During the last few years there have been a number of incidents and emergencies, which have affected the nation as well as local communities. These range from the Severe Flooding in 2000 to the Fuel Crisis and Foot & Mouth outbreak in 2001.

As a result of these and a number of other incidents the Deputy Prime Minister announced a thorough review of emergency planning, the result of which was the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. (CCA 2004)

The CCA 2004 sets out regulations and guidelines that enable organisations such as the Police, Fire Service Ambulance Service, The NHS Primary Care Trust (PCT) and Health Protection Agency (HPA) The Environment Agency, The Maritime Coastguard Agency (MCA) and the Local Authorities to all work together to enhance the resilience of the community. All of these agencies are now referred to as Category 1 Responders.

In addition there are a number of Category 2 Responders who are required to cooperate with Category 1 Responders. These include the main Utilities such as the Gas, Electricity and Water Companies.

The CCA seeks to enhance community resilience by focusing on 7 main areas. These are:

· Co-operation

· Information Sharing

· Risk Assessment –
(Community Risk Register)

· Emergency Planning

· Business Continuity Management

· Communicating with the Public

· Promoting Business Continuity Management

The framework outlined within the CCA helps to ensure that there is a consistency of approach across the country. It achieves this by:

· Establishing a clear set of roles and responsibilities for local responders

· Giving greater structure and consistency to local civil protection activity; and

· Establishing a sound basis for performance management at a local level

Within the Act an emergency is defined as:

· An event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare

· An event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment; or

· War, or terrorism, which threatens serious damage to security

For the purposes of emergency planning, any event, situation or incident of such a scale that it would overwhelm the normal operations of the responding agencies is declared a major incident.