By Robert Hall
Resilience has been a feature of two prominent inquiry reports that have appeared recently in the UK. In July 2024, the UK Covid-19 Inquiry’s first module focused on the resilience and preparedness of the country following the pandemic. (1) In September, Phase 2 of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry looked at the causes of the events surrounding the Grenfell Tower fire in west London (2). Both reports make sober reading but have important lessons to learn.
Seventy-two people died in the fire at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017. That is more than twice the number (35) killed by terrorists across the UK that year. The trauma of the victim’s families and relatives, as well as the many people directedly involved in the Tower incident, have multiplied the tragedy many times over; the same can be said for the terrorist incidents. Remarkably, the risk of a fire in a high-rise or urban tower block was not a separate item in the risk registers of either London or the Royal Borough of Kingston Council (RBKC) at the time – a ‘serious failing’ according to the Inquiry.
This article looks exclusively at Phase 2 of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry and the lessons on resilience. The topic is reflected in many of the 58 recommendations made across a range of industries and services in the 52-page overview. The comments made here focus on selective extracts from Part 10 (Response and recovery) and Part 14, Chapter 113 (Recommendations) of the overview. In the full version of Part 10, resilience is mentioned 207 times.
Response and recovery
Four particular extracts from selected paragraphs in Part 10 shine an uncomfortable light on the shortfalls in the resilience of those organizations that were involved and had some responsibility. (Key words have been deliberately highlighted in this article.)
2.103 ‘The resilience machinery in London and within central government was not flexible enough and took too long to move into action.’
2.106 ‘One reason for the lack of effective plans was that RBKC had failed to train its staff adequately. They did not have a sufficient understanding of the importance of resilience or sufficient commitment to it.’
2.110 ‘The arrangements designed to promote the resilience of London as a whole did not provide for an experienced leader to take over the direction of the response to a disaster that had occurred within the confines of a single borough except by agreement with the chief executive of that borough.’
2.111 ‘The training of resilience personnel in London was piecemeal and not co-ordinated; it was also voluntary and not subject to any external assessment or validation.’
Clearly, these words reflect the Inquiry’s view that resilience planning and preparation were insufficient from the start. This could be perhaps because resilience is too often – and erroneously – associated with post-event operations alone. Yet, resilience can only be achieved post-event if it is recognised and inculcated well before the status quo changes. It has to be embedded early on with every member of staff and validated with regular exercises and assessments. The latter cannot rely on one-off, tick-box questionnaires or short video clips for trainees but must involve dedicated, routine, training sessions from qualified people who can deploy techniques such as storyboards, role-play, team-building exercises and incorporate relevant experiences and lessons. Significantly, the word training appears in two of the four statements above. (See comments on training below also.)
Resilience is the foundation for achieving success in crises but, like many skills, it needs constant work and honing: maturity models can help in shifting up a gear (3). It could be argued that awareness of resilience begins in schools and colleges, well before the world of work begins. At whatever level, it should address preparation, people, place, process, performance, and priorities. Preparation should cover aspects such as situational (and self) awareness, resourcefulness, the importance of trust, empowerment, agility, and adaptation. These are soft skills that are more difficult to embed than the hard skills such as policies and procedures but nonetheless vital if recovery is to be effective.
As for leadership, the lack of an experienced person to assume overall responsibility in an emergency can be seen as a reflection of London’s inadequate preparedness and resilience. The capital has not been short of major incidents, including serious fires, to spur this movement, as well as government and borough initiatives and senior appointments to drive resilience forward. Regrettably, a suggestion by the Prime Minister’s office two days after the Grenfell fire to develop ‘a new strategy for national and local resilience in response to major disasters which could include a new Civil Disaster Reaction Force’ was lost in departmental discussions. The Inquiry’s full report gives a detailed description of the many elements involved in London’s resilience and the failings identified. Lessons learnt, with recommendations to follow up, are revealed in Part 14 of the Grenfell Tower report.
Recommendations
Organizational deficits and leadership failings remain prominent. In fact, both the Covid-19 and Grenfell Tower inquiries reveal a plethora of organizations and departmental heads appointed to deal with crises and resilience; but still gaps appear. The old saying of too many cooks spoil the broth is as true here as in the kitchen. Both reports identify the need for a single entity to oversee resilience application.
