In a disaster, the UK’s civil servants would be responsible for both helping to manage the emergency response, and maintaining essential services in its aftermath. Suzannah Brecknell and Joshua Chambers report.
Japan is one of the richest and most developed countries in the world, but the tsunami left many of its citizens struggling for days with medieval living conditions: electricity and transport networks were wrecked, and food, fuel and medicine distribution systems disabled. Like the events in New Orleans a few years ago, the tsunami warns us of the need to be prepared – and reminds us that our country will be judged on our response to disaster.
In such cases government departments have a responsibility to lead emergency response and recovery, such as the flood responses being tested during the recent Exercise Watermark (see below). They are also required, under the government Security Policy Framework (SPF), to have robust, up-to-date, fit-for-purpose and flexible business continuity (BC) arrangements – which should ensure that, in the event of disaster, essential public services are maintained.
Although the SPF recommends that departments align their BC policies to industry-standard BS25999, there is no requirement for external certification: this would add to the cost of planning, and leave departments searching for external experts with the requisite security clearance to inspect their continuity plans. To provide permanent secretaries with a way to independently assure their BC policies, the Cabinet Office Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) has recently developed a system of Independent Internal Reviews (IIRs) – independent, in that they are not run by departments; internal, in that the reviewers are security-cleared experts from the CCS and the Cabinet Office’s Emergency Planning College (EPC).
If a department can show that its policies align to BS25999 it receives a certificate from the EPC, valid for one year. If not, required changes are outlined, and form the basis of an action plan to meet the standard. Stewart Sterling, the director responsible for business continuity in the CCS, stresses that an IIR isn’t an audit – rather than being a “pass or fail” exercise, it is about “looking at what departments are doing well, what they weren’t doing quite so well, and then working with them to get their plans up to a certain level”.
He adds that the reviews – so far undertaken by six departments – will also help to ensure consistency of planning across government (for example, checking that plans are using the same terms, and are therefore easily understandable to all) and identify best practice which can be spread through the cross-government Business Continuity Forum chaired by Sterling.
One example of best practice comes from the Foreign Office (FCO), which has trained business continuity champions across the department: they not only promote BC awareness, but also meet quarterly with the department’s central BC team to feed back on how the BC policy is working.
Martin Fenlon, the programme director for business continuity at the EPC, who manages the IIRs, says he has seen a “step change” in awareness of business continuity at a senior level over the last few years. Departments have moved beyond simple “buildings continuity”, he says, and are taking a more strategic approach to contingency planning.
But BC managers in government departments are now facing the pressures of shrinking budgets, and of rapid reform both to the structures they work in and the services they are trying to protect. Research carried out by industry body the Continuity Forum has revealed that 55 per cent of public sector BC professionals believe the investment and resources available for BC in their organisation are already poor, very poor, or unacceptable. As departments seek efficiencies, they will have to balance this with the need to maintain resilience (the ability to resist and recover from major interruptions) in their services.
Nevertheless, says Lee Glendon, campaigns manager for the Business Continuity Institute (BCI): “Realistically, you’re probably going to be introducing new vulnerabilities, because you’ll have fewer resources.” Managers seeking savings must understand which processes are critical to business continuity, he says, “so you don’t change them without understanding what the consequences are going to be”.
One risk of cost-cutting mentioned by Glendon is “releasing people who’ve got unique skills”; and Bradley Wright of BC consultancy Veterus believes there is already a skills deficit in the civil service. In contrast to Fenlon, he believes that senior managers across the civil service don’t prioritise BC – and even if they do, a lack of skills within departments means plans are not carried through appropriately. Wright says Sir Peter Ricketts, who was permanent secretary at the FCO when Wright was working with its security advice agency FCO Services, “made it very clear from the top down that business continuity was something the FCO needed to do”. However, this was “not supported by a level of competence within the organisation to get it done”. He argues that slow-moving procurement processes, and frameworks that favour large firms, “prevent subject matter experts in smaller organisations from providing help and advice” and contribute to a narrow skills and experience base for government continuity planning.
