Despite troubles with a private firm, Hugh Orde is marshalling a major security operation
ON MONDAY evening, a small group of Northumberland police gathered on Downing Street, happily taking photographs of each other as they posed outside the door of No 10, perhaps, for the only time in their career.
The image illustrates much: 12,500 police will be on Olympic duties every day, 9,000 of them in London, with numbers drawn from every police force in the UK, including 50 armed officers from the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
“This is a national police response. This could not be delivered by any police force alone,” says Hugh Orde, who is now the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), a private body that acts as a strategic nerve-centre for forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Following G4S’s failure to deliver, the last-minute gaps are being filled by police and military, with the British government deciding yesterday to put an extra 1,500 soldiers, who had been held on standby, into front-line roles at the Olympic Park and other venues.
“ numbers ebb and flow every day. One of the big challenges is not knowing how many people will turn up,” says Orde, though culture secretary Jeremy Hunt later said the company’s performance “has improved markedly in recent days”.
In some places, patience has already been lost. In Newcastle, a Sunderland private security firm has been brought in. In Scotland, Strathclyde Police has taken control back of securing Olympic soccer games at Hampden Park.
Forces, says Orde, are managing the problem: “We will get the money back, so it is fully funded. It just shows how incredibly flexible the police service has been with the army. In terms of blame, that is a matter for afterwards.”
The public’s security fears have been raised, but not among international police colleagues who are in London in numbers to report home on security threats. Without exception, he says, they “congratulate” the British.
“I have not picked up any concern from any government, and I would have done, as a result of that fiasco. The reason is that very quickly the professionals responded and we very quickly got out the message: ‘Business as usual, plans in place, all points covered’,” he says.
Security was built into Olympic planning from the off, he says, including CCTV, secure gates and other protections: “The more you can build it into the structure, the less visible it will be. This is a sporting event with a security overlay, not the other way around.” No credible terrorist intelligence exists: “But it is a very high-profile event and there is a history here. Can you guarantee, I don’t know, that some mad Irish priest is not going to leap out in front of a bicycle again? Of course, you can’t.
“But what you can say is that we have done as much as is humanely possible to allow sport to take place in a safe environment,” said Orde, whose organisation has brokered co-operation between forces at its Police National Information Co-Ordinating Centre.
And co-operation there has had to be, particularly in a country with 43 frontline forces and eight more agencies such as the Security Organised Crime Agency – a model that Orde has frequently criticised as not being fit for the 21st century.
“Forces are collaborating regionally to fill the G4S gap,” the ever-outspoken Acpo leader tells The Irish Times. “We are looking at all of this because collaboration is sub-optimal. We can’t reorganise the service, because the government won’t let us.”
Once the Games are finished, G4S’s failures will be minutely examined, with many police believing that demands by Conservative ministers for the privatisation of some of their work have been dealt a fatal blow.
Orde, however, is more cautious. The decision to hire G4S – a decision made by the Labour government before 2010 – was “logical”: “That is what is done every day of the week at football matches. It was not a bad decision to deploy private security.”
Once the Olympic memory has faded, British policing still faces 20 per cent spending cuts by 2015. Greater use of private companies is not something that can be ignored, even if due diligence must improve: “But it would be wrong to say that the whole private sector can’t deliver just because G4S has failed – it does not mean that everyone else is in the same boat.”
