Matt is a Senior Consultant in the Security Risk Consulting business. He delivers consulting support to Control Risks’ clients across Europe and Africa. Prior to working at Control Risks, Matt served with three UK police forces for 30 years, working predominantly in the area of serious crime. For the past 17 years, Matt has specialised in hostage and crisis negotiation.
Recent tasks that Matt has worked on include:
Deployed for 17 years to support policing operations in kidnap for ransom (including complex cross-border cases), blackmail, extortion, cyber-extortion, and international crime in action cases, supporting victims and families or as a coordinator providing strategic negotiation advice to senior investigating officers.
Member of the UK Government's Crisis Group (COBR), advising on international and terrorist kidnapping in cases involving UK subjects as individuals or part of multi-national groups.
Course director for the UK national hostage negotiator and kidnap negotiator courses training UK and international law enforcement and military personnel in hostage and kidnap negotiation.
As Course director, prepared and delivered UK’s national hostage negotiation course and also delivered the UK’s international hostage negotiation training course to police and military staff in Canada, Kenya, Turkey, Oman, and the Philippines
Delivered training for the United Nations Department of Safety and Security hostage incident management programme and the United Nations Counter Terrorism Centre’s capacity-building project on international best practices on addressing kidnapping for ransom
Matt holds a Masters in Criminal Justice Studies from Leicester University and is currently working towards his PhD in terrorist negotiation studies with Manchester Metropolitan University. During his PhD studies Matt co-authored a paper titled “Police Crisis Negotiation”, published in the Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics”.
