Civil Contingencies Act 2004

The Civil Contingencies Act 2004, delivers a single framework for civil protection in the United Kingdom designed to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
It improves the UK’s ability to deal with the consequences of major disruptive incident by improving the planning process at a local level, building better contacts between agencies and improving the link between local areas and central government.
The Act clearly identifies the roles and responsibilities of local responders, ensuring consistency in civil protection activity and enhancing performance. By setting out clear expectations and responsibilities, the Act helps to ensure that the front line responders can deal with the full range of emergencies from localised major incidents through to catastrophic emergencies.
The Act also modernises the legislative tools available to government to deal with the most serious emergencies, providing greater flexibility, proportionality, deployability and robustness.
Its main concepts are:

Designating Category 1 and 2 responders who will be involved in the emergency. Amongst others Category 1 responders includes the Emergency Services and Local Authorities, whilst category 2 responders includes Utility companies and Transport.

  • A responsibility to jointly plan, respond, risk assess and share information amongst responders.
  • Implementing a regional tier for dealing with larger emergencies.
  • Emergency Powers for Responders to manage the incident – such as implementing cordons.

The Act is in two parts, Part 1 deals with arrangements for dealing with emergencies locally and refers to local "responders". These are local agencies such as Reading Borough Council (insert council area as appropriate), or Thames Valley Police.

Part 2 deals with Emergency Powers, which is a mechanism for the Government to bring in special legislation to deal with a wide spread national emergency quickly without having to debate the legislation in Parliament first. There is a triple-lock test for Part 2 of the Act to ensure that it is only used in extreme circumstances.

How does the Civil Contingencies Act define an Emergency?

Is it a major incident or an emergency? Essentially there is little difference between the two if you are caught up in one. However, the Act refers to an Emergency and defines this as:

  1. an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom
  2. an event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom, or
  3. war, or terrorism, which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom.

In practical terms, an emergency could be a pandemic flu outbreak, a major flooding incident, widespread lack of electricity over a long period of time or a gas leak requiring residents to be evacuated from their homes. The emergency may be abroad, but affecting UK residents, such as the evacuation of ex-patriot citizens from Lebanon due to increased violence in the area.

Duties Upon Responders

The main part of the Act, clearly identifies the roles and responsibilities of local responders. For local Councils, there are seven statutory duties, namely:

  1. Assess the risk of emergencies occurring and use this to inform contingency planning. This is collated at a local level to form a Community Risk Register
  2. Put in place emergency plans
  3. Put in place Business Continuity Management arrangements
  4. Put in place arrangements to make information available to the public about civil protection matters and maintain arrangements to warn, inform and advise the public in the event of an emergency
  5. Share information with other local responders to enhance co-ordination; Reading Borough Council does this via the Thames Valley Local Resilience Forum
  6. Co-operate with other local responders to enhance co-ordination and efficiency. Again, Reading Borough Council does this via the Thames Valley Local Resilience Forum
  7. Provide advice and assistance to businesses and voluntary organisations about business continuity management.

Civil Contingencies Act Enhancement Programme

The CCA is being reviewed and so the most up to date copy of the legislation can be found by following links below.