Emergencies can happen at any time, often strike without warning and their cause can range from human error such as road traffic collisions, to extreme acts of nature such as large-scale flooding or severe ice and snow.
Such emergencies often result in:
- the loss of basic services including water, power, gas, and telephone lines
- damage to properties and local infrastructure
- evacuation from your home and neighbourhood.
In emergency planning, our aim is to reduce the chances of these emergencies occurring and if they do occur reducing their impact on residents and the environment to a minimum. We are guided by the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. This Act has established a statutory framework for civil protection and community resilience at a local level. Local responders have now become an integral part of civil resilience in the UK.
The Act ensures that the organisations best placed to manage emergency response and recovery, are at the heart of civil protection. It achieves this by:
- ensuring a clear set of roles and responsibilities for emergency response and recovery which encourages and enhances cross organisational working and communication
- establishing a set structure and uniformity for local emergency response and recovery activities, placing an importance on appropriate business resilience activities
- establishing an agreed platform for critically assessing the effectiveness of emergency planning at a local (authority) level, with a clear focus on review and updating of plans and procedures.
The Act further establishes two distinct categories of responders as set out below.
Category One responders
In Category One are organisations which are at the core of the response to most emergencies such as Police, Fire Brigade, Ambulance as well as NHS bodies and local authorities.
Statutory duties are placed upon Category One responders. As a Local Authority, Brent Council is obliged to write, maintain, and exercise emergency plans. These plans cover a wide range of potential emergencies and are created either specifically for Brent, or as part of the wider London based multi-agency response.
Day-to-day activities of the Brent Emergency Planning Team includes developing and co-ordinating Brent council’s resilience planning & business continuity (a specialist arm of operational risk management) processes and respond to major emergencies and incidents.
- input to Brent Council’s cross-departmental project teams concerning emergency and resilience matters
- writing and maintaining emergency plans
- providing advice, undertaking warning, and informing activities such as providing severe weather guidance, producing our community risk register, and providing information about business resilience for local businesses and community groups
- conducting exercises table-top or simulation exercises to validate plans, train staff and test processes) as well as review plans and emergency procedures to build resilience (carried out in-house with Brent Council employees or in conjunction with our multi-agency partners).
Category Two responders
Category two responders are ‘cooperating’ bodies. They are less likely to be involved in the heart of planning work but will be heavily involved in incidents that affect their own sector. Category two responders include utilities companies, voluntary sector as well as the Health and Safety Executive.
The Brent Borough Resilience Forum
Category One and Category Two responders in Brent form the Brent Borough Resilience Forum. They meet quarterly to discuss issues, incidents, and developments, and to engage in exercises designed to manage hypothetical incidents using emergency protocols.