Safety, Security & Resilience

Events security planning and management

For organising committees, host-city authorities, venue and transport operators: plan, test and prove your safety and security system will perform when the world is watching.

The offer

Led by our Experts

We have sourced the world’s best policing and emergency services SMEs. Events security planning and management is led by Gary Ritchie KPM, Danni Grant and Ross Guenther APM.

  • GCG Consortium Australia

    Gary Ritchie KPM

    GCG Managing Partner

    Managing Partner, and former Assistant Chief Constable of Police Scotland, retiring in 2025 after 34 years' policing service, with executive oversight of organisational change, partnerships and prevention, international policing development and operational support. He chaired the Scottish Resilience Partnership — advising the First Minister of Scotland on emergency and event preparedness — and held Gold Command during COP26 in Glasgow. He was awarded the King's Police Medal in 2025 and made an Honorary Professor of Edinburgh Napier University. He is now based in Sydney.

    Skills & focus

    • Strategic command
    • Resilience & emergency preparedness
    • Public health & harm reduction
    • Leadership development
    • Partnerships & prevention

    Years of service 34

    Full profile

  • GCG Consortium United Kingdom

    Danni Grant

    GCG Counter Terrorism & Protective Security Director

    Former UK Counter Terrorism Policing leader with national responsibility for preparedness, organisational learning and commander development. Founder of CT Protect, a consultancy that combined practical advice, supporting technology and training to help organisations strengthen their security preparedness.

    Skills & focus

    • Counter-terrorism
    • Protective security
    • Preparedness
    • Commander development

    Years of service 30

    Full profile

  • GCG Consortium Australia

    Ross Guenther APM

    Consortium member

    Retired Deputy Commissioner, Public Safety and Security, at Victoria Police, with more than 38 years in law enforcement spanning counter-terrorism, crime, intelligence and covert support, and transit and public safety commands. Senior State Advisor to the Australia–New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee (ANZCTC), Chair of its Crowded Places Sub-Committee, and President of the Leadership in Counter Terrorism Alumni Association (LinCT-AA). Australian Police Medal recipient.

    Skills & focus

    • Counter-terrorism command
    • Public safety & transit policing
    • Intelligence & covert support
    • Crowded places protection
    • Executive leadership & governance

    Years of service 38+

    Full profile

Delivered by our Experts 16 supporting members

What we bring to your event

Thirteen services across four capabilities — select a capability to jump to its services.

Capability 01

Readiness & Resilience

For a major event, the plan on paper is never the whole story. This capability tests whether your planning is genuinely operational before the doors open, getting underneath the documents to test the systems, people and assumptions behind them, from a single high-risk operation to a multi-year Games programme.

All Hazards Risk & Readiness Review Is your planning genuinely operational, or merely documentary?

What it is

A review of how your organisation understands and manages risk across safety, security, resilience and continuity. We test the threat and hazard assumptions your planning rests on, the governance above it, and who is meant to escalate what to whom. We pay particular attention to the dependencies between teams that plans usually assume away.

Why it matters

Most organisations have a plan. Fewer know whether that plan is genuinely operational and built on current, tested assumptions, or whether it has quietly become a documentary exercise, refreshed on a cycle rather than pressure-tested against how the organisation actually behaves under strain. That gap is usually invisible until the moment it matters most.

What you get

A review built on your documents, interviews with your senior team and a workshop with them in the room. You get a written assessment of where your risk and readiness planning would hold, where it would not, and the actions to close the gap in the order we would take them.

Organisational Readiness Assessment The everyday systems that decide crisis performance.

What it is

A structured qualitative assessment of the core systems that will determine your performance when pressure rises: command readiness, communications, supply chain resilience, workforce and wellbeing pressures, partner integration, business continuity, community and partner interfaces, and the strength of the everyday capabilities that crisis performance is built on.

Why it matters

Crisis performance is rarely about the crisis plan itself. It is about whether the ordinary, everyday systems underneath it, such as rostering, communications and supplier relationships, are strong enough to keep functioning when demand spikes. Weakness in those systems is often the first thing to fail, and the last thing anyone thought to test.

