Staffordshire Community Risk Register

The purpose of the Staffordshire Community Risk Register is two-fold. The Risk Register is used to direct Contingency Planning, Emergency Planning and Business Continuity Management workstreams within the county, to ensure that time, money, and expertise is focused to provide the best resilience, response and recovery capabilities possible in respect of the hazards and risks faced.

Additionally, the publication of the Community Risk Register is to reassure the people and communities of Staffordshire, and the populations of neighbouring counties that a well-established, proactive hazard / risk assessment process operates within the county. This document explains how potential nationally identified risks / hazards have been have been researched, assessed, scored and prioritised. Based on this assessment process appropriate considerations have be made and actions taken to control and mitigate the impacts of these hazards and risks on the population of Staffordshire.

The Community Risk Register is produced by a multi-agency Risk Joint Agency Project Group (JAPG), working within the Civil Contingencies framework. Development and maintenance of the Risk Register is overseen by the Staffordshire Civil Contingencies Unit (CCU), based at Beaconside in Stafford. Regular assessments of the hazards and risks are regularly undertaken by the CCU, backed up by the multi-agency JAPG meeting on a bi-monthly basis. The Community Risk Register prioritises risks in two ways to identify risks in terms of their potential impact, and to identify current county risk priorities.

The Staffordshire Community Risk Register demonstrates that Staffordshire partners and authorities are working collaboratively to meet the demands of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, and the associated guidance (Emergency Preparedness), both of which can be accessed via the UK Resilience website. To visit the website click here.

The Community Risk Register consists of two sections in hierarchical order (highest at the top) and enables the reader to quickly understand the top risks in Staffordshire;

First Section: Risks prioritised in order of their potential impact in Staffordshire.
Section Section: Top tier risks (impact x likelihood). This second column takes into account of all the mitigating factors (plans, regulations exercising etc) that have been put into place to minimise the risk and gives better indication of the actual risk to people in Stafford. This column is subject to frequent review and where appropriate amendment, based on prevailing issues.

The risk rating process works as follows:

a. An assessment of the likelihood of an event occurring in Staffordshire over the next five years is given a score of one to five; one being the lowest (negligible) and five being the highest (probable).

b. The impact of an event occurring in the areas is mapped against the impact on the health, social, economic and environmental aspects of our community. The scoring values are also one to five, with one being the lowest (insignificant) and five the highest (catastrophic).

Click on each item on the list of risks to learn more about what it means to Staffordshire and what is being done to minimise the chances of it happening and to its impact if it does occur.

Background information to the Process.

Definitions under the Civil Contingencies Act

Hazard - an accidental or naturally occurring event or situation with the potential to cause physical (or psychological) harm to members of the community (including loss of life), damage or losses to property and/or disruption to the environment or to structures (economic, social, or political) upon which the community's way of life depends.

Threat - the deliberate / malicious intent to cause loss of life or create adverse consequences to human welfare, the environment or security of a place or the UK. (This includes causing disruption.)

Risk - measures the significance of potential emergencies, in terms of likelihood and impact in the context of the CCA.

Impact - measures the consequence of the event.

Likelihood - measures the probability and frequency of the event occurring in the next 5 years. The table below sets out the definitions of each level of risk and enables the reader to understand how the likelihood scoring has been assessed.

Level	Descriptor	Likelihood over 5 years	Likelihood over 5 years
1	Negligible	> 0.005%	1 in 20,000 chance
2	Rare	> 0.05%	1 in 2,000 chance
3	Unlikely	> 0.5%	1 in 200 chance
4	Possible	> 5%	1 in 20 chance
5	Probable	> 50%	1 in 2 chance

How has the Community Risk Register been compiled?

Using the 6 stage process as follows:

1. Contextualisation

This involves defining the nature and scope of the risk and agreeing how the risk management process will be undertaken.

2. Identify hazards & threats

Physical-mechanical failings of structures.
Environmental / natural-severe weather.
Organisational / infrastructure - staff illness or loss of building.
Social / community-loss of homes.
Health (human & animal) -pandemics, foot & mouth.
Technological-dam collapse, system failures.

3. Risk analysis

Assessing the likelihood of hazards occurring within the next five years, which is the timescale adopted nationally and regionally. This is done by considering the description of an outcome of an incident before assessing how likely an occurrence would be within this timescale. These assessments have been carried out by a small team of professions from the Police, Fire and Rescue Service, Environment Agency, Local Authorities, Primary Care Trusts and Civil Contingencies Unit in Staffordshire based on their experience and knowledge.

4. Risk evaluation

Identify hazards & threats under the CCA.
Analyse the risks (evaluate them).
Consider Historical data, national and regional risk assessments, statistical information, experience, enquiry reports and lessons learned.

Risks are scored according to the following table:

5. Risk treatment

Recognise/ develop plans for unacceptable risks.
Test individual and multi agency plans and capabilities.

6. Monitoring and reviewing

In Staffordshire, the Community Risk Register is reviewed regularly and formally at least once every 4 years (the last one was in 2007). This ongoing process makes the Community Risk register a living document and an ongoing project.

Terrorism

This risk register only covers non-malicious events (ie, hazards) rather than threats (ie, terrorist incidents). This does not mean that we are not considering threats within our risk assessment work, but given the sensitivity of the information supporting these risk assessments and the potential for use by adversaries, specific details will not be made available via this web-site. Threat scenarios that are being considered include, for example, Chemical, Biological, Radiological attacks and Electronic attacks, eg, affecting utilities and communications.

For the current UK threat level, click here.

Discounted Risks

There is a number of risk categories that by there nature are not relative to Staffordshire and are therefore not included in this register. For a list of those risks and the reasons why they have been discounted, click here. Last Modified: 15/11/2007 08:51:20
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