Organisational Resilience and The Covid Crisis - Setting up a U K independent Resilience Body?

What strikes me about the outcomes of the Covid crisis for the the UK is the initial lack of planning and preparedness for it and the poor early outcomes which the crisis put onto our country.

These lead to circa 130k dead people which for a First World country is a huge number!

We have some excellent resilience planners in the UK who are backed up by local resilience forums which can plan to deal with risks and disasters and yet there seemed to be very little collegiate and joint working to offer solutions to mitigate this crisis!

The use of white boards to gather together covid data using fibre tip pens is frankly laughable and the response of going initially for herd immunity at the expense of potentially many thousands of lives smacks of a desperate approach.

Many UK specialists advise other governments on resilience and disaster planning so why not for the UK government?

It appears to me that the country was caught initially with its trousers down in the following areas:

• Border travel controls

• Inadequacy of ppe stocks

• Slowness of entering into lockdowns

• Mixed communications messages to covid infected areas

• Treatment of care homes residents nd their staff

• An inadequate test and trace system

• Questionable covid contract awards to certain companies

These problems could have been anticipated in advance but they were not.

We need to know why?

The government is hoping that its furlough plan and its vaccination strategy can wipe out these initial mistakes and that everyone will be okay with that.

This cannot be the case and we cannot allow this to happen. To allow these good things to happen the country has increased its indebtedness by over £270 bn which was unavoidable but will form a serious debt burden for future generations of our people!

The country currently owes in excess of £2 trillion!

My previous post on crisis management is crucial here and I will cross reference it in this blog.

To learn lessons from this crisis we must identify the lessons we need to learn first of all!

There is no point in denying that critical failures have been made but the question in public resilience terms is, could we have done better in tackling them?

I believe we could and should have done so!

Over ten years of austerity have blunted the efficacy of a public sector response to such a crisis.

Perhaps we need a specific independent resilience body for the UK which would be charged with anticipating, planning, preparing and responding to major risks and challenges for our country.

This would involve developing risk registers and action plans and perhaps more importantly, conducting stress tests on how ready the country is to respond to certain types of risk and develop well resourced action plans to do so.

In the Charity Sector the Disasters Emergency Committee would be a good model for this.

This could be a recommendation of the forthcoming Covid Enquiry.

Sooner rather than later please !!

I think we all need to look critically at what has happened to see if we can do better.

As a country public resilience is growing as a key area of concern!

We must all turn our minds to it and in the coming weeks this blog will address many of the main issues of organisational resilience.

But please, no white boards and fibre tip pens!

We need much more than that