Help for businesses - Business Continuity

Business continuity planning is an important process that makes sure key critical business functions continue, no matter what kind of incident threatens to bring matters to a standstill.

Powys County Council has a duty to promote business continuity to the business and voluntary sectors by encouraging them to make plans for disasters such as floods, fires, power outages and a loss of key staff.

Did you know?

Nearly 1 in 5 businesses suffer a disruption every year.
80% of businesses affected by a major incident either never reopen or close within 18 months
90% of businesses that lose data from a disaster are forced to shut within 2 years.

Effective business continuity planning helps businesses and organisations to anticipate risks and plan a response ahead of time. Experience shows that developing a business continuity plan, can help to reduce the impact and costs of an emergency. It means that your organisation is much more likely to be able to continue trading/delivering services should an incident occur.

Although major emergencies in Powys are rare, smaller scale disruptive incidents affect us much more frequently and highlight the need for us to be prepared.

The aim is to ensure that local organisations are ready for an emergency that may affect their ability to provide a service to the public. Therefore, if an incident occurred there should be less impact on the local economy and community life will return to normal as quickly as possible.

Can you afford a weak link?

Business continuity planning is about making sure that your business is prepared should the unexpected happen. It will help ensure that your business suffers the least possible disruption and ultimately continues to operate during and beyond an emergency.

Having robust business continuity management in place will also help you deal with those smaller emergencies or planned disruptions and stop them developing into ones that you are unable to manage.

Business continuity planning is important for all businesses, from the smallest right through to the largest multi-national companies.

Although development of your business continuity process needs careful consideration it is not difficult to achieve and need not be expensive. However, time spent now can prevent disruption turning into a disaster for your business.

The Welsh Local Authorities Civil Contingencies Group and Welsh Local Government Association have produced the Business Continuity: Can you afford a weak link guidance to help you ensure that your business is prepared.

Self-Assessment

The Welsh Local Authorities Civil Contingencies Group and Welsh Local Government Association have also published a self-assessment template. This is to assist you in quickly highlighting issues you need to consider to help prepare for an emergency that may disrupt your business.

If you don't have a business continuity plan this template will help you to outline issues you need to consider to enable you to prepare for an emergency that may disrupt your business. If you do have a plan then it may help you to identify any issues that you haven't previously considered.

An effective plan can make your business more attractive to customers as many now require suppliers to have a business continuity plan. The planning process may improve your business and having a business continuity plan may also reduce your insurance premiums.

If you require further assistance or wish to discuss any particular issues concerning business continuity, you can contact our Civil Contingencies Team on emergency.planning@powys.gov.uk.

Potential Hazards

Community Risk Register

A statutory requirement under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 is the consideration of the likelihood and impact of a range of hazards occurring within the Dyfed Powys Police Force area.

To help us decide where we should concentrate our efforts in emergency planning terms, it is important that we continue to assess the potential risks to our County. The importance of risk assessment is emphasised by the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. A statutory requirement under the Act is the consideration of the likelihood and impact of a range of hazards occurring within the Dyfed Powys Police Force area.

The community risk register and more information can be found on the Dyfed-Powys Local Resilience Forum Website.

This work is an ongoing process. The risk assessments included in the register will only cover non-malicious events (i.e. hazards) rather than threats (i.e. terrorist incidents). The inclusion of hazards or scenarios does not mean that the Local Resilience Forum believes the risk will materialise, or that if it were to do so, it would be at that scale. The risk scenarios are rather, reasonable worst case assumptions upon which the risk assessment is based.

The Community Risk Register is the first step in an emergency planning process and it will help us and our partners ensures that the plans we develop are proportionate to the risk and ultimately help us to help you.