Civil Contingencies Act

The Civil Contingencies Act (CCA) received Royal Assent in 2004. The Act’s purpose is to update the United Kingdom’s emergency and disaster response mechanisms.

Public sector organisations and businesses should be considering how it affects their business’s continuity and disaster recovery planning and what requirements it places on them. The Cabinet Office state that "the bulk of the duties in Part 1 of the Act will come fully into force on 14 November 2005, with the duty on local authorities to give business continuity advice coming into force on 15 May 2006".

The act specifically addresses public sector organisations (the so called category 1 responders), in particular local authorities and blue light services and key utilities such as providers of electricity, gas, water, telecoms and transport (the so called category 2 responders). All businesses are affected though - it is yet another wake-up call either to put a disaster recovery / business continuity plan in place or to update an existing plan.

Since IT and telecommunications is at the core of most local authority and business operations, maintaining an IT and telecommunications DR/BC plan is a fundamental component of the response to CCA.

Local Authorities

The Act requires local authorities to:

• maintain plans to ensure that they can continue to exercise their operations in the event of an emergency so far as is reasonably practicable. The duty relates to all operations, not just to emergency response.



• provide advice and assistance to those undertaking commercial activities and to voluntary organisations in relation to business continuity management in the event of emergencies. They:



• must provide general advice and assistance;
• may provide specific advice and assistance to individual organisations; and
• may give advice and assistance to individual businesses in relation to the engagement of business continuity consultants.

Businesses

Whilst the act doesn’t place any requirements directly on businesses (other than the utilities) and doesn’t oblige them to seek or accept the advice to be provided by local authorities, the current climate, and the certain knowledge that their business can fail if it is unable to trade for a relatively short time, should make DR/BC planning an obligatory concern of all company directors. Indeed regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley do place this obligation on directors of organisations operating in the financial sector.

CCA could directly affect business’s plans, however, because of the provision it makes for exclusion zones and travel restrictions, both of which could prevent staff from getting to work (or even from leaving work).