As the coalition seeks to open up public services – encouraging more outsourcing to partners in different sectors, and devolving service provision as far as possible – departments are “redefining the boundaries of [their] organisations”, says Glendon. While good business continuity has always included considering dependencies on other organisations, these reforms may take these concerns beyond back office functions and your own business processes. If a public service you consider to be critical is now provided by a third party, your plans should still consider how that service will continue in the event of disruption.
Civil servants shouldn’t simply rely on ensuring providers have their own BC plans, nor service-level agreements in contracts. “If a supplier is simply physically unable to comply with that, for whatever reason, then the fact that it is in your contract doesn’t benefit you,” says Lyndon Baird, technical director of the BCI. Tony Dyhouse, of the government-and-business partnership the Knowledge Transfer Network, advises that “the trick is always to find two different ways of providing a service.” He adds that this is increasingly difficult when so much of our technology is now reliant on connected networks and internet infrastructure. “There comes a time when you have to say: ‘We’ll lose services under those conditions’,” he says; managers should have a clear idea of when that point is built into their own plans.
Wright suggests that, given the fact that even government will sometimes be unable to respond adequately to all contingencies, continuity plans should make more use of the military leadership principle of ‘mission command’. This involves telling staff what they need to achieve in a time of disruption, and then allowing them to do this in whatever way they deem most appropriate. This “empowers staff to deliver under any circumstances, using their own experience and their own initiative”, says Wright. He gives an example of a meals-on-wheels service: if the normal logistics are down, the provider may choose to simply buy sandwiches and walk to the customers’ homes to deliver them – they have a clear outcome to provide a certain number and quality of meals, but the details of how they do so is up to them.
This seems to chime very well with coalition plans to empower the front line, and to focus on outcomes not processes. BC plans will still need to have solid foundations addressing basic recovery issues; but in a period when all civil servants are thinking of new ways to deliver services, should managers also be thinking of new ways to deliver continuity plans? The challenge, as with so much of government work, will be to develop this new approach quickly, ensuring that BC skills which have been built up over recent years aren’t lost in the rush to reform.
Exercise Watermark
It was an operation designed to stretch the capabilities of the nation, and force co-ordination on an as-yet unseen scale between government departments, devolved administrations, local organisations and emergency services. Two weeks ago, 10,000 people took part in a national flood-preparation exercise, dubbed Exercise Watermark.
The exercise arose out of the aftermath of the Hull floods of 2007, when a review by Sir Michael Pitt recommended that the government test its ability to deal with large-scale flooding. The national programme director for Exercise Watermark, Robbie Williams, explains to CSW that Watermark therefore “tested us at a top level down to a local level, with a geographically wide spread covering all of the different forms of flooding that exist, and to a level that Pitt described as severe”.
It never rains but it pours
The main exercise centred around a rolling national emergency, with floods simulated across the United Kingdom. The scenario featured a concatenation of difficult circumstances which public servants had to tackle over a period of five days. In the simulation, intense rainfall caused flash floods from Cornwall to West Yorkshire, including in London. Worse, these floods caused rivers in Surrey and Wales to burst their banks; while in Derbyshire a reservoir collapsed. Finally, officials had to deal with a tidal surge across the east coast of England, stretching from Humberside down to Kent. In reality, tens of thousands of people’s lives would have been affected.
This exercise was run on paper, but ministers and civil servants were fed reports – dubbed ‘injects’ – with exactly the same type of information that they would receive in the event of a real crisis: news broadcasts, and faxes and telephone calls from harbour masters, prison warders, hospitals and schools to report on the local situation or request a new action be taken. In fact, just as Williams is explaining the exercise, he is interrupted by a broadcast news bulletin: “Up to 80,000 homes are now thought to have been flooded as high tides, combined with gale force winds, ravaged the east coast.”
