Business Continuity Planning

The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 places a duty on Warrington Borough Council to establish and maintain Business Continuity plans in order to ensure we can continue to deliver the critical aspects of our daily functions in the event of an emergency, as well as our emergency response functions.  In order for us to be able to support other responding agencies in an emergency situation and to ensure that the impact on our community is kept to a minimum, we first need to identify the critical aspects of our daily services and be confident that we are able to maintain our own crisis response capabilities.  

We must also ensure that organisations delivering services on our behalf (for example, care to elderly people) or which underpin our service provision, (for example IT and telecommunications providers) can deliver to the extent we would require in the event of an emergency.   Therefore we ensure that the council’s contractors and service providers also have business continuity plans in place.

Warrington Borough Council has developed service level business continuity and recovery plans.  Each council directorate has ensured that adequate recovery plans are in place for all critical functions and the main corporate critical functions are included in the corporate business continuity plan.

In the future we will be validating these plans through an exercise programme and developing an internal staff training programme. Lessons learnt from these events will lead to a review of plans.

The council has also developed a corporate flu pandemic plan and has procedures in place to deal with a fuel shortage.