Westminster's security system had 'not functioned for years', terror attack inquest hears

Warnings about "lax" security at the Palace of Westminster were ignored by Scotland Yard for two years, an inquest heard.

A series of emails sent in February 2015, two years before Pc Keith Palmer was killed by Khalid Masood outside the Houses of Parliament, revealed that a senior Metropolitan police officer wrote to the chief inspector of operations at Westminster noting his concern at the position of firearm officers. 

Further emails revealed that those in charge “didn’t really know what the deployment plan was” as well as “frequent” misunderstanding about where the officers were supposed to be stationed. 

Pc Palmer was killed by Masood on 22 March 2017 after storming the Carriage Gates at the front of Parliament and attacking the unarmed officer with two knives. 

The lawyer representing Mr Palmer’s widow, Michelle, told the inquest that the system of security at the Westminster “had not been functioning for years” and “completely failed to protect Pc Palmer” on the day he was killed. 

Questioning Pc Lee Ashby, a firearms officer on duty that day, Dominic Adamson said: "So for a period of years the security at the Palace of Westminster, an area which routinely includes the Prime Minister and cabinet members, the state of security was so lax that the relevant posting instructions were not being performed for a number of years?" 

Pc Ashby replied: "Yes sir."

On 24 February 2015, an unnamed police officer emailed Nick Aldworth, Westminster’s chief inspector of operations, expressing concern at the position of two firearm officers in Parliament, which he believed had recently been changed. 

Mr Aldworth forwarded the email onto his colleagues, who were not named in court, saying: “This is getting a bit too frequent for our liking, below is an incident that came to the boss’s attention.

"I experienced similar on the evening of Thursday 12 February when the two cops who were meant to be in New Palace Yard were not for some time and then there were no cops at SSE (St Stephen’s Entrance). I phoned the duty sergeant who acknowledged that he didn’t really know what the deployment plan was.”

One replied: “This is tiresome, as you say, and our sergeants seem to be failing us all.”

Mr Aldworth said that duty officers manage “over 100 people each”, adding: “[This] means that opportunity to be checking that people are in the right place all the time on an eight-acre estate is challenging for them.”

Mr Adamson QC described the alleged mismanagement of the firearm officer’s positions as “a problem that was not confined to police constable rank but further up the chain.”

The inquest heard of further confusion between where firearm officers believed they were meant to be stationed in New Palace Yard and where official documents from the Metropolitan Police expected them to patrol. 

Posting instructions from the 14 December 2015 stated that the officers were expected to be stationed near Carriage Gates whilst they were open. But neither Pc Ashby or Pc Nicholas Sanders, who were both on duty on the day of Masood’s attack, were aware this is was a “specific responsibility”.

Both also revealed that they had never seen the posting instructions document from December 2015, but rather used a map in the basement of Parliament as a reference of their patrol area.  

Pc Ashby, who said he was “always working with the map” in the basement, told the inquest that he worked with a range of different officers whilst patrolling New Palace Yard over a six-year period and nobody insisted they do it differently. 

“Every firearms officer performed the patrols as by the maps and as their instructions said to. It was never challenged by any colleagues by the same rank or above,” he said.