Liverpool 'needs to invest in its emergency planning' following a terror attack and the impact of Covid-19.
A report into Liverpool Council ’s city corporate emergency management planning has identified that the local authority must “further understand the importance of learning lessons from previous incidents” such as the attack on Liverpool Women's Hospital last November.
The Civil Contingencies Act (2004) places several statutory duties on councils to prepare and maintain robust civil emergency response and recovery plans. The report, which will be discussed by Liverpool Council’s audit committee next week, identified that “the ongoing COVID-19 crisis remains, to date, the biggest challenge to peace time resilience.”
READ MORE: Live updates as huge fire breaks out at scrapyard
“It is, and will continue to be, a ‘game changer’ in how organisations will need to anticipate, assess, prevent and mitigate risks; and how we respond and recover to other risks and threats, when they become a reality.”
Liverpool Council is a member of the Merseyside Resilience Forum (MRF) which compiles and publishes an annual Merseyside Community Risk Register (CCR) that identifies the potential risks that may affect communities.
The report added that Liverpool Council’s own emergency response and recovery arrangements are detailed within the Corporate Emergency Management Plan (CEMP). The document, which is formally reviewed every two years, was utilised following the terrorist attack at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital last November.
It is now being deployed as the city seeks to respond to the Ukraine crisis, including “strategic and tactical coordinating groups, meeting weekly, to respond to any associated local impacts and for those of the Ukrainian refugees, arriving in the country; several operational leads are covering specific workstreams to offer direct support.”
The report said the council “needs to adopt resilience into its thinking” moving forward by “adequately” investing in emergency planning and business continuity functions in its related major plans - the council, strategic improvement and city plans. It added: “It is suggested, that only by doing this that the council can become a more resilient organisation and, in turn, a more resilient city.
“Liverpool City Council needs to further understand the importance of learning lessons from previous incidents. The debriefing process is part of the emergency planning lifecycle, and this process only seeks to ‘identify’ lessons and areas of good practice.”
It was said that the city can only learn lessons from previous incidents once they are embedded into the council’s business.
