The National Security Strategy 2025, published on 24 June, talked of delivering ‘a new Resilience Strategy [that] will deepen our understanding of the UK’s current resilience levels, supporting civil society and the public sector to better address risks and vulnerabilities.’ Such an objective chimed with declared NATO-wide resilience objectives and emphasised the idea of a whole-of-society approach to resilience outlined in the previous administration’s UK Government Resilience Framework (revised in 2023). That framework fell short of being a full and detailed strategy. (See review article here.)
Without the same fanfare, the new UK Government Resilience Action Plan – subtitled ‘The UK’s strategic approach to resilience’ – was announced on 8 July. It is a sharp departure from the previous framework. It again avoids the word ‘strategy’ in the main title, in contrast to other UK publications such as the Industrial Strategy, the Infrastructure Strategy, or the Biological Security Strategy.
Plan v strategy
The titling means that the Action Plan has avoided the usual form and structure of a comprehensive strategy from which plans normally materialise. Rather, it focuses on bringing ‘together policies and programmes, across-government, that strengthen our foundations and help us identify, and mitigate the risks the UK faces’.
While laudable as an action-oriented document, based on a resilience review, the reader could reasonably have expected more detail on the long-term vision ( 5 – 10 years), with principles, priorities, milestones, and resources that lie behind a good resilience strategy. This would have allowed the objectives selected, the measures advocated, and the culture encouraged to be put into true context in response to the collective challenge.
Usefully, the Action Plan begins with a clear definition of resilience, namely ‘the ability to anticipate, assess, prevent, mitigate, respond to, and recover from natural hazards, deliberate attacks, geopolitical instability, disease outbreaks, and other disruptive events, civil emergencies or threats to our way of life’. This is a workable interpretation, but one that many practitioners would challenge by virtue of an all-important omission: the exclusion of ‘adapt’ or ‘adaptation’. The former occurs but once, and the latter twice, in all 47 pages of the plan.
The importance here rests on the concept that if one is to become truly resilient, then one needs to learn from crises and adapt one’s behaviour so that one is better prepared next time – to build back better. This makes resilience more than absorption (response and recovery) and one of adaptation (evolution and change) to an elevated level. In fact, adaptive measures should be essential ingredients of a resilience strategy, especially for chronic risks.
The Action Plan focuses on three objectives:
- Continuously assess how resilient the UK is to target interventions and resources effectively,
- Enable the whole of society to take action to increase their resilience, and
- Strengthen the core public sector resilience system.
These are praiseworthy if delivered as promised by the end of this Parliament, but the timeframe does not suggest strategic longevity.
Marking the score card
The first objective introduces the notion of expanding our understanding of chronic risks (e.g. climate change and antimicrobial resistance). The aim is to include greater analysis and guidance for practitioners. It describes our resilience system as resting on the traditional business-wide concept of three lines of defence:
- Incorporate self-assurance,
- Assurance by system leaders, and
- Internal auditing.
The plan states that the ‘UK government model currently addresses the first two tiers’. It plans to address the third through activities such as red teaming and peer review.
The plan rejects the Covid-19 Inquiry recommendation of the creation of ‘a UK-wide independent statutory body for whole-system civil emergency preparedness and resilience’. (See review article.) The Government believes that it ‘must maintain responsibility for the delivery of our response plans and preparations and cannot outsource this role to an external body’.
Considering the Covid-19 experience and the Inquiry’s findings, retention of responsibility by the Government in future national crises may again come into question. Nonetheless, the Government is committed to ‘enhancing the provision of independent advice and challenge’ and ‘will incorporate perspectives of the UK’s leading experts on various complex risks into our work’. Hopefully, the experts won’t be disparaged for being experts and their views won’t be dismissed by non-experts – but they will have little power. The new UK Resilience Academy (UKRA) has been asked to assemble, by the end of this year, eight panels of relevant experts to scrutinise plans and advise on preparedness. (See review article.)
Whole of society
The second objective is probably the most challenging of the three. While the plan recognises that resilience has to be ‘a shared responsibility between individuals, communities, businesses, local, devolved, and national government, and public services across the UK’, something last achieved in Covid-19, a whole-of-society approach is hard to organize and deliver effectively.
The plan acknowledges that it will require ‘a profound cultural and behavioural shift and needs to be informed by robust social and behavioural science evidence’. While the plan begins the process, the measures offered are unlikely to achieve a comprehensive mobilisation and operationalisation of assets, combining top-down and bottom-up responses at all levels. This most challenging motivational element will require a national transformation.
It necessitates a more assiduous and purposeful move towards planning for a ‘pre-war world’ in which the bulk of the population knows what to expect and what to do in an emergency. It starts with education in schools and businesses and should be more determined than ‘ask and support the public to take action’. It will require a long-term effort to make the public aware of the risks (without alarming) and how they can contribute through collective, joined-up actions.
It will involve more than individuals storing water and batteries at home and receiving one-way communications and official pronouncements. Lord Hague of Richmond describes this approach as ‘retrenchment’. Rather, he believes we need ‘reinvention and reimagination’ involving citizens and communities working together with all the other sectors – public, private, voluntary, charity, trade unions, faith, military, education, etc – to achieve a co-ordinated, holistic effort. Government can direct that effort but only if the command authority is adequately resourced and prepared.