In the case of the Covid-19 Inquiry, the recommendation is to ‘create a statutory independent body for whole-system civil emergency preparedness and resilience’ (4). The Grenfell Tower Inquiry recommends that consideration be given to granting ‘a designated Secretary of State with the power to carry out the functions of a Category 1 responder [in place of a failing responder] for a limited period of time’ under a revised Civil Contingencies Act 2004. Interestingly, the statutory quinquennial Post-Implementation Review of the Act was published by the government in 2022 but found ‘no material appetite for a fundamental overhaul of the legislation’ (5).
The overall conclusion that could be drawn is that it is time to consider one overarching UK department and/or minister, with clout and capacity, to plan for and deliver resilience before, during, and after systemic civil emergencies. Such an entity or person could provide the strategic and operational heft to plan, organize and co-ordinate a major response of any kind. This would be well beyond the limited capabilities of the current COBR Unit in Whitehall, the Resilience and Emergencies Division (RED) in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Housing, and lead government departments.
There are four extracts from paragraphs in Chapter 113 that shed further light on shortfalls and offer other recommendations for improvement.
113.66 In December 2022 the government published a new Resilience Framework and put in place what is described as a new strategic approach to resilience. We welcome those steps. Nevertheless, there remain areas in which we think further improvements need to be made.
113.71 Our investigations revealed the inability of the London Resilience Forum to monitor the quality of its members’ planning, training and preparation for responding to emergencies. Neither Minimum Standards for London, which applied at the time, nor its replacement, Resilience Standards for London, gave the local resilience forum any means of securing compliance with the standards they prescribed.
113.73 All those shortcomings could and should be avoided in future by a combination of measures, but underpinning them all is a need for the staff of local authorities to treat resilience and preparedness for emergencies as an essential part of their responsibilities. We therefore recommend that local authorities train all their employees, including chief executives, to regard resilience as an integral part of their responsibilities.
101.52 We were told that it had been difficult to ensure that the right people attended the exercises and that there had been a tendency for the same people to attend regularly and others not at all. We agree … that responsibility for resilience must lie with the whole of an organisation, not just the contingency planning unit. Everyone in an organisation needs to be involved in resilience and consider it part of their personal responsibility. As far as possible, the arrangements underpinning it should be part of everyday processes to avoid putting new arrangements in place under pressure.
The recurring themes of preparation, training and exercising across organizations, and leadership come out strongly. All parts of the resilience network – namely, the whole-of-society and whole-systems approaches advocated by the government – need to be involved and their capabilities enhanced. This should to be performed under central direction within government but enacted and delivered at local level. There is no clear evidence yet, in spite of a resilience framework and resilience structures a plenty, of a real and credible mission to enact whole-of-society resilience when dealing with major incidents whether in the capital or nationally.
Broader resonance
The need for better whole-nation resilience was echoed in comments made by the UK’s chief of defence staff at a security conference in Berlin on 19th November 2024. He is reported to have said that Britain still had to catch up with allies in civil readiness and would benefit from studying their example (6). He believed that we lack their culture of ‘total defence’ involving the mobilisation of the civilian population in support of the armed forces when protecting the homeland. The advent of a UK Resilience Academy in 2025 may help to advance the cause, providing that resources match a broad remit (7). With the increasing number of both kinetic and hybrid threats facing the UK, it is time to rediscover home defence and reinvigorate national resilience. It is telling that it needed two inquiries on unrelated topics to point the direction for better resilience.
The author
Robert Hall is cofounder and former Executive Director of Resilience First. He is the author of Building Resilient Futures (ISBN: 9781035812622, Austin Macauley, 2023). His next book, The Resilience Mindset: A Philosophical Journey, will appear in the spring.
Notes and references
(1) UK Covid-19 Inquiry Module 1 Report – The resilience and preparedness of the United Kingdom, 18 July 2024.
(2) Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Phase 2 Report Overview, September 2024. Phase 1, published in October 2019, examined the factual narrative of the events on the night.
(3) An example of a maturity model can be found in BS 65000:2022, Organizational resilience.
(4) Hall, R. Lessons from the UK Covid-19 Inquiry Module 1.
(5) Civil Contingencies Act Post-Implementation Review 2022, Cabinet Office, 29 March 2022.
(6) Reported in The Times, 20 November 2024.
(7) Hall, R. Prospects for the new UK Resilience Academy, Resilience Forward, 22 November 2023.
