Business continuity and emergency planning
Our approach to business continuity:
The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 requires local authorities to maintain plans for business continuity arrangements. This ensures local authorities can continue to deliver critical services, if possible, in the event of a disruption. The plans are regularly reviewed to guarantee they are up-to-date.
The Councils' own Business Continuity Plan contains many pre-planned responses to anticipated events. It informs staff what actions are appropriate to take, depending on the situation. A rota is kept to ensure there is a named person, available at all times of the day or night, on every day of the year, to initiate our plan, if needed.
Community business continuity and emergency planning
Business continuity involves thinking about what could go wrong, and making plans to prevent problems occurring in the first place, or to reduce their impact if they do occur.
It is much easier to plan ahead before a crisis develops, than to wait until something goes wrong and then try to cope while there is a lot to sort out.
Our business continuity plan contains information about:
- Which services we feel have the highest priority
- Places we could work from if our normal offices became unavailable
- How many people we would need to cope in emergencies
- How we would get our computer systems running again if they temporarily went down
- How to make you aware of how to contact us
It is important that all organisations (including private businesses) have business continuity plans too.
To find out more information, please visit the Suffolk Prepared website, where you can find out more about the Suffolk Resilience Forum (SRF), which is a multi-agency group that provides strategic and operational guidance and support on the planning for multi-agency responses to a major incident.