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Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones: Partnerships will be crucial for secure future

Yesterday Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, Minister for Security at the Home Office called for increased international and national partnerships between public and private sector organisations – and with the general public itself – in order to build a secure and resilient nation. Speaking at GovNet's packed Homeland and Border Security 2010 conference at the QEII Conference Centre she told delegates: "The goal is a society that is resilient physically and psychologically and has a shared sense of purpose."

Baroness Neville-Jones used her keynote address to highlight the work of the National Security Council (NCS) which met on the first day on the new Coalition Government and continues to do so on a weekly basis. The NSC is the strategic heart of governance for national security. It sees national security as protecting the nation's values as well as its physical assets. Baroness Neville-Jones noted: "This agenda cuts across all areas of government that have a security component."

The challenge the new Coalition has set itself is to roll back areas of the 'protective state' which, according to Neville-Jones, have some characteristics of the 'oppressive state' and can be "...a source of division rather than trust". At the same time, there is a need to address the challenge of ideologically-driven violence, a problem, says Neville-Jones that "...needs to take place in the context of something that is not looked at well enough - which is integrating our plural society into a single whole."

Other speakers at the conference included Charlie Edwards, Head of Strategy and Planning at the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism and Sir Ian Andrews, who highlighted the challenges and work of the Serious Organised Crime Agency of which he is Non-Executive Chair.

Speaking from the private sector, Martin Sutherland, Managing Director at Detica, called for a radical reform in the UK's approach to security against the backdrop of public sector spending cuts and growing public unease about our 'surveillance society'. Mr Sutherland said: "With all minds focused on reducing the fiscal deficit, we need to have a new debate on how we can maintain a proportionate approach to security at a lower cost. There is a firm need for Government - in areas as diverse as immigration and border control, revenue collection and taxation, counter terrorism and countering other types of organised crime - to change its approach to security."

The conference also heard from Professor Paul Wiles, the Former Director and Government Chief Scientific Adviser to the Home Office Science and Research Group. Professor Wiles' concern was that any new security strategy or technology had to be introduced with the trust of the public. "Trust generating capability must be a system requirement and not something to be added when the solution has been created," he said.