Resilience
Bedfordshire County Council's Resilience team is responsible for Emergency Planning and Business Continuity. Together, these areas aim to protect and ensure the safety of the people of Bedfordshire, as well as the employees and assets of the County Council.
The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (CCA)| provides the statutory framework for emergency planning in England.
These pages are provided to raise awareness of emergency planning and preparedness and can be used as a tool towards helping yourself for an emergency.
What is resilience?
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from an event, like a major emergency. The Resilience team works both internally and externally to prepare an effective response and recovery to any event that may cause disruption to Council services. Internally, the focus of the work is on Business Continuity while externally we work with other agencies on Emergency Planning.
What is Business Continuity?
Business Continuity is the practice of preparing a service to deal with an event with the expectation that at some point, the event will occur. Business Continuity involves putting together plans for dealing with a disruption in services, assessing the priority of reinstating services, and training staff to be competent in the event of an emergency/disruption of services.
What is Emergency Planning?
Emergency Planning is the practice of planning the response to an emergency, were it to occur. It involves working in co-operation with a number of other agencies, including the emergency services, health, voluntary agencies, and other local authorities, amongst others. In Bedfordshire, much of this work is carried out in the
Bedfordshire and Luton Local Resilience Forum| partnership (BLLRF).
Why do we need resilience?
As a public-sector body, we have a duty of care to our customers, especially those in vulnerable situations. If an emergency occurs we want to ensure that customers continue to receive quality services from Bedfordshire County Council.
However, resilience is equally important to the success of businesses. We strongly advise local businesses and voluntary agencies to have Business Continuity plans.