- Ministers are secretly establishing an "Armageddon
agency" to respond to devastating terrorist attacks on Britain, The
Independent on Sunday can reveal.
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- Neither Parliament nor the public have been told how
far the Government has gone to put the service - which will deal with chemical,
biological, radiological and nuclear attacks - into operation over the
course of 2004.
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- The body, called the Government Decontamination and Recovery
Service, is such a sensitive topic even within Whitehall that it is deliberately
known only by its initials - GDRS. Even then it is hardly mentioned, even
in official documents.
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- It is based in Margaret Beckett's Department of the Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and, according to a top official, it has
been ready to respond to an attack since last April. It has appointed specialist
contractors to tackle incidents, has a senior Defra civil servant directing
it, and at present has a core staff of about 15 officials.
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- All that MPs and the public have been told is that ministers
are "considering" setting up such a body. A single sentence buried
in a two-paragraph press release issued on 25 March mentioned that "the
Government is actively considering the establishment of a national decontamination
and recovery service".
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- The same words were used by Nick Raynsford, a minister
in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, in May, and this is still the
official position.
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- Nine months ago, Elliot Morley, the environment minister,
promised that further details would be released "as soon as practicable".
But ministers are only now contemplating a public announcement, sometime
in the New Year, that they have decided to go ahead with the agency.
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- A search for the GDRS on the Defra and parliamentary
websites last week did not turn up a single mention. Only two references
to it could be found in publicly available documents: a solitary line in
a Home Office statement referring to a £100,000 contribution to the
project, and a single budget line in a balance sheet from the Justice Department
of the devolved Scottish Executive recording a contribution of £250,000.
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- One top official admits: "There is not a lot of
information about this in the public domain. We are further down the road
than it appears publicly at the moment, and have been working on it for
longer."
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- He says that the first moves to form the agency were
taken a year ago after a secret study identified "gaps" in arrangements
across Whitehall and at local authority levels in terrorism response planning.
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- ©2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd. All rights reserved
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=596082
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