Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Baroness Henig Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Henig]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Security Industry Authority and president of the Association of Police Authorities. I share the great concern of colleagues at the constitutional implications of this Bill, but my main concern this evening is to speak on behalf of those who work with and in the private security sector throughout the UK, but especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and to convey their disbelief, their dismay and their anger at the Government's uninformed and high-handed attempts to deregulate the industry by abolishing the Security Industry Authority.

The 350,000 or so individuals who work in the private security sector have to undergo criminality checks and basic training before gaining a licence which costs them £80 per year. So it is those who work in the industry as security guards, in close protection or as door supervisors, or their employers, who pay for the regulation of private security, not the Government. The SIA is completely self-financing and the Government will save nothing by its abolition. You might therefore have thought that before deciding to deregulate the industry, a Government avowedly concerned about transparency and accountability might have consulted the people who actually pay for regulation, or those industry bodies which strongly pressed for it in the 1990s. But not a bit of it—the Cabinet Office decided to press ahead with the abolition of the private security industry regulator with no consultation whatever, totally disregarding the fact that companies working in the industry had invested upwards of £300 million in regulation and in what they call the “SIA brand” and that they reasonably wanted a return on their investment. Even more seriously, those sitting in the Cabinet Office paid no heed to any of the dangers which deregulation would pose to the public.

In the past five years, the Security Industry Authority has worked with the police, local government and other partners to identify 175 companies and nearly 300 individuals with links to organised crime groups. The associated criminality was at the most extreme end of the spectrum of harm to the public—dealing in class A drugs, organised immigration crime, gang violence, domestic terrorism and laundering the proceeds of crime. Since 2004, 47,000 individuals have been removed from working in the industry because they were identified as not fit and proper to do so, and of these nearly 1,500 had their licences suspended in response to a clear, serious and imminent threat of harm to the public. The SIA itself has successfully prosecuted 24 cases and nine companies because of suspected links to organised crime, and through collaborative working with the UK Border Agency it has revoked about 8,000 licences of people with no right to work in the United Kingdom.

When front-line policing is going to be cut, and when the threat from both domestic and international terrorism is so strong, you would have thought it was hardly the time to announce the deregulation of private security and run the risk of encouraging criminals and untrained people to return to the sector. This runs completely counter to such schemes as the highly successful Projects Griffin and Argos, which bring together private security guards with the police, who use them as their eyes and ears to detect any suspicious goings on in the streets and in the buildings where they work, schemes which have been widely adopted both in the UK and further afield. These schemes rest on the foundation that those who work in private security have been properly vetted and have received basic training, a situation which the proposed deregulation of the industry is about to put in jeopardy.

It was in Scotland in October that the news first leaked out that the Government were intending to abolish the regulatory body for private security. The Scottish Government were appalled; the chief constable of Strathclyde condemned the proposal as a “disaster”. Licensing started in Scotland in 2007, and since then Strathclyde and other forces in Scotland have worked closely with the SIA to disrupt crime gangs by attacking their legitimate fronts, such as security businesses. Without a doubt, regulation was making a significant contribution to tackling serious and organised crime, particularly in the Glasgow area, and there was no way that the Scottish Government would agree to drop it. In fact quite the contrary: Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill made it clear he wanted more regulation, covering more sectors; and following a visit he made to Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Administration gave strong backing to this view, making it clear that regulation had worked extremely effectively there in the year since it was introduced and that, like the Scots, they would insist on retaining it under their devolved powers.

I was very surprised to hear the Minister say earlier that there had been no differences of view between the Government and Scotland on this Bill. I would like to ask him perhaps to reconsider the accuracy of what he said earlier and to make it clear to the House in his summing-up that very strong divisions of opinion exist between the Government in London, the Scottish Administration and the Northern Ireland Administration in relation to the SIA and its role.

