London recovers and starts returning to normal

After a terrible series of events, the spirit of the capital remains unbowed, but there will still be lessons to learn.

The widespread disruption caused travel chaos in Central London with many resorting to walking for many hours to get home.

Schools were open late to allow parents time to get home resulting in many Shops and Offices closing for the day. Travel is likely to continue to be affected during the day as people assess and reflect on the day’s events, but London is well on the way to resuming Business as Usual.

The work of so many agencies in preparing London’s Major Incident Plan is now self evident. The response from all Blue Light and Emergency Services, demonstrated under the most pressurised conditions, was superb. There were few signs of panic and the Public have been full of praise for the efficiency and professionalism of the response.

For the past few years the Government Office for London’s Resilience Team (LRT) has been co-ordinating this response with extensive dialog and action with all groups involved in responding to a major incident. The value of this Resilience and Contingency Planning has now been tested and many lives have undoubtedly been saved through their commitment and effort as London responded to the horror of these attacks.

The Continuity Forum has been working closely with LRT to further improve the planning through the promotion of wide spread adoption of BCM. At last March’s Expo we shared a stand and ran numerous presentation sessions for London’s Smaller Businesses illustrating what they can do to protect themselves from both the direct and indirect effects of ‘Business Interruption’, including Terrorism, but also addressing the far more likely events to strike such as Flooding or Power failure.

The key message should still be ‘Alert … but not Alarmed’, but organisations of all sizes and types should seriously reflect on the levels of investment and attention they give to their own BCM planning as at present it is still the case the majority of organisations in London and the rest of the country does not have any real form of BCM in place.

Those organisations that reflect best practice and do have plans should ensure that they are regularly updated and developed to insure that they can cope not just with the effects caused by terrorist attacks, but also the far more common events that will strike regularly such as Power disruption and IT failure as well as a host of others.

The Continuity Forum will be redoubling its efforts to further extend our already successful education and information programmes, and we thank all those organisations who have already partnered with us and look forward to working with many more.

Your support enables us to deliver valuable help and assistance to communities and groups across the country in areas as diverse as policy and best practice development, as well as our highly recommended Events and Workshops, but there remains a huge amount of work to do.

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If you have any comments on this article or would like to find out more about the work of the Continuity Forum please contact Sara McKenna or Russell at the Continuity Forum directly on 020 8993 1599 or info@continuityforum.org