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How we plan for an emergency

Find information about our emergency plans which explain how to give an effective, flexible and timely response to an emergency and help us minimise the distress and disruption caused by an emergency.

Business continuity planning for local businesses

Find useful information and links to help you implement Business Continuity (BC) within your organisation.

If your premises were affected by a disruption like a fire, flood, IT failure or power loss, how would your business cope?

Business continuity is about identifying and evaluating risks to the everyday running of an organisation and how to continue services during a disruptive incident. It helps you to prepare for disruption by planning different ways of working so that you can continue to deliver your priority services and get back up and running as quickly as possible. 

Experience shows that developing a Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) can help to reduce the impact and costs of a disruption. It means your organisation is much more likely to continue trading and delivering products and services within acceptable time frames at a predefined capacity during a disruption. 

The Business Continuity Institute has produced the Good Practice Guidelines V7.0 which  outlines the 6 Professional Practices to implementing an effective BCMS, they are;

  • PP1 - Establishing a BCMS
  • PP2 - Embracing Business Continuity
  • PP3 - Analysis
  • PP4 - Solutions Design
  • PP5 - Enabling Solutions
  • PP6 - Validation

A key step to identifying and evaluating risks to your business operations is to complete a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to identify your critical functions in your business.

The BIA helps to review the impact over time on the organisation if the product / service / activity is disrupted, and then the maximum length of time that the organisation can manage the disruption without it threatening the organisation's viability to continue operating (Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption - MTPD). 

It is also important within the BIA to identify the minimum level of service or product delivery that is acceptable to the organisation to achieve its business objectives during a disruption (Minimum Business Continuity Objective - MBCO). The MBCO must be delivered before the MTPD / point of no return is reached and this is defined as the Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

The Council’s Resilience Planning Team has produced a template Business Continuity Management Plan (BCMP) to be used in conjunction with guidance notes to assist organisations to become more resilient, and the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames to remain a leading business and investment location in the capital.

The following resources may also be useful on how to start embedding business continuity within your organisation. 

External resources:

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