Emergency planning

What is emergency planning?

By law Local Authorities have to prepare an emergency plan so that resources and experienced people are on standby to respond quickly and in the best possible way when a major crisis - of whatever kind - occurs.

What does emergency planning look like?

Having a main emergency plan allows us to:

• make good, immediate decisions
• co-ordinate our efforts to be most effective.
• It doesn’t specify what particular actions need to be taken when a crisis happens, it just provides essential information so that whatever action we do take is the best possible.
• contains must urgent of information such as Insurer details and emergency contact and Supplier details and emergency contacts.

How do I write a plan?

If you have a Business Continuity Management Plan, you will know what part of your business might be affected by different issues eg, in the event of a fire at your building – would your staff be able to work elsewhere etc. 

The Emergency Plan uses the “what if” question for your business and there may be scenarios where staff/relative have to be contacted – how would you do that in the event of an emergency?

What stakeholders should be involved?

Your whole company should know and understand your emergency plan but you may need a way to let your suppliers, customers, staff know why you can’t trade for a specific period in time – everyone needs to know what their role is and how they should carry it out.

How do I test emergency plans?

Plans are really only tested fully when something happens however planning to prevent emergencies is better than planning for recovery!

Learning from emergency situations

If the unthinkable happens, after recovering from the incident/event, it is useful review what happened, how it happened and what could be done differently to prevent a similar situation from occurring again

Useful links

• Staffordshire Prepared
• Staffordshire Police
• Staffordshire Fire and Rescue
• West Midlands Ambulance Service