The UK Government Resilience Framework (Cabinet Office, 2022)

The UK Government Resilience Framework is the Cabinet Office policy paper of December 2022 that sets out the British government’s plan to 2030 for the systems and institutions underpinning national resilience. It is 79 printed pages plus annexes, it is addressed to departments, devolved administrations, local resilience forums, critical national infrastructure owners and the private sector rather than to households, and it is the most permissively licensed document in our national set. The Resistance Hub hosts it in full.

What this document is

This is the odd one out in the national set, and the difference is worth stating first. Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Poland and Taiwan all write to a household. The UK framework writes to a system. It contains no supply lists, no siren definitions and no shelter guidance. What it contains is an account of who is responsible for what, how risk is assessed and communicated, how the parts of the resilience system are funded, and which of them the government intends to change by 2030. It is a governance document, and it should be read as one.

Three principles run through it, stated in the foreword and repeated in the executive summary: that a developed and shared understanding of civil contingencies risk is fundamental, that prevention is preferable to cure wherever possible, and that resilience is a whole of society endeavour requiring transparency and broad participation. The second of those is the one with teeth. The framework argues that it is more cost effective to invest in prevention and in systems that withstand crises than to rely solely on world-class response, which is an argument about where money goes rather than about how emergencies are handled.

The action plan is organised into six themes, each with its own chapter: risk, responsibilities and accountability, partnerships, communities, investment and skills. Annex B summarises every action in one place. Named commitments include an annual statement to Parliament on civil contingency risk and resilience, the establishment of a standing resilience function in the form of a Resilience Directorate in the Cabinet Office, the appointment of a Head of Resilience, the creation of a UK Resilience Academy built out of the Emergency Planning College, a reinvigorated National Exercising Programme, strengthened Local Resilience Forums in England with a review of how they are funded, and new resilience standards across the public sector with regulation reserved for the highest priority cases.

The scope is narrower than the title implies, and the document says so. Its direct scope is action for England, for UK government departments, and for areas where responsibilities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are reserved to the UK government. Annex A deals with the devolved administrations and each chapter ends with a note on its applicability across the four nations. Readers citing this as a United Kingdom-wide plan should read that caveat first.

For readers coming from an irregular warfare direction, two things stand out. The first is the treatment of hostile state activity, which appears throughout as a malicious risk category handled inside the civil contingencies system rather than as a separate defence problem. The second is Annex E, a short history that traces a hundred year movement from civil defence, described as a focus on war risks with some spillover benefits, through Integrated Emergency Management in the 1980s, to Resilience in the early 2000s, driven partly by the 9 September 2001 attacks. It states plainly that wartime civil defence is the ancestor of the current system and that each of these transitions took years to embed.

Contents

Provenance and lineage

The framework is not a standalone initiative and does not present itself as one. It is the delivery of a commitment made in the 2021 Integrated Review, Global Britain in a Competitive Age, to produce a new Resilience Strategy, and it is written to sit alongside a set of existing risk-specific programmes it names directly: the Net Zero Strategy, the British Energy Security Strategy, the Climate Change Act framework with its Climate Change Risk Assessment and National Adaptation Programme cycle, the Supply Chains Resilience Framework and the 2021 National Cyber Strategy. Underneath all of it sits the National Security Risk Assessment, which the framework proposes to extend to cover chronic vulnerabilities as well as acute risks.

No individual authors are named. The foreword is signed by the Rt Hon. Oliver Dowden CBE MP as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and the document is produced by the Cabinet Office. Annex C records the evidence and engagement behind it. The title page prints its own GOV.UK address, and does so with a doubled slash after the domain, which is reproduced here as printed rather than corrected.

The rights position is the most favourable of any document in our national set. The framework is Crown copyright 2022 and is released under the Open Government Licence, which permits free re-use in any format or medium, excluding logos, subject to attribution and to the licence terms. The document carves out third party copyright material, for which permission must be obtained from the rightsholders concerned. The licence is named and its address is printed, so this is a stated grant rather than an absence of a notice, and it should be cited that way. The licence text is at The National Archives, Open Government Licence.

Two dates should be kept apart. The document itself is dated December 2022 and that is the date to cite. The GOV.UK publication page records a last update of 4 December 2023, which reflects changes to the page rather than to the printed framework. The file hosted here is the December 2022 document.

How The Resistance Hub uses it

The UK framework is the institutional counterweight in the set indexed on National Preparedness Guides. Read next to Sweden or Poland it shows the two halves of the same problem: those documents tell a household what to do, this one describes the machinery that is supposed to be functioning while the household does it. Anyone building a scenario in Scenario Planning for Emergencies should use it to check what they are assuming the state will still be able to deliver.

Its chapters on partnerships and investment, covering critical national infrastructure owners, private sector standards and the incentives for firms to invest in their own resilience, are the primary-source basis for the material in Economic Resilience Under Disruption. The communities chapter, with its treatment of the voluntary and community sector and of support for vulnerable customers of essential services, sits alongside Social Resilience: Community Networks. Annex E is the historical bridge to the total defence traditions examined in Small States’ Total Defense Strategy, and its treatment of hostile state activity as a civil contingency belongs with Baltic States Power Grid Disconnection.

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