It was indeed the Glasgow Herald which pointed up the total inconsistency in what was happening. It said that not only was the effectiveness of the SIA being measured by its ability to curtail and disrupt criminal activity, but that licensing had inculcated a new culture among stewards on licensed premises, whose training in reducing aggression and violence had contributed to crime reduction in city centres. It then observed that the SIA was apparently doomed in England because it had failed the Cabinet Office's tests for survival: performing a technical function, impartiality and establishing facts transparently. Yet, as the Herald wryly observed, it appeared to pass those tests with flying colours in Scotland.

Perhaps the Minister could answer a question that I have been asking for some time: where is the consistency in this Bill? Why is the regulator for private security singled out for abolition, but not other regulators such as the Gangmasters Licensing Authority or the Gambling Commission? Did all government departments answer the three questions differently? What is the common factor which binds together all the bodies in Schedule 1? To me, they appear like a completely random collection, almost as if they had been drawn out by lottery balls on a Wednesday evening.

The leak in the Daily Telegraph, while it completely demoralised staff working in all the listed organisations, did at least give the leading associations and individuals in the private security industry the opportunity to start organising and telling the Government what they thought. The British Security Industry Association, the International Professional Security Association, the Security Institute and the UK chapter of ASIS International, plus all the leading industry online sites and publications, expressed their opposition to deregulation loudly and unequivocally. A new industry umbrella organisation, the Security Alliance, took shape and resolved that regulation should stay for the protection of the public and to continue to drive up standards in the industry; that compliance and enforcement of licensing was very important, and could be undermined by what the Government were proposing to do; and that those working in the industry should be allowed to continue working with the regulator, as they had since the summer, to work out ways of moving to smarter, lighter-touch regulation.

The irony of all this is that had the Cabinet Office done any research at all, it would have learnt that the private security industry and its regulator had agreed on a blueprint for the next few years to move to greater industry involvement in the regulatory regime, particularly for companies achieving high standards in annual independent inspections, so that regulation could focus more strongly on the not so good, not so highly performing companies. The Home Office had already been approached to introduce business licensing alongside the licensing of individuals to make it easier to set minimum standards which could then be progressively raised, and to ensure compliance. Eventually, even Ministers in the Cabinet Office, I am happy to say, heard the message and heeded it. They agreed that, while the SIA should no longer be a non-departmental public body, there should be a phased transition to a new regulatory regime. This was endorsed last week in a letter to me from the Home Secretary, and I am happy to accede to her wish to ensure that,

“any transition to a new regulatory regime is phased in smoothly and takes into account the needs of the industry as well as the priorities of the Government including the devolved Administrations”,

and that there should be no,

“significant changes prior to the Olympic Games”.

However, I am aware that none of that is in the Bill. Can the Minister explain to me, please, and to all those working in the industry, what statutory force the Home Secretary's intentions will have?

One or two issues still worry those working in the industry, and major buyers of private security, such as Tesco, the big City banks and companies with big sites to protect, do not want the transition period to be rushed. They want to ensure that any new regime, even if it includes self-regulation, builds firmly on the existing one, is not a poor substitute for it and, in particular, continues to have government-backed enforcement powers. The Scottish Government, who are already planning for the Commonwealth Games in 2014, will undoubtedly be in strong agreement with these concerns, as will Northern Ireland.

So the regulator will try its best to set out a timetable and to construct a transition to a new regime which satisfies the Government on the one hand and the industry, buyers, Scotland and Northern Ireland on the other. It will not be easy, and our task has been made inordinately more difficult by the way the Cabinet Office has operated in the past few weeks, with a total lack of transparency, consistency, logic or evidence-based policy-making. We will go ahead and try to make the best of what is happening, and all our partners are very supportive, but it hardly inspires confidence in the Government's avowed mission to eradicate waste and inefficiency or to apply with any consistency the objectives listed in Clause 8(1). The Bill is hugely contentious, and I hope I have shown some of its shortcomings in the detailed analysis that I have just put forward. It needs to be considered extremely carefully before we proceed any further, which is why I shall certainly be supporting my noble friend’s amendment later this evening.