2. 2 Resilience Capabilities Programme
Before
The resilience capabilities survey was conducted
every 2 years and provided a long and detailed
assessment of individual capabilities.
Purpose
The UK continually aims to
improve the way it prepares
for, responds to and recovers
from civil emergencies.
The Resilience Capabilities
Programme (RCP) aims to
understand and develop our
ability to respond to civil
emergencies, by assessing
the of the risks in the National
Risk Assessment.
Now
CCS has developed a unique methodology designed
to assess those same capabilities, but in a way that is
comparable across government and local area; it
provides a more holistic, multi-capability view of
response.
What is the Resilience Capabilities Programme?
3. 3 Resilience Capabilities Programme
The capabilities required to respond to the risks assessed in the RCP
Health
Technical
Facilitators
Services
4. The seven elements
Plans & Procedures
Personnel
Infrastructure
Equipment & Supplies
Legislation & Doctrine
Information
Training & Exercising
these establish the framework that guide responders and others during an
emergency.
describes who is needed (e.g. vets, doctors, police) and how many to respond to
a crisis. Are there enough trained people?
acquisition, development, management and disposal of buildings, land, utilities,
and other structures needed during an emergency.
these include expendable and non-expendable items needed during an
emergency (e.g. vehicles, body bags, etc.)
provides the foundations to deliver a response. Includes laws, concepts,
terminology, principles and ways of working.
data, information and knowledge needed during an emergency (e.g. wind
direction in a flooding event) – and the means to share it.
the means to practice, develop and validate plans to deliver effectively during an
emergency.
5. Methodology
5 Resilience Capabilities Programme
1
2
3
Capability owners then
take part in Resilience
Capability Mapping
interviews; they are
asked questions about
each capability to build
a picture of current
performance
The RCP takes a
representative sample of risks
from the NSRA and maps
which capabilities are called
upon by each risk scenario
Each capability is
assessed in terms of
seven elements
4
Each capability owner is
asked the same set of
simple, comparable
questions about each of
the seven elements
7. 7 Resilience Capabilities Programme
Red is the ‘worst’ rating.
It does not mean failure, it just means worse than orange.
Purple is next and reflects uncertainty in the data.
With further data, this may turn into red, orange or green.
Orange is in the middle.
Green is the ‘best’ rating.
It does not mean good, it just means better than orange
The colour coding system
1. A colour coding system
underpins the RCP
methodology.
2. The data behind each
element, capability and
risk determines their
overall colour.
3. These are relative
indicators and do not
have an absolute
definition.
9. 9 Resilience Capabilities Programme
CAP6
Risk XYZ
“How would you rate the capability element’s
effectiveness?”
Big capability gap Small capability gap Good enough
“How would you rate your confidence in that
assessment?”
Internal opinion Independent opinion Objective
assessment,
quality
assured
Objective
assessment,
not quality
assured
“How would you rate the importance of this
capability element?”
Not important Important Critical
10. 10 Resilience Capabilities Programme
CAP6
Risk XYZ
The following logic is used to determine the colour or outcome of
each element.
11. 11 Resilience Capabilities Programme
CAP6
Risk XYZ
The information from the seven elements is then aggregated in order
to determine the capability outcome.
12. 12 Resilience Capabilities Programme
CAP6
Risk XYZ
The information from the capabilities is then aggregated to define the
overall risk rating
13. Capability ratings across full range of risks within the RCP
(Toy Data)
13
Large Capability Gap
Small Capability Gap
Unknown
Good Enough
14. Examples (Toy Data)
32
27 26 26 23 20
4
Category
1
Category
2
Category
3
Category
4
244
180 179
156
137
115
22
Category
1
Category
2
Category
3
Category
4
166
42 34
13 12 12 9
Category
1
Category
2
Category
3
Category
4
Frequency of critical capability elements – across all RCP capability
assessments
Frequency of large capability gaps for capability elements – across all
RCP capability assessments
Frequency of not important capability elements – across all RCP
capability assessments
14 Resilience Capabilities Programme
15. Benefits
15 Resilience Capabilities Programme
Assesses capabilities in a more
comparable way, allowing a
picture of relative
performance to be built up
Identifies gaps in capabilities
– during a response, the
framework is useful to predict
which elements of the
response may require more
support or attention
Provides an evidence base to
highlight areas that may need
more resource
The RCP provides us with a common framework that…
Notes de l'éditeur
The Resilience Capabilities Programme aims to understand and develop HMG’s ability to respond to civil emergencies using the common consequences of the National Resilience Planning Assumptions.
