Feral Jundi

This is a really bad deal. lol I mean G4S really screwed up on this one, and this is one of those deals where all other PMSC’s and contractors are watching and wincing. I know I am.…

As to why this was such a screwed up deal probably rests upon a poorly written contract, and poorly managed recruitment/vetting effort–because of a poorly written contract. Everything from the appropriate amount of time to do this, to resources, and anything else that could have and should have been included in this contract.  And pay is the one thing that the company should not have played games with.  Check out this quote:

A former police sergeant who signed up to work for G4S at the Olympics has told how he withdrew his application over fears the recruitment process was “totally chaotic” and the firm was simply looking for cheap labour.
Robert Brown, who served for 30 years with Kent police, claimed he knew many other retired officers who had decided against working at the Games for the same reasons.
He said he had been given verbal commitments that staff would be paid £14 an hour, but that the contract he received said he would be entitled to £6.05 an hour for working outside the venues, and £8.50 for working inside the stadium.
“It is actually very sad,” Brown said. “I was looking forward to working at this historic event, but it would have been a waste of my time. The public needs to be aware of this.”

All I have to say is that if you mess with pay and break promises like that, then of course no one is going to sign up.  When the final report comes out as to what exactly happened, I would be curious as to how many experienced security guys said no thanks to this one because of pay?

What is equally sad is that in one breath they attracted former police officers like the one in the quote and yet jerked him around on pay, and in another breath they sent this memo out looking for other police officers to help save the contract. Unreal….

G4S has got a £284m contract to provide 13,700 guards, but only has 4,000 in place. It says a further 9,000 are in the pipeline.
G4S sent an urgent request on Thursday to retired police asking them to help. A memo to the National Association of Retired Police Officers said: “G4S Policing Solutions are currently and urgently recruiting for extra support for the Olympics. These are immediate starts with this Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday available. We require ex-police officers ideally with some level of security clearance and with a Security Industry Association [accreditation], however neither is compulsory.”

The other one that came out was the vetting and recruitment of folks with no security background, and how chaotic and dumb that process has been. How embarrassing? I guess the G4S Facebook Page on this deal is littered with complaints from applicants on how terrible and inefficient the process has been.  Like I said, the devil will be in the details of the contract signed and how this was managed, and the report that comes out on this will be very revealing. I understand G4S’s share price has been negatively impacted, and their reputation will take a huge hit because of all of this. How they deal with this crisis and the impact on the company will be interesting to watch.

If anyone from the company, or anyone that has experienced the recruitment process described has any insight as to ‘why’ this might have went so wrong is invited to share their comments below. –Matt

Edit: 07/12/2012– Apparently G4S had some issues with the computer program running the show. Kind of weak if you ask me, and that sounds like management trying to blame technology for their poor leadership and organizational skills. That and they under bid everyone else by %25.  Here is the quote:

* An insider said the root cause of the problem with G4S was its internal computer system which had failed to calculate staff rostering.

* G4S won the security contract with Locog after submitting a tender at least 25 per cent lower than any other, which would have been hugely attractive to a British Olympic movement paranoid about going over budget.

Britain Adjusts Security Plans in Tense Countdown to the Olympics
By JOHN F. BURNS
July 12, 2012
With 14 days to go before the opening of the Olympic Games — and more than 2,500 days since the Games were awarded to London in 2005 — the British government acknowledged on Thursday that it had been forced to deploy an additional brigade of troops to save its security plan from falling apart.
To cries of “shambles” and “international embarrassment” in the House of Commons, the government of Prime Minister David Cameron said it had issued an emergency draft for an additional 3,500 troops, many of them just returned from Afghanistan — on top of 13,500 already committed for the Games — after broken commitments by a private security company. The government will now field a total military force of 17,000, who will outnumber civilian security details at Olympics venues by more than 2 to 1.
The government move came after what some infuriated Olympics officials described as overly hopeful and ultimately misleading exchanges involving organizers, the government and the G4S security company in recent months. This week, G4S officials finally conceded that the company was far behind — by a head count of several thousand — in its contract under the Olympics’ billion-dollar security plan to produce more than 10,000 fully trained, security-cleared guards.

