The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 places a duty on local authorities manage their own business continuity and to promote business continuity to businesses in their area.
South Holland District Council will do this by providing information on this website including links to other sites that support Business Continuity Management (BCM).
The Council itself is going through the BCM process to ensure that essential services can either be maintained during an emergency situation, or in the case of a major incident that results in services being suspended, allows them to be introduced as quickly and effectively as possible. This effectively increases our resilience to emergency situations such as:
- Damage or denial of access to premises including contents
- Loss of critical services such as IT and telecommunications
- The loss of a public utility (e.g. electricity)
- Failure of key suppliers / partners
- Loss of specialist equipment
- Disruption to transport or the road network
- Industrial action or other unavailability of staff (e.g. illness).
The key principles of Business Continuity are:
- Reduction / avoidance of identified risks
- Planning for business / service recovery should disruption occur
- Development of recovery plans to ensure the continuity of services in the event of an emergency or disaster.
The Community Risk Register can be used to help inform BCM plans.
Business Continuity for Small and Medium Sized Businesses
On average, a typical company can expect to experience a MAJOR disruption to the availability of their office and business systems once every four years. The actual nature, duration and cause of the disruption varies but in 2004*: ·
- 41% of companies suffered from loss of IT functionality ·
- 25% lost telecommunications ·
- 18% experienced disruption caused by flood or storm damage ·
- 11% completely lost access to their site
(*source: The Chartered Management Institute 2005).