By providing insights to the relative strength of capabilities within a risk scenario and suggesting areas for investment to improve capabilities.
The programme is intended to shift away from long, detailed assessments of individual capabilities towards providing a more holistic multi capability view.
Rather than assessing our capability to respond to every risk in the NRA, the RCP takes a dip sample of risks, including every red risk (the highest priority risks); and at least one risk feeding into each planning assumption (the generic consequences of risks).
Each risk draws upon a different subset of response capabilities. The dip sample ensures that, having assessed our ability to respond to those risks, every capability will have been adequately probed.
It takes about 20 minutes (max.) to map a single capability to a single risk
Each During the interviews, we asked capability owners about the capabilities required to respond to key national risks, breaking each capability down into seven elements:
Plans & Procedures: these establish the framework that guide responders and others during an emergency.
Personnel: describes who is needed (e.g. vets, doctors, police) and how many to respond to a crisis. Are there enough trained people?
Infrastructure: the acquisition, development, management and disposal of buildings, land, utilities, and other structures that are needed during an emergency.
Equipment & Supplies: these include expendable and non-expendable items needed during an emergency (e.g. vehicles, body bags, etc.)
Legislation & Doctrine: provides the foundations to deliver a response. Includes laws, concepts, terminology, principles and ways of working.
Information: the data, information and knowledge requirements needed during an emergency (e.g. wind direction in a flooding event) – and the means to share it.
Training & Exercising: the means to practice, develop and validate plans to deliver effectively during an emergency.
They were asked for:
judgements/assessments of each element
confidence in assessments,
the importance of that element for the overall capability, and to what extent the capability varies (for example, from region to region).
All lead government departments were asked the same set of simple, comparable questions about response capabilities. Whilst the standardised questions and answers compromises detail, crucially it preserves comparability allowing a picture of relative performance to be built up (which is the crux of the programme). Chooses to ask “do you have enough people?” rather than “how many people do you have?”
Every capability is comprised of the same 7 elements
The same 3 questions are asked to all capability owners.
The data from these three questions is then combined to produce a colour for each element.
If there is a big capability gap for something that is critically important, then it should aggregate to red.
Every capability is comprised of the same 7 elements
The same 3 questions are asked to all capability owners.
The data from these three questions is then combined to produce a colour for each element.
If there is a big capability gap for something that is critically important, then it should aggregate to red.
The data from the seven elements is then combined to determine the capability outcome.
Every layer of data is then aggregated into a RCP sunburst diagrams. This preserves transparency and allows the reader to zoom in and out, tracing the reasoning behind the aggregated results.
The inner three layers are coloured according to the aggregation decision trees.
The outer layer details the capability element inputs. It is important that these are not red/amber/green as this would instantly imply a value judgement that is not valid.
Instead of colours, we have opted for the length of the bar to indicate the different values with some limited colour indicators for leading practice and unknowns
The elements are aggregated to give a capability score the capabilities are then aggregated together to provide a summary for the risk.
We can also use the software to build many other different reports, for example:
Capability ratings across the full range of risks within the RCP.
Being able to delve into the data and visualise it in different ways allows you to spot trends that may not have been spotted before and potentially
In parallel with Yellowhammer and following the interviews we have worked with software developers to develop a visualisation tool to enable us to present the information we have gathered.
The software enables the answers to be aggregated in a standardised way, using decision trees agreed by resilience professionals across government, to produce an overall colour outcome for the capability within that risk scenario. The capabilities are then aggregated together to provide a summary for the risk.
Red, purple (reflects uncertainty in the data), orange and green. These are relative indicators and do not have an absolute definition. Red does not mean failure - it means worse than orange. Green does not mean good, it means better than orange. Purples, with further data, may turn into red, orange or green.
As a community we have decided that if one of the seven elements of a capability is red, the capability as a whole must be red the same logic is true for capabilities and risks. These judgements reflect the resilience community’s appetite for risk and can be changed as that appetite matures or shifts. Critically, if the aggregation decision trees are changed for one capability, they must be changed for all capabilities in order to preserve comparability.