From the tv news conference about the publication of the report by the Greater London Assembly:
Report of the 7 July Review Committee
into the response of the Emergency Services to last year's bomb attacks on the Tube and Buses,
It is clear that if a similar disaster were to happen today, very little would have been improved in the planned respose of the Emergency Services.
N.B. this report is not a substitute for a proper, detailed, independent Public Inquiry.
- There is still no method of radio communications between all of the Emergency Services, and certainly still nothing that works Underground.
The need for such systems was identified 18 years ago as a result of the King's Cross Tube station fire.
The Transport for London plan to install such radio links is, apparently "2 years behind schedule", and will not start to happen until 2007.
This is totally unacceptable in the 21st Century, when the techology itself does exist.
- Above ground, there was over reliance on mobile phones, which, predicably got congested.
The Metropolitan Police Gold Command decided not to declare an Access Overload Control condition, which would have restricted the mobile phone networks to users of specially issued SIM cards.
The City of London Police did declare a limited Access Overload Control condition on the O2 network, but they did not bother to tell the other Emergency Services about their local decision.
Nobody in the Emergency Services knows who has and who has not been issued with such SIM Cards or where they all are at any one time.
This is the sort of thing that a proper widescale training exercise might help with.
- There is still not universal coverage and use of the Airwave encrypted Terrestrial Trunked Radio system which is specifically designed for the Emergency Services.
Why not ?
- The other point mentioned was the lack of any proper planning for the after care of people without visible injuries who were taken to hospital.
If the surviviors had been exposed to toxic chemicals either from a fire or from a chemical device or a biological weapon etc. there would have been no way of following up these people, as names and addresses were not collected before they were allowed to wander off through the Police cordons, sometimes in a state of shock.
- The NHS hospital alert plans only alerted the Acute Hospitals with Accident and Emergency service department, and not the specialist hospitals which were actually physically closest to the scene e.g. Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, whose staff set up a field hospital on their own initiative, not as part of any plan, and who still have never been notified that there was an emergency.
- The Metropolitan Police's media centre, shut up shop at 6pm daily in the aftermath of the attacks, which served the purposes of the Met, but not of the world media and the general public of London.
We have noted ourselves how utterly useless the Metropolitan Police's offical website is, even in reproducing their official press statements, especially over a weekend.
Surely they must be able to do better in future ?
So who exactly is going to ensure that the recommendations of this report are actually put into practice immediately ? Somehow we doubt that the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone will make any difference whatsover.
