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Civil Contingencies Act

Progress on Implementation of the Civil Contingencies Act

The 2006 National Capability Survey suggests that local responders have made good progress in implementing their obligations under the Civil Contingencies Act:

• Cooperation and information sharing: The vast majority of Local Resilience Forums and supporting task groups are up and running and functioning effectively. Almost all local responders are happy that Local Resilience Forums are providing the right level of engagement to enable members to perform the tasks mandated by the Act.

• Emergency planning: This is a well established duty. The majority of responders have in place a suite of generic and specific plans in place. The vast majority of respondents said that they had in place systematic mechanisms for ensuring plans are informed by risk assessments, exercised appropriately and that key staff identified in plans are given appropriate training.

• Risk assessment: The vast majority of community risk registers are now in place and have been published.

• Communicating with the public: The vast majority of responders have in place arrangements for fulfilling their statutory duty to raise public awareness about emergencies. For the most part this was done via websites or written leaflets or advertising. There are also significant patterns of multi-agency engagement on warning and informing issues. A high proportion of responders have multi-agency plans and task groups in place. But the survey also identified room for improvement in exercising and reviewing of plans and integration with emergency planning arrangements.

• Business Continuity Management: Significant progress has been made on local responders' business continuity arrangements, but more remains to be done to improve the take up and the quality of business continuity management arrangements.

• Advice and assistance to businesses and the voluntary sector: A very high proportion of local authorities already have in place mechanisms to make available advice to businesses and voluntary organisations. Some organisations were actively engaged with the business community in a two-way dialogue. But for many this is still a passive, one-way process.

On the basis of the findings of the NCS Civil Contingencies Secretariat has launched a programme of work to identify and disseminate good practice on each of the newer duties in the Act (i.e. risk assessment, communicating with the public, Business Continuity Management and advice and assistance to businesses and the voluntary sector).

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