Home >> council >> departments >> healthcommunity08/08/2008 02:26:42

Business Continuity

Businesses are used to assessing and planning for commercial risks such as the sudden loss of an important customer or supplier, a bad debt or industrial action, but increasingly a wider range of events can also have a major impact on their prosperity or even survival.  Recent events around the world have shown that terrorist or climatic events can increasingly impinge on businesses, for example 58% of UK businesses report that they were disrupted as a result of September 11th, with one in eight severely affected.

 

Companies often fail to prepare for events that can have a significant impact on their operations.  Fire safety measures may be common place but flood mitigation measures are rare.  However, probably due to the influence of global warming, the risk of a flood or other severe weather event is high than that of a fire.

 

Apart from terrorist activities and flooding, other unexpected events include:

  • Fire
  • Accidents/burglary/vandalism
  • Natural disaster (e.g. extreme weather)
  • Interruption to power supplies
  • Shortage of essential resources or raw materials
  • Infectious disease outbreaks

From May 2006 the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 placed a responsibility on Fareham Borough Council to give advice and assistance to businesses and voluntary organisations in relation to Business Continuity Management or BCM.

 

BCM is the planning an organisation can do to assess the risks, identify its vulnerable areas and key functions, and to plan its response to an adverse event.  This is important to ensure the impact of an incident is kept to a minimum and that the business can return to normal operations as quickly as possible.

 

Organisations that have business continuity arrangements in place are more likely to stay in business after an incident , as they are more prepared and equipped to help themselves.  It is an increasing expectation of insurance companies that organisations will have these preparations in place.

Larger businesses may need to access sources of specialist assistance from professional consultants, further information is available from the Business Continuity Institute link below.

 

Please see the links for a variety of websites and publications that give useful advise on business continuity.

Links

The following links contain further information on BCM:

 

Hampshire County Council has been developing business continuity management working along side the district councils a link the the Hampshire page can be found at www.hants.gov.uk/hcc/emergency/businesscontinuity.html (this is an external hyperlink).

  • www.thebci.org/ (this is an external hyperlink) - the Business Continuity Institute provides a certification scheme for business continuity professionals and publishes a list of consultants.
  • www.ukresilience.info/ (this is an external hyperlink) - UK Government advice regarding contingency planning.

If you would like further information, advice or to discuss any of the above please contact us on 01329 236100 and ask for Environmental Health.