Ministry of Defence Police and Guarding Agency

Foreword
Mr S B Love – Chief Constable and Chief Executive
THIS HAS BEEN MY FIRST YEAR AS CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF
the Agency and Chief Constable of the MOD Police
Force (MDP), and I could not have chosen a more
eventful start to my association with this unique security
and policing organisation.
Leading up to the summer of 2005, our planning to
support the high-level Trafalgar 200 events at HM Naval
Base Portsmouth, and the G8 Summit in central Scotland,
required us to manage the deployment of substantial policing
resources, much of it specialist skills, at the same time as
continuing to perform all our agreed security and policing
tasks right across the UK Defence estate. What we could
not have foreseen was an almost immediate test of our
resilience as we moved virtually without a break into
Operation Toga, the aftermath of the July London bombings,
when we surged to reinforce the security of the Whitehall
area of the capital and to support our hard pressed
colleagues in the Metropolitan Police Force, again without
reducing agreed commitments to the wider Defence Estate.
I learned a lot from those months about the strengths
of this Agency. The demands on us could hardly have been
more testing, but we met them and enhanced our reputation.
The MDP is only 1.5% of the national policing strength in
numbers, but has over 8% of the national CBRN capability, a
major marine force, the biggest fraud squad outside London,
the largest dog capability of any police force, and is providing
45% of all the UK’s international policing presence as well
as running the international training for overseas police
deployments from all UK police forces. On the guarding side,
our MGS guards now get nationally accredited training.
The summer of 2005 certainly provided yet further
evidence of the value of MDP Divisional Support Groups
(DSGs) in providing surge capability within Divisions and
when required across Divisions, to meet national
commitments. With taskings closely managed by the
Divisional tasking and co-ordination process, the Force is
able to quickly re-prioritise officers to emerging threats such
as those seen last July. DSG officers are able to perform a
range of tasks all the way through to armed policing and
security. And their deployment
MINISTRY OF DEFENCE POLICE AND GUARDING AGENCY ANNUAL REPORT
does not create the kind of staffing shortfall issues that
arise when officers are seconded away from dedicated
policing duties at MOD units.
But the real place where match-fitness stands or falls is
at the local station. It is part of the day job of anyone in
charge of anything in this Agency to make sure that their
people and their function are put to exercise under
emergency conditions and that everyone will know what
to do in a crisis. This exercise culture will grow in the future,
with the Guard Service playing its full part.
Our sign-up to Airwave radio, the national radio infrastructure
for all emergency services, has continued to raise
our game in communications effectiveness. It was used to
good effect during the Trafalgar 200 events at Portsmouth,
where for the first time MDP, the Royal Navy and Hampshire
Police had a common radio system for special policing and
security operations. It was also used widely by MDP and
Scottish Forces during the G8 Summit. We completed the
roll-out of Airwave to MDP officers in February 2006, and
nationally the O2 Airwave Service programme was completed
with the join-up of the national infrastructure in October 2005.
We also took the decision to equip the MGS with Airwave
radio in order to enable the service to have secure interoperability
with MDP, with Home Office and Scottish Office
police forces and with other MOD users.
Command and Control is now established as the common
system for incident reporting and resource deployment. The
Control Room element of the project has continued to
progress and all the MDP Divisional Control Rooms, with one
exception at this stage, have been equipped with the NSPIS
Command and Control system. Airwave enables control room
staff to maintain digital (encrypted) radio communication with
all MDP staff anywhere in the UK.
Taking its constituent parts together, the Command and
Control project was the largest of its kind for the Agency, and
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