Safe transport

Patrick Mercer, OBE, MP, and the UK’s Shadow Minister for Homeland Security offers his thoughts on securing transport infrastructure and why ministers need a “boot up the soft regions”.

INFRA. The pressure is on stakeholders in the transport industry to provide cheaper, more reliable and more environmentally friendly transport systems. How then can they be encouraged to make security a priority?
PM. By realising that the next attack will probably be mounted on our transport systems and if those responsible have not taken measured to make things safer from the traveller, then they will face the most appalling legal battles afterwards.

INFRA. Why are transport systems such a favourite target and so hard to protect?
PM. They are a favourite target because our enemies have said they are. For instance, the idea of aircraft moving from one continent to another means that not only are people being transported but ideas are being exported as well. This exporting of ideas is something that Islamic fundamentalists feel very strongly about and wish to attack. So there is the practical side – the relative ease of attacking a crowded transport system – and they have a certain iconic value.

But they are not that difficult to protect. A considerable amount has been done, for instance in the air, which has made it considerably safer that it was. It still isn’t perfect and never will be, but it is considerably safer. The easiest target of all in my opinion are the millions of people who travel on the tube each day in London – there has already been a successful attack, a foiled attack and another probable foiled attack and nothing substantive has been done to protect the tube.

INFRA. Transport security, often being cross-border in nature, requires cooperation. Are there programmes or mechanisms in place in the UK to foster such collaboration?
PM. Again, I think things are improving but it’s taking a long time and if you look at the relative ease with which terrorists can board a British aircraft leaving from a British airline compared to the difficulty in mounting an American aircraft, then we certainly do need to cooperate better and have common standards across boundaries and borders.

To give another example, air freight can come in and out of Britain and you would be most unlucky if your freight was screened or surveyed at all, whereas a foot passenger will have many such checks. That leaves freight wide open.

INFRA. A plethora of new security measures and technologies, such as biometrics and scanning devices, are now available. Are we making the most of these?
PM. Absolutely not. One of the most depressing things from an extremely depressing speech at the ‘Building a Secure World’ conference by the Department of Transport Security and Contingencies’ Niki Tompkinson, was that she talks at length about the number of trials that have been done on various pieces of equipment. That’s impressive until you realise that what she’s talking about are only trials, not the deployment of kit. These are tools that are being installed, trialled and then removed.

For example, the surveillance and screening equipment that was installed at Paddington Station for the Heathrow Express was deployed with great fanfare but it is no longer there. It raises the question of why on earth we are trialling these things and then not replacing the equipment. Secondly, it’s 2007 – it became absolutely clear from the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in 2003 that transport networks were going to be very, very vulnerable so why are we still doing trials at this stage?

INFRA. As we raise our levels of technology and put in more layers, the terrorist will always find new avenues of attack. How do we stay one step ahead?
PM. It’s extremely important, but at the same time we need to make a decision to deploy technology as and when it’s ready to be deployed. There is always a temptation to say that technology x is pretty good, but give it another few years and it’ll be even better and cheaper to deploy. That’s fine, but we need equipment and we need it now. Equipment is also only part of the equation.

If you ask why are we being so slow to put these things in place it’s because the Home Office in the UK and others are not being pressurised brutally by a single minister for security who ought to be putting the toe of his or her boot up the soft regions of industry and doing it quickly.

INFRA. How good is sharing of best practices across Europe today? How can it be improved? Do we learn enough from our mistakes?
PM. I think we’re pretty good. While much of what I have said so far has been hugely negative we should bear in mind that if the UK government is to be believed we have had five major attacks interdicted by the security forces since July last year. I have no doubt that there are many other occasions when the security services manage to deter or interdict attacks. Lessons are undoubtedly learned. For example, following the Madrid bombings, the lessons that came out were widely disseminated. How much the advice and lessons are then actually put into practice is another matter.

INFRA. New measures to protect us against liquid explosives were recently put in place – why were we not aware of this risk already?
PM. You’re right and I would recall my time in Northern Ireland when we suspected we were going to be attacked by an improvised armoured vehicle and yet we had no armour piercing weapons. We were attacked in this way and lost many soldiers as a result. Immediately following the attacks we were provided with armour piercing weapons.

It’s very easy to be wise after the event, and I alluded to the speed of response just now, but what worries me is we know for example that the tube represents a huge target for the terrorists but very little is being done to make it harder to attack.

INFRA. What about other means of attack that may get past traditional surveillance procedures, such as CBRN? Are we prepared for such an eventuality?
PM. I think there’s absolutely no doubt that the next thing in the terrorists’ armoury is going to be a dirty bomb. We’ve seen people like Dhiren Barot, who I saw last week in the first week of his 40-year sentence at Belmarsh, talking about the practical application of a dirty bomb and there are other hints that they will use these things. And we have seen the chaos that can be caused when just one individual is suffering from radiation sickness, Alexander Litvinenko. We have got to be ready for this and understand that not only do our emergency services need to be prepared, but also the population has to be prepared.

My single largest criticism of the UK government is that they are increasingly talking, loudly and articulately about the threat of terrorism, but preparing the population to actually deal with that threat is something they simply haven’t addressed.

INFRA. Immediately following 9/11, the public, businesses and emergency services became much more alert to possible dangers. Did that period of heightened fear actually makes us any safer, and have we slipped back into complacency?
PM. My own view is that knowledge dispels fear. So if you say to someone that there is a possibility of their office catching fire it is very alarming. How likely is it that this will happen? It’s possible but highly unlikely. However, in the event that it does happen everyone in the office has been through a number of regular drills to prepare you for what to do. Nobody refuses to come to work or has a panic attack over the possibility of such a fire.

I believe we should be educating people about the possible aftermath of an attack, but it should be focused on what they need to do to cope with that incident. If we don’t do that it simply suggests to me that politicians and others don’t believe the rhetoric that they employ.

INFRA. Fear is one of the aims of the terrorists. Could you therefore argue that by adding to that fear we are doing their work for them. Where does the balance lie?
PM. The UK Home Secretary John Reid announced recently that the country faces a very high risk of attack over the Christmas period and I think that is a deeply irresponsible thing to say, unless it is accompanied by guidance for the population on how to deal with it. Crossing the road is a risk but we all have to cross roads and we all understand that. We also understand how to avoid getting run down by a car. So you can either tell people that crossing the road is incredibly dangerous and they should stay inside and avoid them at all costs, or you can teach people the safe way to cross a road and train people to be responsible in traffic then that is knowledge dispelling fear.

INFRA. People demand security, but many still reject changes that they see as ‘big brother’ tactics across the transport infrastructure. Can we have one without the other?
PM. We need to understand the nature of the threat, in the same that we understood that German paratroopers or spies were likely to be amongst us in the Second World War or that Russian spies were amongst us in the Cold War or that the IRA posed a threat. All of these things we dealt with successfully and none of them we allowed to interfere with our day-to-day life. We simply need to understand what the threat is and, importantly, how to deal with it.

Karl Wycoff: “Have advanced notice of containers, so you can do proper risk management.”

William Mawer: “The challenge is to match the evolution of changing technologies with the changing threats.”