Planning

This page is from APP, the official source of professional practice for policing.

Civil emergencies response is based on consequence management. The capability and capacity to respond is based on the anticipated requirements identified through a robust planning process with partners.

Major incident plans should have the JESIP principles at their centre.

The planning process should include:

scoping and identifying a proportionate number of trained officers who have the experience and availability to work within the major incident command structure. This process should consider force capability and capacity to respond to sudden onset events * consideration of force command rotas, particularly the capacity of commanders who may be required to fulfil more than one role during a major incident * testing all call-out and other operational deployment processes, to provide assurance and check that resourcing plans will remain resilient to real-life situations and scenarios

Plans should be regularly reviewed and include the views of specialists as appropriate.

Chief officers should ensure they have a robust process to review, test and exercise their major incident plans alongside their local resilience forums. This includes appropriate training and awareness on the content and delivery of the plan. Important principles must be shared with relevant parties, including relevant processes for testing and exercising of the plans.

Testing and exercising of the plans should:

include the management of concurrent threats/civil emergencies or incidents * be aware of any change in threat level and the resulting resource demand

The government strategy is to prepare for consequences that are common to most risk scenarios – for example, a large number of casualties and fatalities, major disruption to transport, or significant loss of energy.

The common consequences of emergencies and their maximum plausible scale, duration and magnitude are defined in the National Resilience Planning Assumptions (NRPA) communities.

NRPAs are shared with Category 1 responders. Police forces use planning assumptions in chapter four of the National Policing Requirement (NPR, 2012) when detailing the response required to counter the Strategic Policing Requirement (SPR, 2023) threats. Local resilience forum (LRF) members should use NRPAs to inform local-level planning.

Planning assumptions inform the work of the cross-government National Resilience Capabilities Programme(opens an external website in the same tab) . This programme coordinates work to build and maintain capability to respond to the common consequences of emergencies.

Planning units should ensure appropriate functions are in place to provide adequate support to the commanders at all tiers of command up to and including the SCG.

These functions or cells should use the following principles (which form the mnemonic PIRLFLW).

Planning * Information/Intelligence * Resources * Logistics * Financial * Legal * Welfare/Wellbeing

For further information, see Operations APP and Disaster victim identification (DVI) APP .

Forces should consider the contingencies required for a total loss of critical infrastructure and communications as part of a failure of systems. This could be caused by:

the ongoing incident * a natural event such as flooding * power failure and loss of backup systems * an orchestrated cyber-attack on one or more of the emergency services.

Where the incident is related to a cyber event, a cyber technical advice cell (CTAC) is formed including representation from the National Security Cyber Centre (NSCC). Plans for critical national infrastructure sites should take account of the risk of a cyber security breach in addition to power failure due to other incidents such as flooding.

An excess death event is an outcome that challenges the delivery of the normal death management process, resulting from either:

environmental factors (such as a heatwave, cold weather or air quality) * health-related factors (for example, outbreak of communicable disease affecting large sections of the population)

Initiation of an excess death plan follows the activation of other regional or national frameworks – such as the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework(opens an external website in the same tab) (according to the World Health Organization) or Adverse Weather and Health Plan(opens an external website in the same tab) (according to GOV.UK) – at the appropriate time.

An excess death plan considers the levels upon which local/regional plans and capabilities have exceeded their localised thresholds. During the COVID-19 pandemic, policing ownership for excess death was taken into the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) disaster victim identification and Casualty Bureau portfolio. The Cabinet Office Civil Contingencies Secretariat has provided guidance for local planners in England and Wales for possible influenza pandemics(opens an external website in the same tab) and a national planning assumptions assessment tool.

Following activation of the Excess Death Framework by the SCG, the Mortality Management Group (MMG) is triggered. The MMG includes relevant organisations with responsibilities for delivering the stages of the death management process. This process includes many organisations, legal requirements and interdependencies. Sub-groups are recommended to ensure processes are monitored and managed.

The SCG operates at the strategic level. The MMG brings together very specific organisations – some will be strategic – managing and commissioning services in the region(s). Tactical delivery works closely with sub-groups, coordinating and tracking activities where relevant and reporting into the MMG providing tactical oversight of the excess death process. This group is also responsible for resolving any issues that may arise before they escalate. The chairs of the delivery and sub-groups are members of the MMG.

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