With the Olympics opening ceremony set for July 27, Games organizers and the government, along with military commanders, now face a scramble to rejigger their plans.
Their aim will be to salvage as many private security guards as they can from G4S, a giant, British-based security company with 650,000 employees worldwide and contracts that have included running British prisons, Australian refugee detention centers and, through a subsidiary, guarding American nuclear plants. They will also have to devise a crash course in civilian duties for front-line troops who, in some cases, returned only days ago from heavily armed patrols in the war zones of Helmand Province.
It is a situation far removed from the sunny assurances with which top organizers like Sebastian Coe, a former world record holder for the mile in the 1980s and now head of the London organizing committee, have paved the countdown to the Games. Mindful of the fact that Britain has not hosted the Olympics since the first postwar Games in London in 1948, when food rationing remained so tight that even athletes went hungry, many hopeful Britons have treated the 2012 Games as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to showcase all that is best about the country.
For now those hopes, heightened by a yearning for relief from the gloom spread by years of austerity and recession, are far from extinguished, even if they are under increasingly heavy strain.
Beyond the worries over security staffing, there are continuing fears of terrorist attacks that could upset all hopes for the Games.
Britain’s domestic and international spy agencies, MI5 and MI6, have combined in an assessment that rates the risk of a terrorist attack as substantial, third highest in a five-tier alert system.
That is down a notch from the alert that has prevailed for most of the time since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It is an improvement, senior MI5 officials say, that owes much to the success that the security agencies, with greatly increased budgets and manpower since 2001, have had in disrupting large numbers of terrorist plots aimed at British targets. These plots had been hatched by extremists taking shelter undetected in Britain’s populous Muslim communities — or in overseas havens like Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
But few in Britain have forgotten the horror of the one big plot that succeeded, the multiple bombings in the London transit system in July 2005 — the day after the city won the contest for the Olympic Games — that killed 56 people, including the four bombers. That plot, largely homegrown, remains the template for what worries security officials most: random terrorist cells, or lone operators on suicide missions, who have slipped through the security net.
“In back rooms and in cars and on the streets of this country, there is no shortage of individuals talking about wanting to mount terrorist attacks,” Jonathan Evans, director general of MI5, the domestic security agency, warned in a rare public speech last month. Mr. Evans’s address was aimed at allaying exaggerated concerns about the Olympics, while also reminding people, as he put it, that “there is no such thing as guaranteed security.”
Beyond security concerns, Games organizers have had a widening array of other anxieties. There have been pervasive worries about traffic chaos on London’s roads, its Underground system and at Heathrow Airport, as systems that are heavily overloaded in normal times face an unprecedented Olympics traffic surge. In addition, there is the British weather, with the heaviest rainfall in 100 years in recent weeks, and forecasts that it will continue through the 17-day period of the Games.
Still, organizers point confidently to what they describe, despite the hiccup in the security plan, as the most thoroughly prepared peacetime endeavor in Britain’s history. They note that the government has committed nearly $20 billion in taxpayers’ money to the Games, vastly more than the estimate that helped win the award of the Games from competitors like Paris, Madrid and New York. They point, too, to a prominent strain in the national character — a gift for improvisation and what Britons call “muddling through” — that they say will ultimately prevail over last-minute crises like the one over security staffing.
Still, the muddle over security has been a serious setback. The troop deployments — some to be assigned to ticket-checking and ushering spectators, some to routine security duties at the Olympic sites and still others to stationing batteries of ground-to-air missiles on rooftops and open land near the Olympic park — will join a diminished group of private security guards at 100 sporting venues and other sites associated with the Games, including hotels to be used by delegations from the 200 competing countries.
In Parliament on Thursday, lawmakers brimmed with other gloomy prognostications. They noted that one of the main expressway bridges leading from Heathrow Airport to central London, and onward to the Olympic park in the east of the city, had been closed to traffic for the past two weeks while engineers worked against the clock to repair stress fractures in some of the supporting ironwork.
The closing has compounded fears that the perennially congested London road network will seize up under the pressure of Olympics-related traffic, despite — or perhaps because of — plans for dedicated lanes to whisk V.I.P.’s and Games officials to and from their high-end hotels.
