Agenda item

The Committee received a report on the current status of Business Continuity Management (BCM) and Business Continuity Plans (BCP) across the Council.  BCM was the capability of an organization to continue the delivery of its priority activities within acceptable timeframes and to pre-defined levels during a disruption affecting the Council.  For the Council, as a ‘Category One responder’ under the Civil Contingencies Act, there was a statutory duty to have both BCPs and Emergency Plans in place, with staff trained and exercised to respond.

Within the Council’s BCM process Directorates undertook a Business Impact Analysis to understand and mitigate the impact to the organization of losing specified activities over given timeframes in order to identify which activities should be considered Priority Activities and while doing so confirming key continuity / recovery timeframes.

To ensure robust BCM, the Council needed to ensure that all Teams and Services had effective BCPs in place.  The Covid-19 pandemic had been a thorough test of the Council’s BCM and Emergency Response processes and had demonstrated the organizational ability to respond and the resilience to do so over an extended period of time.

The next year for the Council would continue to be critical, delivering on post Covid-19 recovery, ever challenging budgets, and unitary transformation.  The report further set out the Council’s preparedness should it be faced with a large-scale emergency response and/or a number of smaller local incidents.  This included information on the status of BCM and the current status of Service Area BCPs as of Novembver 2021.  Across the 6 Directorates there were 92 BCPs of which 76 (84%) were complete (green), 16 (16%) were work in progress (amber), with no Service Areas not having a BCP in place.

Amber BCPs were as follows:

-                      Adults Social Care – 8 plans required review following a ASC restructure.

-                      Deputy Chief Executive – 1.

-                      Communities – 3.

-                      Planning, Growth and Sustainability – 4.

Each Service had mitigations in place whilst the full BCPs were developed by using legacy BCPs.

Work was currently being undertaken to transfer all BCPs into the corporate BCM system, Clearview, so that users could fully utilize all the benefits of the system including improved reporting and dashboard features.  The Clearview rollout was being project managed by the Business Management Function, Resources, with support of the CCU.  As part of the CCU Service review it had likely that corporate responsibility for BCM would move to Business Assurance with the Corporate Finance Service.

Members sought additional information and were informed:

-                      That it would be possible for documents in the Clearview system to be version controlled, for clarity.

-                      That the amber BCPs would be completed as soon as was possible.  The BCPs for the Adults and Health area (8) were in progress and reflected the new teams following ASC re-structure.

-                      That BCPs were usually reviewed annually depending on the Service area, but would be more frequent if the Council needed to prepare for any emerging threats or after a major incident.

-                      ACTION LOG: ADD issue – that target completion dates be provided for the BCPs being undertaken in the Communities and PG&S areas.

-                      An explanation was provided of the Incident Management process which led to the invoking of an Incident Management meeting chaired by the relevant Corporate and Service Directors.

-                      That in some instances, elements of a BCP could be rolled up into a higher level plan, this was a judgement call for the relevant Service Director.

Members agreed that given the recent instance of power failures in the north of the UK, it would be sensible to keep hard (paper) copies of BCPs and not rely solely on electronic copies.

RESOLVED –

(1)               That the current status of Business Continuity Management and Business Continuity Plans across the Council be noted.

(2)               That Business Continuity Management arrangements should include having hard (paper) copies of BCPs and not rely solely on electronic copies.

(3)               That it be noted that the lead responsibility for Business Continuity Management would transfer to Business Assurance in December 2021, subject to the CCU consultation outcome.