Perhaps the best way to describe G4S is ‘omnivorous’. With a staff of 530,000 and a turnover of £4.5 billion from 110 countries, after countless mergers and takeovers, a corporation with a diverse slate of activities has been established. For over a century now, G4S in its various incarnations has specialised in security solutions, and with more than half a million people under its umbrella, there should be few problems it cannot solve.
Group 4 Securicor was formed after a 2004 merger between Securicor and part of Group 4 Falck, bolstering the core businesses of Group 4 (cash-management systems, guarding and running prisons and immigration centres, event and building security). One figure reveals its importance in Britain: G4S transports 90 per cent of UK bank notes (£300 billion a year).
As well as its cash services, G4S has been at the forefront of the British government’s private finance initiatives (PFIs) and privatisation programmes. If proof were needed of how influential the company is, in 1998 G4 was part of a consortium to build the new Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), where national security intelligence is gathered. A year later, the company was awarded the contract to supply a computer system for the Pentagon.
This high-profile project across the Atlantic is indicative of how far G4S reaches. It operates nine prisons for adults and juveniles in Britain and America, eight immigration centres in the Netherlands and justice services in South Africa and Australia. Add to this security for London Heathrow, Amsterdam Schiphol, Kennedy Space Centre and the Wimbledon Championships, and its true depth can be seen.
That is not to say that G4S has enjoyed unalloyed success. In the 1990s, when it won the first contract for a privatised prison in Britain, it lost seven prisoners in its first fortnight, garnering national humiliation. In 1999, a prison it ran privately was renationalised, leaving Group 4 ‘astonished’.
Perhaps most damaging of all has been its involvement managing immigrant detention centres in Britain, particularly Campsfield House and Yarls Wood Detention Centre. Campsfield House holds 200 asylum seekers and refugees coming into Britain and was criticised by government reports in 1995 and 1998, the latter after a riot there in 1997. (G4S’s contract for Campsfield ran out in May 2006.) The £100-million Yarls Wood Detention Centre was half-destroyed by a fire in 2002 in an attempted mass escape.
G4S is not universally popular, but it does seem to be effective, and its size and stature testify to the regard in which the business world and government hold it.
September 2008
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