What you get

A practitioner-led assessment of the systems that matter most in your context. You get a written picture of where you stand and a sequenced set of actions you can start on the week we hand it over.

Adaptability & Resilience Assessment Can you sustain performance for weeks, not hours?

What it is

A focused assessment of your organisation's ability to absorb disruption, adapt to uncertainty and maintain performance during sustained operational strain, covering both structural resilience (systems, redundancy, supply chains) and behavioural resilience (how your people recognise weak signals, adjust pace, reprioritise, and hold up under fatigue).

Why it matters

A prolonged incident, an extended major event, a multi-month recovery: each tests an organisation differently to a single sharp shock. The organisations that struggle most are often those that performed well in a short exercise but had never tested whether they could sustain that performance for weeks, not hours.

What you get

A written assessment of structural and behavioural resilience, drawn from practitioner experience of sustained operations. It names the points where fatigue, rigidity or a fragile system is most likely to break first, and what to change before it does.

Training, Testing & Exercising Rehearsal turns a plan into a capability.

What it is

We design and run training, rehearsals, simulations and scenario tests for the way your organisation actually operates — a sequenced programme, not one tabletop exercise a year.

Why it matters

A plan that has never been tested is a hypothesis, not a capability. The gap between what people believe will happen and what actually happens under pressure only closes through realistic rehearsal, and organisations that exercise only once, late in the cycle, routinely discover their biggest gaps too late to fix them properly.

What you get

Training focused at the right levels of your organisation and planning systems, backed by a programme of exercises matched to your risk profile and timeline: from focused tabletop sessions through to full-scale, multi-agency simulations, each followed by a structured debrief and a clear record of lessons identified and actioned. The result is an evidence trail of improving readiness over time.

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Capability 02

Leadership & Coordination

When an event goes live, multiple agencies have to decide and act together. These are the command and coordination disciplines for organising committees, venues, police and partners: decision-making, escalation and multi-agency coordination, led by practitioners who have commanded through real crises.

Command & Leadership Development Decision-making under pressure, built deliberately.

What it is

Development of decision-making under pressure, escalation, interoperability and assurance for senior leaders and command teams, including Gold, Silver and Bronze critical incident command development and the design of multi-agency response arrangements.

Why it matters

Command failures in major incidents are rarely about individual competence. They are almost always about individuals who have never practised making decisions together, under time pressure, with incomplete information and multiple agencies in the room.

What you get

A development programme built and run by practitioners who have held Gold, Silver and Bronze command themselves: structured learning, then decision-making exercises under time pressure with the whole command team in the room. Every exercise is debriefed and recorded, so you can show how the team's decisions changed between the first and the last.

Executive Coordination & Decision Support An experienced second pair of eyes in the room.

What it is

Direct, hands-on support to executives and command teams during planning, exercising and live assurance, provided by practitioners who have held national-level command themselves.

Why it matters

In the moments that matter most, executives need someone beside them who has actually carried that responsibility before, who can help frame the decision, test the assumptions, and challenge constructively in real time.

What you get

A named senior practitioner alongside you through planning, exercising and the live operation — in the room when the decisions are made, and reachable between them. We agree in advance who that is and how many days it covers.

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Capability 03

Programme & Infrastructure Assurance

Major events are delivered by many hands: contractors, overlay builders, technology suppliers, security providers and public agencies. This capability helps you act as an intelligent customer across all of them, so the gaps between packages are found and closed before the event goes live.

Programme Assurance & Governance An intelligent customer across every package.

What it is

An independent assurance and governance function for complex programmes involving multiple suppliers, contractors, delivery teams or partner agencies, helping you act as an intelligent, informed customer across every supplier and package.

Why it matters

On complex, multi-party programmes, the biggest risk is usually fragmentation: inconsistent assumptions, uneven standards between contractors, and gaps at the interfaces between packages that no single party is responsible for closing.

What you get

One set of assurance criteria that every contractor is held to, a written review of how each package measures up against them, and a standing route to escalate the gaps nobody owns — early, while they are still cheap to fix.

