Protecting your Business against Emergencies
How can BCM Plans help?
Emergencies can strike anytime and anywhere. Whether it's a natural disaster like a flood, fire, or a pandemic like COVID-19, it's essential for businesses to have a plan in place to protect their operations, employees, and customers. Business continuity planning helps ensure that a business can quickly recover and resume normal operations after an emergency.
What is Business Continuity Management (BCM)?
Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a process that helps organisations prepare for and deal with emergencies or unexpected events that could disrupt their normal operations. It involves developing a plan to ensure that essential functions can continue during and after an emergency. The goal of BCM is to minimize the impact of disruptions on a business and ensure that it can quickly recover and resume normal operations.
Many businesses that survived the Manchester bomb had Business Continuity Management plans. However, it has been assessed that companies affected by a disaster that does not have a plan in place only have a 50% chance of surviving the following 12 months.
Business Continuity Management (BCM) plans to ensure that your business or organisation has a quick and painless return to "business as usual" in the event of a major disruption.
- Identify individual roles and responsibilities, including who makes decisions
- What structure or functions must remain to keep things going
- Prioritise the action plan and functions needed first and the resources needed
- Help businesses continue during disruption and recover quickly
- BCM in Nottingham City
What risks are considered?
Although terrorism is a risk, the following generic risks should be considered:
- Large-scale temporary absence of staff
- Permanent or long-term loss of staff
- Denial of the site or geographical area
- Flooding
- Severe weather
- Loss of mains electricity
- Loss of IT
- Disruption of transport
- Loss of mains water and sewerage
- Loss of availability of oil and fuel
- Loss of telephone/ mobile telephone communications
The government encourages all organisations to understand Business Continuity Management clearly and has published the Business Continuity Guide for Dummies in association with The Emergency Planning Society (EPS): The organisation for Resilience Professionals (the-eps.org).
Preparing a Business Continuity Plan
While predicting every possible incident that may threaten your business or organisation is impossible, you can develop a basic plan using the information below.
Depending on your business's size and nature, you may require more or less comprehensive plans to be in place. By following the links below, you can self-assess your business to see how prepared you are and find out more information on whether you should have further measures in place.
Nottingham City Centre Emergency Planning Guide for Businesses
Business Continuity is essential to aid planning to ensure minimal disruption and recovery to business as usual. The City has many risks, so preparations must be made in advance to deal with disruption to the business. It is also important to consider developing an initial response plan; to enable this, the City Council has produced a guide.
The guide contains valuable information on the following:
- Emergency Services’ actions
- How can you aid the emergency services?
- Cordons
- Evacuation, including the City’s evacuation zones
- Public information and communication with the emergency services
- Business Continuity
- Counter Terrorism
- Contents of grab bags
Nottingham City Council (with the help of the City Centre Emergency Planning Group, CCEPG) has written a guide to help businesses. To get a copy of the Nottingham City Centre Emergency Planning Guide, Click on the link below:
Action Counters Terrorism (ACT) e-learning
The UK is currently facing the most severe and sustained threat from International Terrorism ever known. The threat is real, ever-present and enduring. The events of 2005 and subsequent operations have shown that it is vital that all agencies enhance their capability and capacity to deal with this threat.
At the same time, domestic extremism - which incorporates animal rights, political extremism and other extremist activity - also poses significant dangers to the social and economic well-being of the country.
The Police Service has a vital role in the effort to counter terrorism but cannot combat it alone: effective working with the full spectrum of partners, stakeholders and the community will be critical to our success in protecting the UK.
ACT Awareness is your opportunity to become involved in an exciting development in community safety in Nottingham city centre.
Preparing your Business for Flooding
The Environment Agency has produced a booklet and materials for making your business resilient against flooding. This includes a guide to creating a business flood plan and sample templates.
For further information, visit the Environment Agency - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) or email enquiries@environment-agency.gov.uk.
Contact Us
Emergency Planning
Nottingham City Council
Loxley House
Station Street
Nottingham
NG2 3NG
Tel: 0115 915 4781
emergency.planning@nottinghamcity.gov.uk
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