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The government has published its Resilience Action Plan where it sets out how to strengthen domestic resilience, how to coordinate preparations and foster a culture where resilience is part of everyone’s daily lives.
The action plan, launched by the Resilience Minister, Pat McFadden, focuses on work to build resilience to all risks and comes shortly after the publication of the National Security Strategy and the Strategic Defence Review and reflects the conclusions of the government’s review of resilience. It is not the Resilience Strategy which was promised in the National Security Strategy.
“The pandemic reinforced just how important it is that we take resilience seriously and better coordinate our preparations across society. It is impossible to prepare for every risk, but it is in our gift to close many of the gaps in our vulnerabilities and work together to make the UK a more resilient, more secure country. That ambition is at the core of this Resilience Action Plan.”
Pat McFadden MP, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
While focused on resilience in England, it states that government will align its work with devolved administrations.
There are three objectives in the plan that the government says it will deliver against during the lifetime of this Parliament. First, it will continuously assess how resilient the UK is to target interventions and resources effectively with a particular focus on vulnerable people.
With no common methodology for measuring overall national resilience, the government commits in this plan to creating a consolidated, data-driven picture of our resilience baseline and a new Cyber Resilience Index (CRI).
Second, it will enable the whole of society to take action to increase their resilience. While the concept is not new, the action plan notes: “Delivering enhanced resilience across society will require a profound cultural and behavioural shift and needs to be informed by robust social and behavioural science evidence.” It highlights resources to help people prepare for incidents and the Emergency Alert system which is scheduled to be tested again on 7 September.
A consultation published by the government ahead of this action plan seeks responses on how to strengthen the relationships between Category 1 responders under the Civil Contingencies Act with the voluntary, community and faith sector. This action plan goes further to emphasise the role of this sector, providing guidance, inclusion in training and exercising and the need for collaboration as part of the whole of society approach.
The fire at an electrical substation that led to the closure of Heathrow Airport sets the scene for a section in this action plan about critical national infrastructure (CNI). The government commits to deliver the development of CNI Knowledge Base, “the UK government’s world leading tool which creates an interactive map of all CNI in the UK.”
The topic of resilient CNI was the focus of a recent Emergency Services Times webinar, where CFO Alex Woodman and Emergency Planning Society Vice Chair Stephen Arundell discussed the National Security Strategy and what they wanted to see in a Resilience Strategy.
To assist the delivery of this objective, the government is creating a strategic resilience forum to bring together the UK government, devolved governments, the local tier, the VCFS and businesses to build relationships and work together to strengthen the UK’s resilience.
In a section on the third objective to strengthen the core public sector resilience system, the action plan sets out a range of structures and initiatives including detailing the five local resilience forum trailblazer areas and testing of the role of the Chief Resilience Officer. These have £2.55m funding for the current year and the action plan states that there will be ‘rapid evaluation’ after two years but no information is provided about that second year of funding to go with it.
There is also a reference to reviewing Joint Organisational Learning (JOL), a multi-agency learning system which identifies and shares lessons following of multi-agency incidents, training and exercising. It states: :This should be further embedded nationally, to improve our ability to learn from and act on experiences from previous crises and exercises.”
Responding to the publication, the National Preparedness Commission (NPC) said: “It is an important further step on the road to building a resilient nation that is better prepared for the threats and hazards that we face.”
The NPC asks for clarity on timelines to deliver the actions set out under each of the objectives while saying that it is “unambitious” in its scope. “The government needs to set out a much wider public awareness campaign: one that reaches the whole population – young and old and in every part of the UK – and is unashamedly multi-media.”
The 50-page UK Government Resilience Action Plan is now available to read in full.
Read more about the publication of the National Security Strategy – ‘Urgently needed’ National Resilience Strategy imminent.
