,
if we may, to the Games, what do you think the major threat is
to the Games?
Mr Farr: We have got four threats,
we believe. One is terrorism, of course. Another is public disorder.
The third is serious crime and the fourth is what I would call
non-malicious hazards, which could be anything from heat or flood
to epidemic. Globalisation and globalisation movements could yet
prove to be a very big challenge for us. Even with non-malicious
hazards, if you are looking at the sorts of crowds we are expecting
for the Olympics, the task is immense. I am sure you know the
figures, but you are talking about an event which is 20 times
the size of a World Cup. Simply crowd control, without public
order problems or terrorism problems, is a great challenge, so
we have got those four areas.
Q187 Chairman: I entirely accept
that.
Q188 David Davies: Do you honestly
think we have got enough police officers and PCSOs at the moment
just to deal with the non-malicious, the public order and the
heat and the crowd control at the moment?
Mr Farr: I rely, obviously, on
the police to tell me that. There is a work stream in the new
Olympic strategy which is about command and control and resources,
and a key part of that is to come up with those figures. An awful
lot of work has been done. I am sure that we have. Remember that
a lot of forces are not directly affected by the Olympics and
therefore can provide, under mutual aid resource, into the Met
and other forces who are. I am told the answer is yes and I have
seen nothing that would lead me to question it.
Q189 Chairman: And the co-ordination
of the police forces that are going to be involved? Half a dozen
or so?
Mr Farr: The Metropolitan Police
are about to appoint a counterpart to me who will be responsible
for the delivery of the programmes by policing. That person will
have nationwide responsibility and in the police parlance is an
ACPO as well as a Met appointee, which is essential. Otherwise,
basically, this would not work.
Q190 David Davies: This session has
been excellent and the last question is whether or not you think
it is likely that you will be taking over security for other major
sporting events in the future. I suppose it might depend on how
you perform on this one.
Mr Farr: As you know, as someone
helpfully told me the other day, there are issues about whether
and how we bid for World Cup, rugby, cricket and football, and
it seems inevitable that at least two of those are going to come
here. They are not anything like the scale of the Olympics. Whether
we will have a role, whether they are big enough for us to have
to get involved or whether they remain policing issues, I do not
know. I do think—it is not your question but it is perhaps
worth stating it—that one of the real legacy benefits of
the Olympics is to give us the expertise to do these things, not
as a matter of routine because they will never be that but to
make the concept of operations much more familiar to everyone
in the delivery chain.
Chairman: Thank you. I take that point.
Can I thank you, Ms McGregor and Mr Farr, for what I think has
been an outstanding session.
Ms Buck: I think this has been one of
the best sessions I have ever had on a committee; superb.
Q191 Chairman: May I ask for guidance,
please, and discussion if we need to, very briefly? How much of
this could we have done not in camera?
Mr Farr: My problem about not
being in camera is that for every answer that we give there
is often a bit that is classified and you cannot separate unclassified
questions and answers from classified questions and answers. The
classified and the unclassified are mixed together. That is the
difficulty. When you see the transcripts you can split off the
classified bit and you are left with an unclassified answer, but
what you cannot easily do is break the session in half because
you then end up having to go over every question again, saying,
"I want to add this to that, that to that, that to the other".
That is why, I am afraid, we suggested it was easier to have the
whole lot in camera and then to look at the transcript
and deal with it through the transcript rather than through the
evidence session.
Q192 Chairman: Ms McGregor?
Ms McGregor: Yes, and if the transcript
can come to me in the first instance we will discuss it with Charles
and then we can quickly separate out those things. There are quite
a number of things that were said that we could not have said
in a public transcript.
Mr Farr: I do stress, and I hope
you see this when you read CONTEST, that it is a really clear
objective of ours, set by the Home Secretary, that we have got
to get as much of this out into the public domain as we possibly
can. That is our default position. I hope you will not regard
our suggestion that we have this in camera as, as it were,
contrary to that principle.
Q193 Chairman: No. Frankly, it raised
a few hackles and it raised a few question marks, but I think
my colleagues' points are well made, that this has been an extremely
interesting session compared with some of the others, which may
be our fault for not being focused terribly well. This is totally
useful and where we now take it is clearly up to us to decide.
Mr Farr: If I may add, I think
there is a real willingness by everyone in the counter-terrorist
community, leave aside the agencies who work with the ISC, to
talk more about what we are doing. I have expressed a degree of
frustration that we cannot do it more and I do find it, I have
said to people, an anomaly that I go around the world talking
about our counter-terrorism strategy but I do not do it in this
building. That does not seem to me to be sensible, so we welcome
really genuinely an opportunity to get asked questions, interrogated,
get views, advice, suggestions, about how we should improve it.
If we do not do that then we are not doing our job.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
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