In total, over 6,500 individual ‘injects’ were planned in advance. And more could be written on the day, explains John Astbury of Vector Command – an exercise-management company which assisted with the design. “We have a hot writing desk, and dedicated umpires monitor what is going on. If they’ve decided not to evacuate a housing estate and the consequence is that it’s flooded, we can ring them up and say: ‘There are 2,000 people who now need rescuing’,” he says.
It took 19 months to plan such a detailed exercise, the first of its kind in the world, Astbury explains. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs set the key national objectives and instructed the Environment Agency with setting up the scenario. It in turn brought in three private sector consultants to help with the planning and running of the exercise: Vector, Capita Symonds, and Halcrow.
Responding to a crisis
The national response to these types of crises is run by the Cabinet Office’s Civil Contingencies Unit, with ministers meeting to tackle the problem in the famed Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR, or ‘Cobra’). Officials from departments across Whitehall had to provide briefings about their areas of responsibility. For example, the Department for Education assisted with the evacuation of schools, while the Department of Health managed overloaded or flooded hospitals and the Ministry of Justice had to evacuate flooded prisons.
Environment Agency project executive Peter Midgley was in charge of running the storyline, and says that the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) provided the link between central government and the 40 Local Resilience Forums (LRFs) which co-ordinate regional efforts to tackle natural disasters. Penny Kanssen is policy manager for the emergencies management team in the Resilience Emergencies Division of DCLG. She explains: “We had government liaison officers in each of the coordinating [LRF] groups: they were on the front line, getting all the information on what support the local areas needed.”
DCLG officials faced a big challenge caused by the spending review: it had only been a month since regional resilience teams – which manage these liaison officers – were subsumed into the department, following the closure of regional government offices. Some teething troubles resulted: “There’s some learning required about the format of our situation reports,” Kanssen says. “You can imagine that there’s an awful lot of information and it’s tough to get it into a form that’s useful and usable – and make sure that people get what they need, when they need it.”
However, Kanssen says that the exercise was a good opportunity to test and train staff: “This was the first time that the team have all been in one place, and it gave them a good opportunity to train and interact.” Further, it provided an opportunity to trial the department’s new single operations centre; previously, regional offices had operations centres across the country.
The department has a volunteer pool which can be drawn on in the case of a national emergency. DCLG’s Beverley Fountain manages this, and says that the experience “was a steep learning curve for them: briefing minsters and attending Cobra”. However, the exercise allowed the department to train the volunteers, and get them interacting with the national resilience team.
Meanwhile, other partners conducted a number of ‘bolt-on’ exercises across the country. At Bala Lake in Wales, the Royal Air Force practised helicopter winching exercises to rescue casualties from vehicles trapped in flood water. Meanwhile, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution trained and tested its capabilities at the Cardiff International White Water Centre.
While most of the exercises were conducted on paper, a small number were run as live. The reservoir dam in Derbyshire was not, of course, demolished; but residents in Sutton on Sea, near Hull, were asked to practise evacuating their town as they would in the event of a North Sea tidal surge. Volunteers stepped forward, as did the pupils of Sutton Primary School.
What happens next?
The results of the exercise are being evaluated over the next three months. Damien Smith, a consultant, is charged with producing a report assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the overall response. This will provide a definitive account of the levels of preparation that exist in the UK to assist with widespread flooding, he says.
Already, debriefs have taken place with participating officials across the country to gather information from participants. Further, the 146 ‘umpires’ were charged with monitoring departmental efforts and will feed in their assessments. Smith sets out the kinds of problems he expects to find: misguided departmental policies; poor communication between government departments; difficulties with the communication; inadequate forecasting information; an inability among local resilience forums to coordinate action in their areas; and errors by rescue forces, such as police and fire services.
Smith’s report should be a significant tool – not only in building capacity to tackle floods, but in putting out transferable lessons to help departments collaborate on other issues and work with local groups. The initial report will be published on 7 July, Smith says, to coincide with a workshop on the exercise.