The 7/7 terror attacks killed 52 people PA

The anti-terror police chief in charge during the 7/7 attacks has attacked the way the Government tackles national emergencies.

Andy Hayman, who was in charge of the Scotland Yard’s specialist operations unit until he resigned in 2007, said the current Cobra committee was “nonsensical” and needed to be overhauled.

The committee oversees the handling of events from flu epidemics to major terror attacks.

Hayman attended Cobra meetings between 2005-07 during security emergencies that included the July 7 and July 21 London bombings, the Glasgow airport and Haymarket car bombs, a series of other terror plots and the assassination of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko.

Cobra “is a nonsensical system that drags people away from the serious job in hand to attend a crisis meeting”, he said.

Hayman made the claims in his new book The Terrorist Hunters.

He said that he and other counter-terrorist practitioners were frequently frustrated by political posturing and the slow pace of Whitehall.

Hayman writes: “It slows everything down, making it difficult to respond with immediacy to a crisis and can blur the lines between what’s operational and should be left to the police and other experts and what’s political.”

He called for Cobra to be replaced with a committee made up solely of operational officials.

It came as he also called for a full independent inquiry into the July 7 terror attacks, when four suicide bombers were able to attack London’s transport network killing 52 people.

Hayman writes: “Incidents of less gravity have attracted the status of a public inquiry - train crashes, a death in custody and even other terrorist attacks.

“How can there not be a full, independent public inquiry into the deaths of 52 commuters on London’s transport system?

“There has been no overview, no pulling together of each strand of review - no-one can be sure if key issues have been missed.”