Who paid the seven-figure sum for the security of the Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow in September 2013? All of us, in the end, as tax-payers. But what authority paid the bill – the Scottish Government, as the host, or the Home Office in London? Papers released by the Home Office under a Freedom of Information request show the to-and-fro of government.
The Home Office took the position that policing was devolved to the Scottish government in Edinburgh, and hence police in Glasgow could not get the estimated £1.2m policing costs for the conference paid by London. According to a Home Office brief, the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) leaked the story to the Scottish press, and the issue was linked to the Scottish independence debate (which came to a head in the vote of September 2014). The Home Office ‘restricted’ document released under FoI made the point that the issue needed ‘to be handled with extra sensitivity’.
Party conferences do not, according to the Home Office, automatically get extra funding for the extra costs for a force policing such a conference, typically at Brighton, Birmingham or Manchester. The ‘special grant’ is only for forces in England and Wales; and police forces apply for expenses such as long running investigations, or an event which results in public disorder, such as EDL marches. As for how much money it takes to secure one of the three main political parties’ conferences, the Lib Dems’ conference in Brighton in 2012 reportedly cost £2.1m.
Kenny MacAskill, then the Scottish Nationalists’ cabinet secretary for justice, wrote to Home Secretary Theresa May in March 2013 making the case for London to give Edinburgh the money. He argued for the Home Office to pay for the extra security for political party conferences of any party in government and the main opposition. National security, he pointed out, was a reserved power (that is, a job that Westminster has for the whole UK).
In a draft letter to the Scottish Government in Edinburgh, and the letter that Theresa May sent to Edinburgh, the Home Office stuck to its guns. The Home Office did accept that the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) at the Home Office would reimburse Scotland for counter-terror (CT) costs of securing the Lib Dem event. Such CT work included a police search of the conference venue and hotel (while the sites were closed to the public) and for contract security to search anyone entering the ‘conference Island site’ (that is, inside the searched, secured perimeter) and the issuing of ID passes.
Also, a ‘national accreditation team’ under Great Manchester Police (GMP) does the identity card badging for all the main political parties’ conferences, and the Home Office was agreeable to covering that cost for Scotland. In a sign of how politics and security can clash, a Home Office briefing paper noted that Police Scotland might, instead of paying £15,000 for the GMP service, do its own badging in-house, which might mean one more set of ID for Lib Dem politicians and delegates generally. The briefing paper made the point that ‘accreditation is a thorny issue for the Liberal Democrat party’ because as liberals they would argue against an ID card, and indeed one of the first acts of the Coalition Government in 2010 had been to abolish Labour’s ID card.
Apart from the politics, also in the mix was the austerity cuts that police forces had to meet, so that Strathclyde (now part of Police Scotland, the single force for the whole country) was looking to its funds as much as anybody.
For the FoI release in full visit – https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/392459/FOR_DISCLOSURE_LOG_Furby_33316.pdf
