Concluding a three-part view of the Protect Duty, on the eve of the close of the Home Office period of consultation, Mark Rowe says that the legal responsibility the Duty will place on site and land owners is of a piece with ever more complex modern life, says Mark Rowe.
Take data protection for instance; grotesquely, often the victim of a data breach is financially punished by the regulator, far more than whoever the hacker is (who is seldom if ever even identified, let alone in court). Banks get fined for not meeting money laundering rules; what about the criminals, whose money it is? To return to terrorism, the ‘Prevent’ duty requires ‘specified authorities’ to have ‘due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’, according to the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. The ‘authorities’ that come under this Duty are local government (oddly, parliaments, the security services and GCHQ, the military and the General Synod of the Church of England explicitly cannot fall under ‘Prevent’), schools and universities, healthcare, prisons and probation, and the police.
That means a bureaucrat’s dream of awareness training, and monitoring, that all has to be documented (and plenty of paid work there for trainers and consultants). None of it appeared to stop the terrorist who was released from prison, eight months before the Fishmongers’ Hall attack; as the inquest (page 36 of the July print edition of Professional Security magazine) has shown. Another real world question; are schools and prisons given extra budgets to comply with such a Duty? What teacher, doctor or dentist in their right mind wants to fall under such a duty?
The working out of any Duty, once passed by Parliament, will require answers to at least two questions that have long hung over the private security sector, without being pressing enough for a resolution. First, a definition of stewarding (that under the Security Industry Authority regime does not require a door security or guarding badge and training) and security. If a steward’s role is now deemed to be Security, where is the line drawn; does it include any concierge and porter at any entrance to any site? Second, liability, which was aired in an Association of Security Consultants (ASC) webinar featured in the May print edition of Professional Security magazine, page 40. Who will take responsibility for land where the boundaries, physical and organisational are not set (as was such an issue outside the Manchester Arena, in May 2017)? The Inquiry has seen an exhaustive discussion of who was responsible for what and who might therefore be to blame for doing or not doing something: the concert promoter, the security contractor, and police.
Besides, compliance with the Duty will not be a one-off; the threat level to a place, or its unrelated neighbour, even, will go up and down, and the terrorist methods will change and call for new training. The authorities will have to keep up with what they provide risk surveyors and ops managers, something else exhaustively gone into by the Inquiry.
Fire safety
The security industry should be careful what it wishes for. You could say that the burden of responsibility is with the security manager regardless of any legal duty, as the Arena Inquiry has shown. The worst result could be as we have seen with fire safety, in buildings. The country had the Health and Safety Executive, laws, made over decades; and in any case you would have thought products ought not to catch fire. Instead, Grenfell happened (pictured), also in 2017, and far from resolved.
The government’s answer to both; a new regulatory regime. What’s needed is good public policy. The difference between terrorism and fire is that fire is a matter of physics and chemistry; measurable and predictable. So far as the acts of suicide terrorists can be traced, they can be unpredictable, in their choice of geographic targets and when they choose them, perhaps at a very late stage. Any Protect Duty has to account for not the science of fire, but the devious and ultimately unknowable workings of the terrorist mind.
