Before covid struck, we as a country knew that a pandemic was among the top risks that we faced. The Government had been advised that in the event of a coronavirus pandemic, the country would suffer up to 100 deaths. Given that more than 140,000 people have now died in the UK, it is clear that we needed to re-examine our system of assessing and planning for extreme risks. So says Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, Chair of the Lords Select Committee, on Risk Assessment and Risk Planning.
He was speaking on the publication of a report, Preparing for Extreme Risks: Building a Resilient Society. He says: “Pandemics are not the only risks we face. Since the start of our inquiry, the UK has faced severe supply chain disruption, storms, terrorist attacks and threats to the nation’s fuel supply. The Government must be able to identify lessons from all crises quickly and ensure it can translate them into real change.
“The Government’s risk management system defaults to a secretive and centralised approach that withholds safety critical information from those who need it – shielding it from full scrutiny and challenge. The Government must open up the risk management system and welcome expert consultation from a wider variety of sources, as well as see our people as an essential building block.”
“Our inquiry has concluded that the UK must adopt a whole of society approach to resilience, one which emphasises the important role played by all sections of society in preparing for, adapting to and recovering from the effects of risk. Risk and resilience are not solely the concern of central Government policymakers, and since they have the capacity to alter the lives of everyone in the country, everyone needs to be involved in shaping the response to the risks that we face.”
The report recommends that UK Government should set up an Office for Preparedness and Resilience headed by a newly created post of Government Chief Risk Officer. This body would be responsible for producing independent analysis of UK preparedness; and that Government should better engage industry and businesses when developing risk assessments. The peers ask that the Government make a biennial publication of a brochure on risk preparedness, to inform the public on general resilience principles, and what to do in an emergency.
Among those who gave evidence to the committee were Roger Hargreaves, the Director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat at the Cabinet Office; and Lord Harris of Haringey, the Labour peer who has been working in this field of societal resilience, and who is among other things president of the Institute of Strategic Risk Management (ISRM).
Comment
On the cyber threat, Rani Osnat, SVP Strategy at the cloud service company Aqua Security, said: “Next year, there will be a continued growth of cloud adoption in general, and more specifically the move to cloud native practices and technologies – such as CI/CD, containers, serverless or Kubernetes. This will replace simply lifting and shifting existing applications. This change is rendering older security tools obsolete and requires born-in-the-cloud tools for everything from app testing to network security, to runtime protection and SIEM.
“User organisations are beginning to better understand the ‘shared security model’ and more specifically, how much of it is their responsibility. This is especially true in the case of multi and hybrid cloud scenarios, which some organisations are adopting, and virtually all organisations are now planning for. What this means is that they simply cannot rely exclusively on defaults or cloud provider tools.”
Photo by Mark Rowe; national covid memorial wall, central London (facing the Houses of Parliament).
