Create an emergency plan for your community

Community resilience is where people come together in the event of an emergency. By using local resources and expertise, they help themselves and each other.

Communities who are resilient can also assist the emergency services when needed.

Our aim to enhance community resilience is to strengthen engagement, build trust, share information and best practice, and to support training and development of community resilience activities and projects by:

• harnessing local intelligence to build, shared situational awareness of local risks and vulnerabilities to better inform response
• reinforcing joint working with agencies and communities at a local level in terms of cooperation, planning and resilience activities
• identifying businesses and volunteer organisations involved in resilience activities i.e. response, training, education to the public and facilitate links between similar organisations.

Creating an emergency plan for your community is good practice so that in the event of an emergency you can:

• use local resources to help emergency services with their response
• help those in the community that are vulnerable
• help manage the response of the voluntary sector

Communities that spend time planning for emergencies are able to deal with them better and recover faster.

This does not mean creating a whole new community network or a one-off response to an incident. It is an ongoing process to improve emergency preparedness. We are keen to work with communities to encourage them to write community emergency plans. There is no statutory responsibility for these groups to plan for, respond to, or recover from emergencies.

As part of an emergency plan, you will need to consider:

• local risks or hazards specific to your location
• local resources or groups that may be able to support emergency services in their response
• people in the community that are vulnerable
• how vulnerable people can be provided with care, support, information, or practical help
• how you will communicate the plan to people in the community and inform them of local risks
• how you will work in partnership with the local authority,town or parish councils, emergency services, voluntary and faith groups in the event of an emergency
• how you can maintain communication with important groups
• what steps you can take to help recovery after different emergencies
• how you can influence decisions to reduce the likelihood of different emergencies occurring

Here are some resources which may help you and your community form an emergency plan:

• Preparing for Emergencies: Guide for Communities
• Community Emergency Plan Toolkit
• Community Emergency Plan Template
• Resilience in society: infrastructure, communities and businesses

Our team are happy to talk to you about this and support you in:

• looking at local risks
• identifying opportunities to become more resilient (such as training and communications)

For guidance or to let us know about your community emergency plan, contact us via email on [email protected].