Clause 60
Policing and Crime Bill
5:15 pm
David Ruffley (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Bury St Edmunds, Conservative)
Welcome back from Namibia, Sir Nicholas. It is a pleasure to see you looking so refreshed and chairing the Committee with your usual verve, and indeed with even more verve after your recuperatory recess break.
Clause 60 and the clauses that follow relating to aviation security are important, but they are not without controversy, for reasons I will move on to in a moment. Clause 60 provides for the establishment, crucially, of a risk advisory group and a security executive group at aerodromes. Risk advisory groups will be required to produce a comprehensive risk report at the outset that will include analysis of risks to the aerodrome and make recommendations regarding the actions necessary to mitigate such risks. The membership of that RAG will include a representative of the aerodrome manager and a representative of the chief officer of police in that area as a minimum, and the manager of the aerodrome will have discretion to appoint such additional members as he considers necessary.
A risk report will be put together by that group, which will then be considered by a security executive group. The SEG is a different body in the sense that it has a different membership. It will make judgments on the security measures to be taken for the aerodrome and decide which party should be responsible for executing that security measure. Those decisions will form the content of the aerodrome security plan—ASP—which will formally document the security measures to be taken. The SEG’s membership is different from that of the RAG and will include, as a minimum, a representative of the aerodrome manager, representatives of the chief officer of police and the police authority of the relevant area and representatives of airlines operating at the airport—such people are not within the RAG.
On the face of it, clause 60 looks a little bureaucratic. Why do we need two groups, often with overlapping membership? My understanding is that the Minister, in drafting this, thought that there might be a conflict of interest in a body that on the one hand analyses risk and on the other hand has to pay for the measures that mitigate that risk. I assume that the reason for having two groups rather than one—the Minister may correct me if I am wrong—is that the risk analysis cannot be short-changed by the people making the decisions downgrading the risk because they do not want to pay for it. If my understanding is correct, those two groups are separate for that reason.