Government has appealed to business to helpexpand its emergency co-ordination initiatives beyond
utilitiesinto the corporate
world.
Bruce Mann, director of the
Civil Contingencies Secretariat, made the call at the opening
session of the two-day
Business Continuity Expo that kicked off in London today.
Bruce Mann said the government was to publish a national risk
register later this year to encourage business and local
communities to be better prepared and co-ordinated for
emergencies.
Mann said experience had shown that a
co-ordinated multi-agency approach was the most effective way of
dealing with emergency situations.
He said one key characteristic of resiliency in any organisation
was its understanding that risk management was a shared
activity.
"A whole range of actors need to be brought together in adopting
a risk view [of an incident] to decide the way forward," he
said.
Brett Lovegrove, head of counter terrorism for City of London
Police, endorsed Mann's view and praised the government for its
leadership in countering the terror threat.
Brett Lovegrove said the national resilience committee, the
London regional resilience forum and its 17 sub-groups were "all
about working together."
Lovegrove said effective partnerships aimed at ensuring
resiliency should typically cross the divide between public and
private organisations to create a shared vision through
understanding each other's business and achieving a high level of
trust and confidence.
"Understanding [across any organisation] is mission critical to
ensure everyone moves together," he said.
Gerald Corbett, chairman of SSL International, who was chief
executive at the time of the rail crashes at Paddington station in
1999 and Hatfield in 2000, picked up the theme of leadership and
concerted effort.
Gerald Corbett said one of the biggest lessons learned was that
in a crisis, leadership "must speak up, be seen, and
communicate".
Corbett said in both incidents, although he was co-ordinating
his piece, there was no single authority to provide an overall
co-ordination of what all the stakeholders were doing and
saying.
"Response to a crisis needs co-ordination," he said.
Corbett said he was pleased to see the railways were now less
fragmented and that Network Rail appeared to have coordinating
mechanisms in place.