Revealed: Worried officials commissioned audit of G4S back in April

Tonight ITV News can reveal that back in April Olympic officials were sufficiently concerned about the G4S recruitment and training operation that they commissioned an audit from the consultants Deloitte.

A source told us the audit was designed to help LOCOG (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games) get a clearer picture of whether G4S would be able to deliver the numbers of security guards it had promised.

The audit is revealed in a document seen by ITV News, details of which were first reported by us last week. The document appears to be a note by officials after visiting the G4S training centre. We’re told it was dated the 23rd of April and was seen in both LOCOG and the Home Office.

This is the full transcript of the document shown to ITV News:

Clearly the training operation is very frustrated at not being able to put through the required numbers, and viewing with trepidation the inevitable last minute nature of the mass throughput that will be the consequence.

Overall attendance this week appears to be approx 60% of planned capacity. We saw some full classrooms of trainees in the early stages of security training (Skills for Security). However, the first day of the Rapiscan course was substantially under-subscribed (approx half-full). This is a direct consequence of first stage of training (Skills for Security) being under-subscribed over the past few weeks, and means that we are now well behind the original planned number of x-ray operators. Hence, there are four overarching problems, as you well know:

• Input to the funnel, and the right sort of people. It was not clear to what extent G4S is really targeting the right people to be X-ray operators beyond basic competency tests and specific tests such as sight, hearing etc

• Achievement of numbers attending for training (approx 60% - cumulatively several thousand people who should have gone through the initial training by now). We knew the serious concerns about this, but the visit really highlighted that the initial stage of training needs to be operating at full capacity from now on in order to be able to recover the situation.

• Achievement of output of full trained security personnel in specific roles. Of course, this is still very early, but we will very soon start to see big shortfalls against these planned numbers also X-ray operators are the most critical.

• And then capacity – of both training space and trainers – to service what will be the very large numbers needing training in June and July. Clearly, the Deloitte audit should address some of these issues, in particular the need for clarity of data (and it’s presentation) from G4S to enable us to see where the specific problems lie. But the point now of course is what we do about it…….

Home Office officials made many attempts to do something about all this, and some of the issues were fixed.

And it’s understood officials view the commissioning of Deloitte as illustrative of the intense scrutiny they were putting G4S under. But the Deloitte audit revealed tonight by ITV News could be seen as further evidence that officials were aware of an impending problem.

For months G4S continued to claim it could meet expectations, it was only last Wednesday that the company admitted it couldn’t produce the numbers.