On Tuesday Demos launched a report I’ve authored called Resilient Nation. The report argues that we live in a brittle society with over 80 per cent of Britons live in urban areas relying on dense networks of public and private sector organisations to provide them with essential services. But our everyday lives and the national infrastructure work in a fragile union, vulnerable to even the smallest disturbances in the network. And both are part of a global ecosystem that is damaged and unpredictable.
So how does Britain protect against threats (like terrorism), hazards (such as natural disasters) and major accidents? Much of our infrastructure is outmoded and archaic. And with their narrow focus on emergency services and institutions, so are the policies that underpin it. The pamphlet calls for a radical rethink of resilience. Instead of structures or centralised services, it argues that citizens and communities are the true source of resilience for our society. Resilience, I suggest, is an everyday, community activity. It is people’s potential to learn, adapt and work together that powers it. Only by realising this potential will we succeed in building a resilient nation.
The report connects neatly with the Government’s own work on community resilience – which could be a central plank in the next iteration of the national security strategy and may be a public strategy in its own right. The general feeling I got from meetings with officials in central and local government and relevant agencies as well as from people in pubs, sitting rooms, warehouses and meeting rooms was that citizens and communities were the missing piece of the resilience jigsaw.
More often than not in the past no one really bothered to talk about what role citizens and communities could play and this was reflected in official guidance and advice where they were seen as ‘a problem to be dealt with rather than a source of help’.
In short – the shift towards a more citizen focused approach to resilience is happening…and in the summer the Government will unveil its own thinking on the subject (one hopes using the 4Es of community resilience ).
And then I remembered the Government’s response to the Pitt Review and I began to have serious doubts about whether such a strategy will succeed.
It’s not that there is anything wrong with the Government’s response – it is after all a response to an independent review on the floods of 2007. Fundamentally however it kicks the idea of a self-resilient society, and by that I mean a more citizen-focussed approach to resilience, into touch. Very early on the response welcomes Michael Pitt’s approach suggesting that:
Sir Michael has rightly put the needs of ordinary people at the heart of his Review .
I took this sentence to mean that when Sir Michael began his review, first and foremost he was thinking about the impact of flooding on ordinary people. If we were applying a community resilience approach – the next step would logically be to focus on the roles and responsibilities of citizens and communities and how government, relevant agencies and the emergency services were supporting them.
But what that sentence actually means is what more could Government and the emergency services have done, as in:
The Review contains 92 recommendations addressed to the Government, local authorities, Local Resilience Forums, providers of essential services, insurers and others, including the general public.
So while the public are the focus of Pitt’s attention their role is relegated to watching from the sidelines. This approach runs right through the Pitt Report and the Government’s response to it and yet as Resilient Nation points out time and again if you give people the space and tools to step up – they will do – as the Director General of Emergency Management Australia has said ‘the more that we as individuals can do to prepare ourselves, the more effectively the emergency services can direct their resources.
Instead the Government has taken on too much of the burden, saddling itself with more work, and more spending. This will only divert attention inwards – on strucutres, processes, and plans than outwards – helping shape, influence and support a resilient nation. The point I am driving at is that community resilience demands a new approach by Government based on the motto: Less is more
