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View From Thames

by msecadm4921

Nigel Churton of consultancy Control Risks Group was last in our September 2005 print edition, after 7-7.

A year later, Mark Rowe returns to CRG’s Thameside offices to ask his view of the security and risk landscape. <br><br>Nigel Churton, vice-chairman of Control Risks Group, has a fine views from his office: from the south bank of the Thames, you see the river from roughly Cannon Street station to the Gherkin. If it were 1906, it’d be a ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’ sort of scene. But it is 2006 and as it happens – though who was to know? – August 9, the day before the police and Security Services operation to thwart suicide bombers, and the security alert at UK airports.<br><br>Threat as high<br><br>If anything, the threat level is as high, if not higher, than this time last year, he says. “What have we learned since 7-7? Hindsight is a great thing. because 7-7 and to an extent 21-7 took place within the infrastructure, and therefore within the public sector, as opposed to one of the buildings in the City or Canary Wharf, the corporate sector has had a good time to reflect on what might have been and as a result there has been a lot of work done on business continuity planning, on how they protect their people and their assets and in particular how they communicate with people in the event of an attack; how do they account for their staff.” One query – and CRG itself has wrestled with it: it’s all very well for the big firm to get back to work on the Monday after an incident on the Friday, but what if the sandwich makers, car parks, shoe repairers, barbers, don’t open? In other words, business resilience has to be about communities. <br><br>Everyone knows<br><br>He gives the July Mumbai train bombs as an example of how when something happens – such as the Madrid and 7-7 bombings – everyone knows the news. While Nigel adds that Mumbai was about local politics, not al-Qaeda, his point is that terrorists, criminals learn and already can plan how to do better next year: “So we have to plan for it being much worse than has happened …. we are definitely the number two target. Number one is the US, or anything with US interests. It isn’t only here, in London, but British interests abroad.”<br><br>Floods, disasters<br><br>Another look at the view from Nigel’s window prompted the thought, however hard it is to picture, of a City of London flood. What, then, of natural risks? We have to be ready, was Nigel’s answer: “The [Asian] tsunami showed some of the dilemmas. One is, there will be staff on holiday with their family members getting lost, killed. These members of staff aren’t going to be ready to work until they have resolved all that. What help does one give them as a company? … In terms of doing risk analysis one has to look much more broadly than just terrorism; it’s also the various forms of natural disaster: being hit by a very big flood.” Or, he added, an immigration scam. That is, what if Immigration swoop one morning and you lose all your contract cleaners – and confidential information shredders? If you haven’t laid down with the contractor standards about pre-employment vetting or screening, not only might you give work to illegal immigrants, but what else are they doing on your site?! And what if you don’t have any cleaners for three days – will your office or dealer floor start stacking up with unhygienic sandwiches?! And returning to the idea of your cleaners taken away, in Nigel’s view you owe it to your other staff to know that the people working in their office space are fit and proper.<br><br>‘Hard work’<br><br>“It’s a great time to be in this business,” says Nigel, ever a man in the swim. He asks me if I was at the think-tank Demos that morning to hear Home Secretary John Reid’s speech on counter-terrorism (I wasn’t). But then CRG are in the swim around the world; it was among others on the ground in Beirut helping clients, via its London-based crisis incident management centre CR24, evacuate people from Lebanon; a Foreign Office contract in Iraq has been renewed; and China business grows. He continues: “The challenges are big, the environment is difficult. Globalisation gives the criminal and the terrorist tremendous opportunities to learn and to develop ideas. They are under no time pressure; they can decide when they want to do something, whereas we have to try to set our businesses up to be on guard the whole time. And that’s the hard bit; how do you keep your staff motivated, your office secure and functioning properly when apparently not much is happening? Wherever I go across the world, governments are saying, this is a high threat environment. We are here another 15, 20 years and that is hard bloody work, to keep things tight over this very prolonged timescale. But people say, wasn’t it the same with the IRA. It was never the same because they always gave warnings, they didn’t want to kill you and I, they wanted to bring the Establishment to the table. It’s a completely different environment. This is a totally no-warning environment … So you have to be eyes open, and ensure that you have done your best. People can’t ask for more than that, I suspect.” <br><br>About Nigel Churton MBE<br><br>A former British Army officer, he is a member of ASIS, the Company of Security Professionals, and is a council member of The Security Institute; he has been president of the International Security Management Association (ISMA).<br> <br>About Control Risks<br><br>Its next UK ‘managing a kidnap or extortion incident’ workshop is on October 17 and 18.

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