Counter-terrorism Risk Assessment

The UK Government has published the ‘Protect Duty’ Consultation with large venues, organisations, businesses and local and public authorities on proposals to impose a legal obligation on organisations to consider the safety and security of their staff and the public who use their ‘Publicly accessible locations’.

Any new legislation propounds that all publicly accessible venues that have capacity for 100 persons or more and organization’s that employ onsite more than 250 persons, will in future have to conduct a Counter-terrorism Risk Assessment.

It is seemingly only a matter of time before organisations have to factor security and terror threats into their planning, many organisations will have little experience or ‘know-how’ when considering risks around terror attacks and threats, so it is advisable to start engaging with security and counter terrorism knowledge as part of any existing risk assessment/health and safety regime, as early as possible.

Security threats evolve constantly and vary widely from location to location,so a Counter-terrorism Risk Assessment should be qualitative rather than quantitative in terms of describing risk likelihood. This key fact makes it problematic for non-Security experts to derive reliable estimates of probability and so it is critical any assessment is carried out by a competent person with the relevant Counter-terrorism background and knowledge.