London 2012 Olympics: G4S chief Nick Buckles reveals disaster In a wide-ranging interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Buckles says the crisis now facing G4S is bigger that the ISS debacle, and that he has considered his position as chief executive. "Of course," he said. I have got to make sure we deliver this contract. What happens there afterwards is down to others. It's a big setback for us, we are really disappointed with how this has turned out. The G4S chief executive says he hasn't yet spoken to the company's shareholders, who stuck by Buckles after the collapse of the deal with ISS. It does appear, though, that the new chairman, John Connolly, is holding talks. "I don't think I will have time to go and see them, so I will probably give them a call and we will have to see how it goes," Buckles said. It depends. The ISS deal was an issue because of what happened with the share price. The share price is going to move on Monday it just depends how much basically. I want to stay. I have been here 27 years, I am very committed to staying. It just depends doesn't it? The 51-year-old says he is "miles more" disappointed than he was after the collapse of his proposed deal with ISS, which fell apart due to opposition from investors and eventually led to the chairman and G4S's brokers leaving. "This is different," Buckles said. I still feel convinced that ISS was a great deal. I am still very upset it didn't happen. The ISS deal had lots of other parties, influences and challenges. This is us delivering a contract which is what we should be able to do. Buckles declined to take a bonus after the ISS crisis because the failed deal cost the company £55m in fees. He is now likely to be without one this year too. "I honestly believe most CEOs going forward will have a reason why they can't take their bonus," he said. This is a huge reason, I am not denying that. I wouldn't get one anyway because it will hit the profit line. The early indications from shareholders are that rather than calling for Buckles's scalp immediately, they are prepared to wait to see what the longer-term impact of this crisis could be. The G4S chief executive has built a huge amount of goodwill amongst shareholders for integrating Securicor and Group 4 Falck into the biggest security group in the world and doubling the share price since he took over in 2005. However, Buckles has already used up one life with the ISS crisis, is now working under a chairman with a fierce reputation in Connolly and - as the demise of Bob Diamond has shown - political pressure can have a huge impact on a company. Buckles is due to appear before MPs for a Parliamentary grilling on Tuesday. "Our track record has been really good in terms of service delivery and growth," Buckles says. I mean, the ISS thing is a separate issue. In terms of what we have done in the last 10 years, we have built a really strong global brand and global business. So far Buckles claims he has seen no sign that the failure to meet the obligations of the Olympic contract could lead to G4S losing or missing out on other government contracts. We still do £600m a year plus with the UK Government. It is very important for us. We have clearly got an issue here, but it is very important for us that we are still a credible UK government supplier post-Olympics and that is why we are still working really hard to make sure we still do a good job basically. That hard work involves Buckles and David Taylor-Smith, the UK chief executive, working full-time with the company's Olympic team in Canary Wharf. Currently G4S has provided just 4,000 security staff of the promised 10,000. However, Buckles says 9,000 people are going through the training and vetting process and G4S could eventually reach the 10,000 staff target. If G4S delivers, then some members of the Armed Forces could be stood down. They [the Army] are definitely coming. They don't do things by half," he said. But we hope and expect they will be then be let go once we get our staff levels up. He also claims the problems have not compromised security at the Olympic Park. Even without the Army being called up, it would not have been compromised, says Buckles, just slow. The G4S chief executive only found out about a potential problem with the Olympic contract 11 days ago. Buckles was on holiday and out of the country when he was called by Taylor-Smith. The next day, Wednesday, July 4, he was back in the office and by the following Wednesday the Army had been called. Buckles does not believe he has personally done anything wrong. "I don't actually, I really don't," he says. I feel accountable, but not responsible. So what has gone wrong? The timescale from when staff accepted to getting them through training just got very compressed. We signed this contract in December and started recruiting but it has just been very compressed at the back end really. Until we've gone through the review - we said in the announcement the board will be undertaking a full review of the contract - we won't know exactly whether some key mistakes were made along the way. All we can see at the moment is that we underestimated the challenge of bringing that number of people together for a short period of time. Only last weekend, G4S had 8,000 security staff working across three events, Wimbledon, the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, and the T in the Park music festival in Scotland. However, the Olympics is a unique event in terms of scale and length of time it lasts. You have got to get them [staff] probably working about six weeks, so it's almost in between an event where you get them for one or two days and a full-time contract where they work for you forever. When you stand back and look at it, how many people can you find that want to work for six weeks and will go through all the process involved in that? They probably have to commit two and a half weeks of their own time, which they will be paid for, to get six weeks' work, whereas usually you commit two and a half weeks and you get a job for life. The company's plan to cope with the threat of people accepting jobs and then pulling out was to recruit relatively late and recruit more staff than needed. However, G4S has been caught out by the scale of London 2012. The security contract is the biggest ever awarded in terms of manpower required, and around 100,000 people expressed an interest in the jobs. Initially G4S was asked to provide 2,000 staff. But last December the organisers of London 2012, Locog, increased this sharply to 10,000 owing to heightened security fears. The contract required an unprecedented mobilisation of security staff, so should G4S have agreed to that so readily? "With hindsight probably not," Buckles concedes. But we did, so we are where we are. We do employ large numbers of people. If anyone was going to be able to do it, we could basically. We couldn't see that anybody else could do it. Maybe we should have just said: 'Nobody can do this'. I guess we convinced ourselves we could do it. Buckles says G4S has been treated fairly by Locog, but that the organisation was late in presenting the company with its final requirement, a document called the D41. Therefore, given the unprecedented task set by Locog and the delays in finalising its requirements, does he think G4S is entirely to blame for the security shambles? There have been mitigating circumstances, but I can't say we weren't aware of all of that. There are things we could say we should have known. They were late in giving us a lot of information, which hasn't helped. But if that was the case we should have flagged it. I haven't been made aware of anything in the process to date that Locog had done to cause us problems or else I would have tried to deal with it. However, while Buckles says G4S is prepared to accept responsibility for the fiasco, he is still ready to defend the company's recruitment process. Applicants for G4S's London 2012 jobs have claimed the process is flawed, with 90-second interviews, lax record-keeping and low pass standards. The [initial] interview may only have been two minutes, most of it was online. What we wanted to make sure is that we didn't get loads of applications that were completely impossible. Then there was a telephone interview to make sure they could speak English, then they go into the process. They wouldn't get through the courses unless they could do all of those things. I think the only criticism which is valid is we are a little bit disorganised. Because we had to do the process out of order - so some got training before they got another sort of training. Everybody on the assignment was going to be trained. The SIA [Security Industry Authority] licence is four days' training, so whatever happens they would have had to sat in a classroom for four days and done the same training as every other of the 250,000 security officers. Those two bits are absolute fact, no one can argue about that. Buckles said the company took the contract on because G4S "is the world's leading security company and we are British." We felt it was good for our business to be the Olympic security provider. It's as simple as that really. It's not a financial issue by any means. This was about a flagship contract for the group. The company believed the contract would be a calling card that could help it to secure more work in the UK, abroad and for future major sporting events. That plan now looks in tatters. "It's been a challenge," says Buckles.