The UK Government Resilience Action Plan

The Resilience Action Plan, produced by the Cabinet Office, sets out the Government's strategic approach to resilience. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden, describes how the whole of the UK’s national resilience - our economy, defences and biosecurity -  is being tested like never before.  Although it is impossible to prepare for every risk we can close many of the gaps in our vulnerabilities and work together to make the UK a more resilient, more secure country.

The Action Plan considers resilience in the short term, medium term and long term and brings together policies and programmes, cross-government, to identify, and mitigate the risks the UK faces.  Resilience must be a shared responsibility among individuals, communities, businesses, local, devolved, and national governments, as well as public services across the UK.

Previous work by Local Resilience Forums, The National Resilience Academy and the Office of National Statistics’ Risk Vulnerability Tool is a fundamental input. The National Security Strategy and learning from the COVID-19 Inquiry Module 1 and the Grenfell Tower Inquiry are also incorporated.

Each risk in the National Security Risk Assessment (NRSA) has a nominated lead Department, and Cabinet Office itself is involved in more cross-cutting risks. But because of the uncertainty about how risks will unfold, the Government also looks to improve the general resilience of the nation to all risks - the ‘all hazards’ approach. This includes a strong healthcare system and secure energy supply.

The Action Plan is based around three primary objectives:

• Continuously assessing how resilient the UK is  

• Enabling the whole of society to take action

• Strengthening the public sector resilience system.

Objective 1: Continuously assessing how resilient the UK is, to target interventions and resources

The Action Plan first discusses how the Government assesses risks. The NRSA is the most definitive assessment of acute risks - that may require an emergency response - with the National Risk Register being the public version. It is updated several times a year, with an Expert Advisory Programme to challenge groupthink.

A second step is mapping chronic risks that pose continuous challenges, generally over a longer timeframe, that gradually erode our economy, community, way of life, and/or national security. Chronic risks can increase the frequency or severity of acute risks: climate change, for example, exacerbates the risks of flooding and wildfires. SAMI worked with GO-Science and the Cabinet Office on a Risk scenarios toolkit to enable organisations to respond to chronic risks.

The Chronic Risk Analysis covers issues around security, technology, geopolitics, the environment, societal change, biosecurity, and economic factors, together with a cross-cutting analysis. This recommends that people can use the Futures Toolkit (updated by SAMI Consulting) to help plan for the interconnected risks.

The National Situation Centre provides ongoing monitoring, maintaining a 24-7 eye on events in the UK and around the world.

In a further refinement, the Action Plan recognises that not everyone is equally affected by risks – some are more vulnerable than others. So it has developed a Risk Vulnerability Tool (RVT) to help identify at risk areas and an Expert Panel to address the needs of vulnerable people.

Next the Action Plan discuses assuring the resilience system. Lead Government Departments (LGDs) are responsible for conducting their own internal planning, exercising and monitoring of their capabilities; the Cabinet Office supports LGDs in planning for cross-system impacts, in particular for catastrophic risks. Moving to an internal audit of the system, the Government plans to enhance “red-teaming”:

• red teaming the next National Capabilities Assessment

• building a red teaming tool to test planning for specific risks

• introducing a new peer review protocol for LRFs

The UK Resilience Academy will convene a number of panels per year of relevant experts, chaired by someone outside government,  to scrutinise plans and preparedness for whole-system civil emergencies across the UK.

Finally, the Government will look to measure the UK’s resilience through a variety of individual, household, local and national resilience indicators, in particular a Cyber Resilience Index.

Objective 2: Enable the whole of society to take action to increase their resilience

The Action Plan states that the most impactful mitigations to crises might be the actions others take for themselves – a “whole-of-society” approach.  To make this happen, the Government will:

a. ask and support the public to take action to prepare for emergencies as set out on the GOV.UK/Prepare website.  This includes the Emergency  Alert System, tested on 7^th September.

b. better integrate the offer from voluntary, community and faith services. The voluntary sector can more rapidly mobilise people to provide practical and emotional support, so the Voluntary and Communities Sector Emergencies Partnership will enable them to do so in a more integrated and professional fashion. The “Belong Network” will provide guidance on strategies.

c. improve the resilience of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) through targeted interventions in 13 sectors. This includes developing the CNI Knowledge Base with its interactive map of all CNI in the UK.  The Government will provide advice on best practice directly to businesses to help them strengthen their resilience.

d. provide the right tools to work with the private sector on risk and resilience planning. This involves publishing information on impacts through the Prepare website; providing training; and raising awareness of potential risks. The Supply Chain Strategy, the Economic Security Advisory Service and the Critical Minerals Strategy are also key inputs.  

e. bring together organisations from across the whole-of-society through training, exercises and governance. The UK Resilience Academy will support the public sector, the private sector and individuals. The National Exercising Programme will support simulations of crises and teams’ responses. A strategic resilience forum will bring together interests from across all four UK nations.

Objective 3: Strengthening the public sector resilience system

Turning to the public sector itself, the Action Plan notes that there are very many varied organisations involved in resilience and that a principle of subsidiarity should apply, with decisions taken at the lowest effective level. To improve the overall system, the Government will:

a. improve clarity of roles and responsibilities in the public sector resilience system through enhanced guidance and legislation across all stages of the risk life cycle. Subsidiarity requires a Lead Government Department to take responsibility, with Secretaries of State and Accounting Officers being held accountable. The National Security Council sub-committee on Resilience (NSC(R)) makes collective decisions across government. Cabinet Office is responsible for “whole-of-system” issues (so-called catastrophic risks). In the event of conflict, a Home Defence Programme will oversee collective endeavour in support the UK’s NATO First Approach.

b. better connect the public sector resilience system by upgrading digital tools and more effectively sharing up-to-date, timely data with partners, supporting them to take better decisions. Elements of this include the roll-out of the Risk and Insights Navigator (RaIN)  -a digital and interactive version of the NSRA; ResilienceDirect, an online platform, which enables secure multi-agency information; the Joint Organisational Learning (JOL), a multi-agency learning system which identifies and shares lessons following multi-agency incidents, training and exercising; a joint LRF-UK government group to facilitate and improve data-sharing between local partners and the UK government.

c. improve the quality of work in the public sector resilience system; this centres around Local Resilience Forums that bring together emergency services, local authorities and volunteer groups, and the need to empower them and increase their effectiveness. In 2025/26 five “trailblazer” experiments will test out resilience plans in fields such as climate change and AI. A more strategic approach, including skills and capacity building and better use of science and technology (including social and behavioural science)  will be developed.

The Resilience Action Plan clearly demonstrates the need for involving a wide range of organisations and co-ordinating smoothly between them. The variety of risks that may be faced is huge, so some generic approaches need to be built. This can feel bureaucratic at times (keeping track of everyone involved is a challenge in itself), but if there is a good focus on local engagement, resilience can definitely be improved.

Two areas which perhaps could have been brought out more are collaboration with international allies (clearly vital in defence, but also in other global issues), and the role of regulation and standards in enhancing private sector resilience.

As recent cyber-attacks have shown, threats are very real and significant. The Action Plan points to the role of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in providing support, but clearly, more needs to be done in this field.

In some of our previous writing on resilience, we have pointed to the goal of becoming “anti-fragile” – that is, using challenges to become stronger. In building on learning from the Covid-19 and Grenfell inquiries, the Action Plan is taking important and overdue steps down that road.  

Written by Huw Williams, SAMI Principal

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily of SAMI Consulting.

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