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Olympic and Paralympic Games 2012

My Lords, in declaring my interest as a member of the advisory board of the British Olympic Association under the austere eye of our chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, my remarks will be entirely concerned with the security aspects of the Olympic and Paralympic Games and the practical and very costly problems which arise in meeting that most difficult of challenges of achieving a balance between security concerns and ensuring that spectators can enjoy the competitions in an open and friendly atmosphere. No one raising security matters now can be accused of scaremongering since the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, in a speech in mid-November 2009 to the Royal United Services Institute said that our Olympics would be, ""possibly the greatest security challenge that the United Kingdom has faced since the Second World War"." I recognise that there have been no fatalities in any Olympics since that pipe-bomb explosion in a crowded Atlanta park which, alas, killed two poor people in 1996, in a city which I visited at the tail end of October last year. That our UK security task in 2012 is both formidable and likely to grow in cost formidably is self-evident from what has been done in the run up to the forthcoming winter Olympics 2010 in Vancouver, now less than two months away. The preparation for the winter Games started off with a published planning assumption for security costs of 175 million Canadian dollars. The budget is now just under 1 billion Canadian dollars, about what the Greeks spent, in effect, for a whole summer Olympics in 2004, compared with the much smaller forthcoming winter Games events in Vancouver next month. It is very instructive to see where this nearly fivefold increase over the initial planning estimates of security costs will be spent. It will be spent on everything from enforcing airspace restrictions on over-flying to the costs of some 15,000 police, military and private security guards, all of whom are just now being vaccinated against certain viruses as part of their own protection. I trust that the Government will look very close indeed at what I hope will be peaceful Vancouver Games and at the security lessons that we can take and apply to London 2012. I understand there is a notional sum of some £800 million in the £9.3 billion budget for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. That sum is certain to escalate very substantially. As it is a matter of public security—the security of athletes, their coaches and the spectators who come to view these great events—that security bill will have to be met, as we meet others from outside existing budgets. That said, I have two main points to make about our Games relating to physical attack against people and property and one further main point about threats to the ticketing, logistics and organisation of 2012 posed by co-ordinated cyber attacks on our systems in this country. On violent terrorist attacks, since the 7/7 outrages in this country in 2005 and the almost daily litany of reports of explosions in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan, we are all too familiar with the current, most prevalent means of causing mayhem via demented suicide bombers or by improvised explosive devices, IEDs. To these, from information reaching me, I must now add improvised chemical devices—ICDs—those deadly twins of IEDs. Let us have no accusations of scaremongering just because so far those spectres have not attended any great Western sporting events. We must, rather, learn from the success of others in stopping just such potential chemical assaults. I think in particular of how Germany dealt with that specific threat in the run-up to and during the 2006 football World Cup—an object lesson for this Government and for us generally in chemical readiness. Pre-emption was paramount, as in all good anti-terrorist work, of course, but underlying it was a brilliant chemical surveillance plan allowing any suspect substance to be analysed quickly. Those devices were in continuous standby mode, but installed so that spectators were completely unaware of them, and thus unalarmed. Without, of course, going into any sensitive detail, will the Minister in his wind-up speech answer this specific question: is a chemical attack/prevention and chemical surveillance plan in development for 2012 or not? If not, will there be one? If the Minister cannot, for understandable reasons, answer tonight because he is not briefed on the point, will he none the less undertake to write to me with the answer, copied to all other speakers, and to place a copy of that letter in the Library of your Lordships' House? My second point about the prevention of attacks on the person is driven by the belief that terrorists do best, by their lights, by the simple tactic of working around or, best of all, before security measures are in place. Devices of a latent nature could still be left in the Olympic Park during the construction phase and elsewhere. I very much welcome the vigorous biometric checks that have been introduced for construction staff working in the Olympic Village, with a present workforce of about 4,500 doubling to 10,000 by the end of 2010. All those methods, from photographic smart cards in conjunction with hand scanners to iris-checking devices, must be used to help to prevent the courage of illicit and destructive materials on to the site. However, fast forward not much more than a couple of years, and the same sort of checking will have to be in place for the many scores of thousands of volunteers who will willingly—I welcome this—give up their time for stewarding and other roles in the Olympics. That is a formidable security task. Terrorists, particularly suicide terrorists, use ever more concealed devices, as we have just seen, and there has been a Statement in your Lordships' House today about that. That is a hard question, with all the cost implications that it entails, but I suppose that we must consider whether whole-body scanners should be used for 2010’s construction workers and, perhaps, for 2012’s volunteers as well. I end on this note. We face the threat of direct attacks on the person, but we also face formidable possible attacks from cyber methods to disrupt 2012 by a co-ordinated or partial assault on ticketing systems, on the related transport and hotel bookings systems, and certainly on our utility companies’ electricity networks. I am advised that there are what are termed in the cyber trade Trojans, which can be placed across diverse systems and networks, and then simultaneously triggered from a distance, as the people of Estonia found out with the devastating cyber attack on their country back in 2006. Just as in the matter of the pressing need for an Olympic chemical attack and surveillance plan, do the Government who, in the end, are responsible for our security, have a cyber attack plan? Who is in charge of it? By the same token, if the Minister cannot answer tonight because he is not briefed on it, will he again undertake to write to me, copied to all other noble Lords who have spoken in this debate, and to place the answer in the Library of the House?