￡7.50 is the price of your life.

This past year has seen some terrible incidents and atrocities committed by individuals. These persons sought and seek nothing less than to kill, maim, orphan, widow, and generally inflict as much misery and torment and suffering as possible. When these attacks happen, the public and the media are quick to hold scrutiny over the emergency services and others, and make great noise about how such a thing could be allowed to happen. The key word their is 'allowed'. The focus is not on the attack itself, more on the failure of preventing it.

My LinkedIn feed has popped up several times in this past month with adverts for event stewards. Invariably, the going rate is ￡7.50/hour. This is not because the companies advertising are any better or worse than any others, it's simply the industry going rate. I know this because I took it upon myself to work as an event steward for a few years to understand the industry. I've stood out in the pouring rain and howling wind myself, or the roasting sun in a thick high-viz coat, with drunk people swearing at you and calling you a "jobsworth". I've also had to take charge during emergency incidents where members of the public are screaming blue murder about whatever the current problem is. I got to see first hand just how hard these men and women on the front line work to keep you all safe.

For this, I too was rewarded the princely sum of ￡7.50/hour (or the equivalent minimum wage of the day).

We are in a strange contradictory situation where we say that individuals working as event stewards are highly suitable to be responsible for our lives, yet are also completely unskilled workers. There is an implication when you pay someone the minimum wage that you would ideally pay them less but can't by law. As such, we're effectively saying that we consider event stewards to be so low in value that we don't even feel they are really justified in having the lowest pay possible. We pay artists and footballers who we go to watch millions, but the people who are there to (amongst other things) be the first eyes and ears for stopping us being blown up...?

I've been to many emergency planning and debriefing meetings where a significant complaint is that the quality of stewarding is poor. In fact, a key point of the Taylor Report all those years ago was that stewards needed to be highly trained and highly competent, due to their critical role. Money talks, as they say, and its clear that we don't really hold to that, because if we did we're admit that this race to the bottom is not only unfair but outright dangerous!

So the next time you as an emergency planner, event organiser, or even attending patron, are considering the terrorist threat posed to yourself, ask yourself this: if you were being paid ￡7.50/hour, would you put yourself your life on the line? Many of the stewards I worked with would have done so without thought, despite the pittance pay they were getting. But would you? I don't think I would have if I'm honest.

In and amongst the scrutiny about how such terror attacks and major incidents could be allowed to happen, we're deliberately avoiding the elephant in the room. Until we start recognising stewarding as a skilled profession in its own right, start recruiting selectively, and paying a salary to match that, we really aren't in a position to claim dumbfounded surprise when things go wrong. How are these things 'allowed' to happen? Simple: we allow them ourselves because it will saves us a few quid.