Business continuity

What does Business Continuity mean to you?

The majority of local businesses are small to medium sized companies and sole traders and these businesses are more vulnerable to an incident or crisis than any other - yet with only a little bit of thinking you can make yourselves much more resilient.

The key to business continuity is to understand the vulnerabilities of your business to disruptions and their impact and come up with a simple plan that will allow you to continue doing whatever is time or output critical to keep the cash flowing.

The impact of a major incident may be a loss of access to a site or office, a severe and prolonged shortage of staff, a loss of IT or telecommunications, fuel shortages or transport network disruption; it may even be a key business partner going under or that critical piece of machinery failing as you start that big order.

In many cases, a simple plan will ensure survival and happy customers but having no plan could put everything at risk.

A Guide to Business Continuity planning

The purpose of Business Continuity Planning for us is to provide a clearly defined and documented policy, framework and operational direction to ensure that our critical services continue to be delivered.

We are happy to advise local businesses on any aspect of Business Continuity Planning. Contact us for more information. 

Legislation and accreditation

The Civil Contingencies Act (2004) places obligations upon Local Authorities in relation to Business Continuity.  Local Authorities have a legislative requirement to develop and maintain Business Continuity Plans to ensure that they can continue to deliver services to the public in the event of a significant incident affecting their operations.  In addition to this, Local Authorities have to provide advice and assistance to local businesses and voluntary organisations about Business Continuity Management.

We were the first Council in the UK to hold BS 25999 for our Business Continuity Management System. Continued accreditation is determined by regular audits conducted by the British Standards Institute.