Refreshed National Risk Register ‘more transparent than ever’ says Minister

Following on from the publication of the Integrated Review and the National Resilience Framework, the Government has now published an updated National Risk Register (NRR).

Aimed at resilience practitioners, business and academia, the refresh contains 89 acute risks that have a substantial impact on the UK’s safety, security or critical systems on a national level and require an emergency response. The risks are organised under nine themes including terrorism, cyber and natural hazards. Each risk is set out in terms of its reasonable worst case scenario, the response capability requirements and recovery requirements.

Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden MP states in his foreword to the NRR, ‘the Register is more transparent than ever.’ because it is based on the the National Security Risk Assessment (NSRA), the government’s assessment of the most serious risks facing the UK. He added, ‘We are giving businesses and other organisations as much information as possible about the risks they face, so that they can use this knowledge to support their own planning, preparation and response.’

In line with the Integrated Review and the 2022 NSRA, the NRR no longer contains chronic risks, the long term risks that ‘gradually erode our economy, community way of life, and/or national security.’ The Government is yet to confirm the process of identifying and assessing these risks.

Other key changes to the NRR include longer assessment timescales where non-malicious risks are assessed over five years and malicious risks remaining at two years. There are also new and updated impact measures that reflect learning from the pandemic, including a reshaping of the reasonable worst-case scenario ‘into a more generic pandemic scenario.’