Similar concerns have focused on the Underground, known as the Tube, which faces such strains from Olympic crowds that Games organizers have asked millions of everyday commuters to consider working from home during the Games. There are, too, the persistent problems in recent weeks in clearing passengers through immigration controls at Heathrow, with some passengers waiting three hours to clear the controls.
Faced with this sea of troubles, the government dispatched a somewhat flustered Theresa May, who as home secretary is the most senior woman in the cabinet, in a bid to calm lawmakers and the nation. Ms. May said G4S and the Olympics organizers, not the government, were responsible for the $440 million contract for the private security guards, and implied that the government had been kept in the dark by saying that the extent of the problem had “crystallized” only 24 hours before she brought it to the Commons.
She said deploying the extra troops was part of an established contingency plan, that Britain’s overstrained, austerity-shrunk army could handle the work, and that millions of Olympics spectators, far from being uneasy at the sight of uniformed soldiers at Games venues, would find the military presence reassuring.
She noted that soldiers, sailors and airmen in dress uniforms working on security and ushering duties were a long-established part of the scene at the Wimbledon tennis tournament. And to those inclined to see the breakdown in plans for security staffing as a possible harbinger of a failure to pre-empt and prevent terrorist attacks, she offered further reassurance.
“There remains no specific threat to the security of the Games,” she said. “And there is no question of the security of the Games being compromised.”
Story here.
—————————————————————-
G4S Olympic security recruitment ‘totally chaotic’
Former police sergeant withdrew application to work at London 2012 due to concerns over employment process and pay
Nick Hopkins
Thursday 12 July 2012
Soldiers guard a security checkpoint at an entrance to the London 2012 Olympic park. Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters
A former police sergeant who signed up to work for G4S at the Olympics has told how he withdrew his application over fears the recruitment process was “totally chaotic” and the firm was simply looking for cheap labour.
Robert Brown, who served for 30 years with Kent police, claimed he knew many other retired officers who had decided against working at the Games for the same reasons.
He said he had been given verbal commitments that staff would be paid £14 an hour, but that the contract he received said he would be entitled to £6.05 an hour for working outside the venues, and £8.50 for working inside the stadium.
“It is actually very sad,” Brown said. “I was looking forward to working at this historic event, but it would have been a waste of my time. The public needs to be aware of this.”
Brown has grade one private security qualifications and worked for the Home Office, advising on covert operations, after he left the police.
He said he applied to G4S when the adverts started to appear in November last year. But he was not called for interview in Stratford, east London, until February.
“They were trying to process hundreds of people and we had to fill out endless forms. It was totally chaotic and it was obvious to me that this was being done too quickly and too late,” Brown said.
The first training day involved presentations on how to be polite to members of the public, and follow-up training on how to pat people down.
“The instructors had been given a script that they had to stick to, and if you asked a question, they would not be able to give you an answer. The training was very basic and minimal. Having undergone their training I realised that they only wanted cheap labour.
“My great worry was this was being done before the vetting process had been completed.”
Brown withdrew his application before the third training instalment after receiving the contract about pay.
“At the beginning of the process we were told we could get expenses and some kind of accommodation for people who would be travelling to venues,” he said. “But then I was told there would be no expenses paid and no accommodation either. They were not guaranteeing work over a specific period and the pay was poor. I decided to wash my hands of it. It became obvious that it was becoming a farce.”
After attending the first training session, Brown asked whether he could apply to be a trainer. “But when I went to the interview it was obvious by the questions they were asking that they thought I was over-qualified, so I didn’t get it.
“It has been an awful experience. In my view, they should have started recruiting a year ago to get the numbers they needed. I am 63 years old and I regarded this as a unique chance to get involved in an historic event. It’s an awful situation.”
G4S said its security training was graded and that it lasted from four to 14 days, depending on the role.
“In this case, he may have pulled out before the training had been completed,” a spokesman said.
G4S insisted it would pay a minimum of £8.50 an hour during the Games.
Story here.
—————————————————————-
Olympic security chaos: depth of G4S security crisis revealed
Recruits tell of chaos over schedules, uniforms and training while ex-police officers asked to help out