Japan and Sweden are mentioned as exemplars in the plan but more by way of passing. We need to emulate their efforts at engaging a wide public base and motivating citizens. Studies in Japan have shown that communities with deeper reservoirs of civic engagement (i.e. social capital) have higher survival rates and faster recovery times in disasters. We certainly need to see the UKRA organize collective training in emergency preparedness for key players from mixed public, private, military, and community sectors across the board.
Business has a large part to play here and it is reassuring to see the Action Plan including a section on this topic titled ‘Providing the right tools to the private sector on resilience’. It is right that management and boards are asked to consider resilience as a ‘strategic matter’ – but a strategic ask demands strategic guidance. Prominent business leaders attending UKRA courses would show seriousness and commitment, for instance.
The legislative tool should be exercised, not just for mandating incident reporting in cyber attacks. A National Resilience Act could place obligations on a range of key resilience measures. It was regrettable that the Government withdrew a Resilience Statement in 2023 because of business pressure around competitiveness and bureaucracy. If we are serious in a whole-of-society approach, we need to ensure all are on board and counter what the Action Plan states is: ‘the risk in some circumstances that companies may behave in ways consistent with the interests of their stakeholders and balance sheets, but without recognition of the fact that the UK’s CNI sectors, as well as wider essential services, and the public at large are wholly dependent on their operations’. We all need to pull together holistically in readiness for all kinds of crises.
The plan has a lengthy section on the better integration of voluntary, community, and faith services (VCFS), which is welcome. These services provide a valuable resource. The plan recognises that the VCFS face their own financial pressures and challenges, so the ‘UK government’s aim is to make better use of the work already undertaken by this sector, rather than add further demands’. This sounds admirable but says a lot about the British tradition of relying on the voluntary sector to fill gaps where official resources are unavailable or underfunded.
The public sector
The third objective moves to strengthen the public sector’s resilience system. This focuses on governance, with roles and responsibilities coming under the spotlight. Again, the Government rejects the Covid-19 Inquiry’s recommendation to ‘abolish the lead government department model for whole-system civil emergency preparedness and resilience’. The Inquiry believed this was necessary because national, especially cascading, risks straddle multiple departments and need central co-ordination before subsidiarity.
While the Action Plan describes some governance measures, it prefers to leave that central leadership role to the Cabinet Office. One must ask if that office is resourced sufficiently (without external support) to do that over a protracted period. Efforts at the local level to launch a Community Cohesion & Resilience Programme for VCFS organizations and a Belong Network for Local Government Associations, as well as strengthening Local Resilience Forums (with more funding) and joint exercising, are positive steps. Yet, they cannot achieve a concerted nation-wide impact without top-down direction.
Plans for a new Home Defence Programme are geared to a response ‘in the event of a major conflict impacting the UK’. This will focus on the protection of critical national infrastructure and countering sabotage during a crisis (potentially modelled on the Reserves). No mention is made in the plan of a ‘citizen reservist cadre’ providing support in times of crisis, a sensible idea that was first mentioned in the Integrated Review (2021). This has no doubt proved problematic to organize and administer, but it can be expected to reappear as the resource issue raises its head in the application of a whole-of-society system.
Bearing in mind that the military (both Regulars and Reserves) may play an important role in a national emergency short of a major conflict, it would be reasonable to expect some comment in the Action Plan on the deployment of, and co-ordination with, the forces through the Military Aid to the Civil Community (MACC) service. This role is likely to increase as weather-related events and biological threats increase, and some may well be nationwide. Absence of this MACC role from Pillar 1 (Security at Home) of the National Security Strategy is perhaps understandable, as it may not be an activity that the military is keen to promote.
Bottle half full
The plan is reassuring through statements on standards, indicators (for benchmarking), exercising, upskilling, and the better utilisation of science and technology. They are all building blocks towards a better resilience, which is a journey not a destination. In that regard, the Action Plan is a step along the way. Yet, it appears overall as a list of measures to be delivered in the relatively short term and without longer-term goals of a truly strategic approach.
It is important to acknowledge that any strategy should fulfil the delicate balance of marrying top-down directives with bottom-up fulfilment. No strategy can be successful if the people required to implement it are unable or unwilling to comply; at the same time, if the whole-of-society guidance from the Government is inadequate or under-resourced, then early societal fragmentation is likely no matter how fine the words in a plan.
The author
Robert Hall is cofounder of Resilience First Ltd. He is author of Building Resilient Futures (2023), and The Resilience Mindset (2025). Both books can be ordered from Austin Macauley Publishers or through bookstores. The third title in the series on resilience, Nature’s Resilience, will be published on 12 September.
Notes
(1) The Biological Security Strategy (2023) sets out a vision until 2030, mission, plans and outcomes to respond to the risks. The 2023-2025 Implementation Report was published alongside the new Resilience Action Plan. Both the Industrial Strategy and Infrastructure strategies have timeframes out to 2035.
(2) In the US, FEMA’s National Resilience Guidance defines resilience as: ‘the ability to prepare for threats and hazards, adapt to changing conditions, and withstand and recover rapidly from adverse conditions and disruptions’. The UNDRR Sendai Framework defines resilience as: ‘the ability of a system, community, or society to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, and recover from the effects of hazards’.
