2024 ended on a high for Sceptre, but not before one of our most significant events of the year was safely delivered in Spain on behalf of our client.
In essence, the event was launching a major Latin-American / Spanish title in an arena capable of safely accommodating 14,000 people. This particular title was aimed squarely at an older teenage audience, and as a result, approximately 6000 young people would attend this all-ticketed event.
Large-scale events always attract generic risk, but with such a large contingent of younger people and children present, it was clear a comprehensive safeguarding policy would be required and effectively delivered.
In our experience, various departments can own the responsibility for safeguarding, and often, there is a push for security to take ownership. Still, on events of this scale, safeguarding is often more effective if it is owned by a specific specialist safeguarding unit with the support of all other departments. Although this can increase resourcing, it does mean that the safeguarding team will not become distracted by competing and additional responsibilities.
So early in the planning stage, Sceptre sat down with the rest of the event team and specialist safeguarding personnel to develop a bespoke policy for the event.
The six Safeguarding Principles
We followed the 6 broadly recognised principles of safeguarding, those being.
- Prevention
- Protection
- Proportionality
- Partnership
- Accountability
- Empowerment
Safeguarding considerations
Firstly, our safeguarding team, who would be on-site as first responders, would all be vetted, and experienced staff would be used to interacting with younger people. Measures were also put in place to identify risk, who was likely to be at risk and procedures to mitigate that risk, with all staff briefed about their responsibilities, roles, expectations, contingencies and communications.
It was of primary importance that any young person needing support would be identified and looked after in a safe environment and that their rights and wishes were respected.
Security had a pivotal role to play in delivering an effective Safeguarding environment due to their training and high profile on the event footprint. They were more likely than most departments to identify lost or missing people, and due to that, the Security briefing to guarding staff was longer and more detailed than usual.
An example of minor security changes made to the event due to safeguarding was the placement of security dogs. Often, at events this size, dogs are obvious as a deterrent and to reinforce the security message. However, due to the ages of the people expected, it was considered more important that no one felt threatened by the dogs, and as a result, they were redeployed on the perimeter away from the main entry and exit points but still visible from a distance.
Ultimately, the event went off without incident, the audience was safe, and the client got all the good coverage it wanted. Still, I strongly suspect the reason it went so well was because of the stringent effort put in by everyone in the team to ensure the safety of such a large number of younger people.
