Support services giant G4S has hit the news for all the wrong reasons, over its £300m contract to run the physical security at the London 2012 Olympics. G4S is supposed to have 10,000 security personnel on site during the Games, but it just emerged (16 days before D Day) that it has had problems recruiting and training staff. Home secretary Theresa May’s response was to call up 3,500 extra troops to fill the shortfall left by G4S, in addition to the 13,500 troops already earmarked for the Games.
In a statement, G4S admitted that it had ‘encountered some delays in progressing applicants’, but said it has ‘nearly 4,000 people’ at work across 100 [Olympic] venues and another 9,000 going through the final stages of its vetting, training and accreditation process.
Something as mission critical as Games security was always going to be a contentious service for the Government to outsource. So it really begs the question why the military didn’t have a bigger role to play in the first place, with a security company like G4S, and/or one of its rivals like Serco or Reliance in a more minor supporting role.
Unfortunately this high profile intervention by Government, at such a late stage, will only serve to add this contract to the list of other outsourcing deals over the years that have gone awry. Such problems add to our caution over the rate at which new outsourcing business will enter the market in the years to come (see UK public sector outsourcing: heading for a boom or a trickle?).
G4S said that this ‘is an unprecedented and very complex security recruitment and deployment exercise’. Perhaps then it should have been more realistic about what was going to be achievable. A salutary lesson here for other outsourcers to UK Government?