Emergencies can occur suddenly, unexpectedly and anywhere. They could happen due to:
- severe weather e.g. flooding or heatwaves
- pandemics
- manmade accidents associated with commercial and industrial activity
- terrorism
- wars
The impact of emergencies may include
- disruption to services
- casualties
- potential loss of life
Council responsibilities
The Civil Protection Service are a team within the Council that help to prepare and respond to such emergencies. We have legal emergency planning and community resilience responsibilities and play a vital role in:
- recognising and assessing the risks that the city faces
- encouraging action to prevent and minimise the effects of emergencies arising from those risks
- ensuring the wellbeing of our communities
- providing business continuity advice to local businesses
We are responsible for developing plans for specific sites across the city, which can be viewed below. We also maintain the Council's Emergency Response Plan (ERP), which guides our response to a major emergency, to help us act in an efficient and coordinated manner no matter the emergency.
We work with multi-agency partners, including the emergency services and voluntary agencies, to:
- prepare emergency plans
- run training sessions
- deliver exercises to test and confirm plans to check they are fit for purpose
Background to the Civil Protection Service
The Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) was set up by the Home Office to improve the UK’s resilience against disruptive challenges through working with others to anticipate, assess, prevent, prepare, respond and recover. They define resilience as the ability at every level - national, regional and local - to detect, prevent and if necessary, handle disruptive challenges. The CCS have a number of specific objectives:
- Spotting trouble, assessing its nature and providing warning
- Being ready to respond
- Building greater resilience for the future
- Providing leadership and guidance to the resilience community
- Effective management
Civil Contingencies Act
A key focus for the CCS is supporting the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (CCA). The CCA was written after a review of national emergency planning arrangements, following an increased threat of international terrorism, fuel crises and flooding. The CCA provides the foundation for the Civil Protection Service’s work and sets out clear local responsibilities for preparing and responding to emergencies.