Unprepared: The Case for Community Control of Civil Contingency Plans

Why locally owned, properly resourced and genuinely civil disaster response will save lives.

This pamphlet looks at how the UK is unprepared for a new era of crises and disasters. To illuminate the national predicament, we look at lessons from recent history, and what we can learn, often from countries in the Global South, about the kind of local planning required and resources needed to be ready for when storms and other disasters strike near where we live.

From pandemics to extreme weather, safety failures, energy and other system shocks, the government repeatedly reveals itself to be unprepared. Inadequate, poorly resourced, weakly connected and badly communicated national arrangements mean communities are typically the ‘first responders’ who are left to fend for themselves in disasters.

This reality casts a long shadow over recent events ranging from the Grenfell tower block fire, to the floods and ‘fire weather’ of the worsening extreme weather events driven by global heating. Here, we call for a new vision of locally owned and properly resourced disaster response to save lives and build strong, resilient communities in the face of increasing upheaval.

Every neighbourhood should have a hub, underpinned by a resourced local network that helps each community in the twin tasks of facing a new era of disasters and working on the rapid transitions to prevent them, while making life better for all in the process.