Meeting documents

The Cabinet agrees that:

5.1 A robust Business Continuity Plan will contribute to the achievement of the Council's priorities

7.1 In 2007 a council wide project to improve our Business Continuity arrangements commenced. The purpose of this was to help the Council be able to prepare, plan and respond more effectively to interruptions to the delivery of critical services within the community.

7.2 In doing so, this would have secondary impacts in helping the Council prioritise its resources on business critical activities and also further develop our Disaster Recovery arrangements.

7.3 Our current position is that we have made good progress over the first 3 stages detailed below but we can still improve and further work is therefore ongoing to deliver the remaining stages of the project over the coming years.

7.4 Stage 1 - Assessment and Action Plan

7.5 The first stage of the project was to assess our position against our obligations which included legislation (Civil Contingencies Act) and best practice (CPA and BS2599 British Standard for Business Continuity Management). This assessment was completed late summer last year and identified key steps to improve our future resilience. The key milestones and their status are -

o Agreeing Corporate Ownership and Actions - Completed

o Carrying out Council wide Business Impact Analysis - Completed

o Prioritisation and Planning - Completed

o Developing Tools to support our arrangements - Work in Progress

o Supporting Partners & the Community - Work in Progress

o Testing & Review - Work in Progress

7.6 Stage 2 - Business Impact Analysis

7.7 This involved all services in assessing their functions and IT systems against simple criteria to decide in what timeframe they needed to recover service delivery to their customers. This had never been carried out before on a Council wide basis and so the process took considerable time and was completed early in 2008.

7.8 Stage 3 - Prioritisation & Planning

7.9 The next stage involved bringing together all the analysis undertaken above and building that into a set of key responses that the organisation would take in the event of an incident. This involved refining our current methods and clarifying roles and responsibilities in the process. The plan was completed in late February and was then consulted internally with Cabinet, Strategic and Divisional Directors and is presented here today for approval.

7.10 Stage 4 - Supporting development

7.11 In many cases at a local level Business Continuity arrangements were appropriate in critical areas such as dealing with vulnerable adults or children or those affecting a whole community, i.e. the Combe Down Stone Mines project.

7.12 However support to the whole Council could be improved by improving awareness and putting together a toolkit to guide services through the process of preparing and planning for an incident.

7.13 This work has started and initial support will be directed at Business Critical activities.

7.14 Stage 5 - Supporting Partners & the Community

7.15 At a corporate level the Council works effectively with its key partners and the Emergency Management function spends considerable time liaising with key agencies to improve our plans as well as supporting them in responding to incidents.

7.16 In addition pro-active work in helping the Community continues and examples include the support given to Gloucester County Council in relation to the serious flooding last year where we provided substantial resource over a 24/7 period for 2 weeks.

7.17 In addition the recent flood awareness day held in Bath which was highly successful and these are now planned to be extended to Midsomer Norton and Keynsham. We have also carried out review meetings with the community and key agencies to learn lessons from how we have dealt with real-life incidents such as the recent flooding in Bath, Chew Valley and Radstock.

7.18 Stage 6 - Testing & Review

7.19 The strength of our arrangements is only put to the test when a real-life emergency occurs and whilst we do experience a number of local incidents each year there has not been a major crisis for some time outside of national events such as the fuel crisis or foot and mouth outbreaks.

7.20 Appropriate testing is therefore necessary to ensure our plans remain fit for purpose combined with an annual review of our arrangement to ensure we keep up-to-date with latest best practice.

7.21 Testing does take place at a local level, i.e. within the Combe Down Stone Mines Project and in Children's Services and we also support a number of regional and national exercises. We will however look to build on this in the future and identify suitable exercises which could be run to test our corporate as well as our local response and how well we work with our key partners.

7.22 Embedding the Plan & Our Approach

7.23 The key steps can be summarised as follows -

o Distribution of the Plan by e-mail & hard copy plus access via the CIS

o Updates in Information Bulletin and CIS News and where relevant DDG/SDG

o Preparing a guidance toolkit and distributing it via the web and key mediums as above

o Identifying from the list of critical activities a timetable to carry out service reviews

o Combined with this a mixture of briefing and training to those critical areas

o Identifying areas of best practice and promoting this including use of `champions' or `service leads'

o Reviewing plan and impact analysis annually and reporting back on that (SDG etc)

o Identifying and running suitable testing exercises along with feedback reviews

o Speaking to key partners, local resilience forum, neighbouring UA's on their roles

o Improving guidance to the community and contractors/suppliers who work for us

7.24 This is a 3 year programme to cover all critical areas but will involve a lot of refinement and review throughout the period and so the plan will need to be continually updated to reflect this.