Testing, Commissioning & Operational Assurance From design intent to live operational confidence.

What it is

Support to move from planning and design into live operational confidence, including design-stage validation, commissioning readiness review, scenario testing and interface exercising with your delivery partners.

Why it matters

A system that passes design review on paper can still fail in live operation if the interfaces between design intent, construction delivery and day-to-day operations were never properly tested together before go-live.

What you get

An assurance programme running from design validation through commissioning to live operational testing, with a written sign-off at each stage. You know what has been tested, what has not, and what is still open before you rely on it.

International Benchmarking & Lessons Identified Learn from someone else's expensive lesson.

What it is

An evidence-based review of practice from comparable organisations, programmes and jurisdictions internationally, covering what has worked, what has failed, and what is genuinely transferable to your context.

Why it matters

Every major programme believes its challenges are unique, but most of the failure patterns have played out before, elsewhere. The organisations that benefit most are the ones willing to learn from someone else's expensive lesson.

What you get

A short written review of what comparable programmes did, what failed, and which of it applies to yours — with the implications for your next decisions on sequencing, design and governance set out in order.

Evidence-Based Practice & Strategic Insight Decisions based on what the evidence actually shows.

What it is

Turning research, operational experience and comparative evidence into practical action for senior decision-makers, delivered in partnership with GCG's Evidence-Based Practice domain.

Why it matters

Boards commit real money to preparedness on instinct and precedent, because nobody has put the evidence in front of them in a form they can decide from. That is a straightforward thing to fix.

What you get

A written evidence review of the decisions actually in front of you, and a practitioner in your planning and governance meetings while they are being taken — so investment and sequencing are argued from the evidence rather than from precedent.

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Capability 04

Protective Security & Place Assurance

Venues, precincts and transport interchanges each carry their own vulnerabilities. This capability addresses the physical and procedural security of event places, designed in early and evidenced before the event opens, from strategic design through to the detail of a single site survey.

Protective Security Preparedness Pathways A staged route to stronger protective security maturity.

What it is

A structured route to stronger protective security maturity, including police-informed security design and practical support applying protective-security good practice and your legal and regulatory responsibilities, whatever country you operate in.

Why it matters

Protective security rarely improves by accident. In the UK, Martyn's Law makes keeping the people who use your premises safe a legal duty for qualifying sites. A staged pathway turns that duty into evidenced progress rather than a one-off exercise.

What you get

A clear, staged pathway, starting from an honest assessment of where you are today, through to specific, proportionate actions that build maturity over time, with police-informed design input and a direct route into the CT STEP platform for ongoing self-assessment and evidencing.

Security Design Integration Review Security as a design discipline, not a late add-on.

What it is

A review of how safety, security and resilience are currently embedded into your infrastructure, systems and operating models, assessing whether protective security is designed in from the start or added late, once decisions are already hard to reverse.

Why it matters

Security retrofitted after design and construction decisions are locked in costs more and does less than security designed in from the outset. The organisations that get this right treat security as a design discipline from day one.

What you get

An independent review of your current design and governance processes, identifying where security thinking is genuinely integrated and where it is fragmented or late-stage, with practical recommendations for embedding it earlier and more consistently across future projects.

Site Assessment & Technical Surveying Vulnerabilities a floor plan will never show you.

What it is

Assessment of physical vulnerabilities, perimeter issues, movement routes and operational pinch points at your sites, using drone-based assessment and other specialist technical methods where useful.

Why it matters

Vulnerabilities in a physical space, including sightlines, access points, crowd movement patterns and perimeter gaps, are often invisible from a desk review or a floor plan. They only become apparent through a proper site-level assessment by people who know what to look for.

What you get

A detailed, evidenced site assessment combining physical inspection with specialist technical methods, resulting in a clear picture of your site's vulnerabilities and practical, prioritised recommendations to address them.

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Start the conversation

The window to influence decisions narrows as timelines harden, so we favour early engagement over late-stage rescue. Wherever you are in your planning cycle, the right first step is a conversation with a senior practitioner who has delivered this before.

Talk to us about your event