Buckles was speaking to the Home Affairs Committee yesterday (11 September) as part of its inquiry into Olympic security problems, after
Buckles told the committee the highly unusual nature of the contract had to be taken into account. "It clearly is a very different contract than any other that has been carried out by any private sector company anywhere in the world for security," he said. "There's no blueprint for this, there's no track record, there's no book."
Quizzed by Keith Vaz, chair of the committee, Buckles said G4S was expected to supply around 3,000 staff at the start of July, rising to 10,000 at the end of July.
Challenges arose due to the complex process of recruiting and training staff, he said.
He told the committee G4S interviewed 60,000 people and assigned successful applicants to one of 49 different roles, from CCTV officers to access control and radiation detection staff.
The recruits then had to complete a week of Security Industriy Act (SIA) training followed by an exam, role-specific training and accreditation to work at one of 110 Olympic venues.
Buckles explained these stages were run concurrently and it was unclear how many staff would be ready at the end of the process: "We were building this pipeline over many months. We knew that we had to achieve 3,000 staff at the start of July and 10,000 staff by the end of July, but at the point of getting close to that we still had a large number of staff who were nearly there. We didn't know exactly how long each part would take, and we didn't know the administration involved in each part."
Buckles added: "Until you got to the end of the process [we didn't know] how many staff we would have absolutely ready to go, with the right skills in the right place at the right time."
Buckles also appeared before the committee in July and
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