Business continuity management

Essex County Council is required by law to prepare business continuity management procedures. These enable the council to quickly recover services and minimise impacts to our communities, staff, and other stakeholders due to a disruption to, or loss of, service provision.

Business continuity management overview

Business continuity refers to an organisation's ability to sustain essential operations and services, even in the face of disruptive events such as:

• natural disasters
• technological failures
• cyber attacks
• other unexpected incidents

It involves creating strategies and plans to ensure that critical functions, processes, and resources can continue to operate or be rapidly restored, minimising the impact of disruptions on the council and its stakeholders.

Why we undertake business continuity management

Business continuity management helps enable an organisation to keep running at least at a minimal level during a crisis. Strong business continuity saves money, time and company reputation. An extended outage risks financial, personal and reputational loss.

Under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, we have a duty to have business continuity management processes in place to ensure that we can continue delivering for the residents of Essex.

Business continuity management at the council

Business continuity management is not owned by one team or service area. There is collective ownership across all levels of the organisation with each function being responsible for maintaining their own business continuity arrangements, while a corporate plan sets out the corporate response.

Business continuity requires services to look at themselves, analyse potential areas of weakness, understand their resource requirements and develop contingency options. By doing this we can help ensure that we minimise any impacts to both our service users, partner agencies, suppliers and our own staff.

To support the delivery of the business continuity programme across the council, the Emergency Planning and Resilience team provide professional advice, guidance, training, exercising and validation to enable and facilitate effective business continuity planning and response within the council.

The Business Continuity Strategy (PDF, 566 KB) identifies how business continuity management is delivered within the council, as well as the different roles and responsibilities involved in delivering the work.

Business continuity system

We use a secure platform to make sure that employees can be contacted in times of emergency, or if we need to enact a business continuity situation. The platform also supports our business continuity planning activities on a day to day basis.

You will be asked to review and update your contact details on the system twice a year. To find out more, see the Business continuity system FAQs (PDF, 293KB).

Contact

For queries about business continuity planning, speak to your local Business Continuity Lead (PDF, 141 KB).

They can provide local support and advice relevant to your Service or signpost you to places where you can access the necessary support.

For advice, training and queries about business continuity, contact the Emergency Planning and Resilience team (PDF, 101 KB).