Robert Booth and Nick Hopkins
Thursday 12 July 2012
The depth of the crisis over G4S’s Olympic security preparations became increasingly clear on Thursday as recruits revealed details of a “totally chaotic” selection process and police joined the military in bracing themselves to fill the void left by the private security contractor.
Guards told how, with 14 days to go until the Olympics opening ceremony, they had received no schedules, uniforms or training on x-ray machines. Others said they had been allocated to venues hundreds of miles from where they lived, been sent rotas intended for other employees, and offered shifts after they had failed G4S’s own vetting.
The West Midlands Police Federation reported that its officers were being prepared to guard the Ricoh Arena in Coventry, which will host the football tournament, amid concerns G4S would not be able to cover the security requirements.
“We have to find officers until the army arrives and we don’t know where we are going to find them from,” said Chris Jones, secretary of the federation.
G4S has got a £284m contract to provide 13,700 guards, but only has 4,000 in place. It says a further 9,000 are in the pipeline.
G4S sent an urgent request on Thursday to retired police asking them to help. A memo to the National Association of Retired Police Officers said: “G4S Policing Solutions are currently and urgently recruiting for extra support for the Olympics. These are immediate starts with this Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday available. We require ex-police officers ideally with some level of security clearance and with a Security Industry Association [accreditation], however neither is compulsory.”
Robert Brown, a former police sergeant, told the Guardian that he pulled out of the recruitment process for the Games after seeing it close at hand.
He said: “They were trying to process hundreds of people and we had to fill out endless forms. It was totally chaotic and it was obvious to me that this was being done too quickly and too late.”
Another G4S trainee, an ex-policeman, described the process as “an utter farce”.
He added: “There were people who couldn’t spell their own name. The staff were having to help them. Most people hadn’t filled in their application forms correctly. Some didn’t know what references were and others said they didn’t have anyone who could act as a referee. The G4S people were having to prompt them, saying things like “what about your uncle?”
Tim Steward, a former prison officer, said he was recruited by G4S in March as a team leader but said he would not be working at the Games because of a series of blunders.
Steward said he provided documentation for vetting but G4S had said it did not have the information on record and so closed his file. The security firm then offered him a training session at short notice, which he could not attend, but it did not offer an alternative.
A recruit who was interviewed in March and completed training last month, said: “There are people like me that are vetted and trained in security and would be happy to work, but can’t. Some of the classes were of around 200 in size with only two trainers accommodating the training for a class of this size.
“I am yet to hear from G4S regarding my screening, accreditation, uniform or even a rough start date. I know many people also who will be commencing work on 27 July who have had absolutely no scheduled on-site training. They are simply being chucked into their role on x-ray machines, public screening areas and even athlete screening areas.”
Another guard who has been trained as an x-ray operator, complained that he was unable to get through to G4S to find out when and where he was meant to be working, and was once left on hold on the phone for 38 minutes.
One student applicant said he had already spent £650 on travel and hotel bills to attend training and was now worried that, because he had not received any accreditation or rota from G4S, he might not be given the shifts that would enable him to cover those costs. He said he had expected to earn about £2,000 over the period of the Games.
G4S’s own Facebook page for new recruits is littered with similar complaints.
“They’ve placed me in Manchester and  I want to work in London,” wrote Glenn Roseman. “Some idiot has changed my location, I’m never going to get any work now.”
Christian Smith complained: “I did the training course, passed, and got my own security industry association licence, only to fail G4S vetting. Two days after I got their letter, they rang me, and asked me what days I could work.”
Rickie Hill reported that he had been sent someone else’s schedule.
Billy Edmunds said that he had been told on the telephone that he was to work four day shifts at the ExCel Centre, only to find when he checked the system later that he had been allocated three night shifts at a different location which he could not attend. “I give up,” he said. “Thanks for wasting my time for eight months G4S.”
The Guardian put the allegations to G4S. A spokesman for the company responded: “We are unable to respond to the specific questions you raise because to do so would involve pulling staff, who are working hard to mobilise the 2012 workforce, off  the work they are doing.
“We will enquire into the claims that are made and we take very seriously any allegation of poor standards on our part.”
Story here.