Agenda item

Business Continuity Management

(To receive a report by Ian Reed, Emergency Planning and Business Continuity Manager, which seeks to update the Committee on progress made by the Emergency Planning and Business Continuity Service since Business Continuity Management was highlighted with lower assurance as part of the Finance and Public Protection Combined Assurance Status Report which was presented to the Committee in January 2018)

Minutes:

It was reported that Business Continuity Management (BCM) was highlighted with lower assurance as part of the Finance and Public Protection Combined Assurance Status Report which was presented to the Audit Committee in January 2018.  The report updated members on progress made by the Emergency Planning and Business Continuity Service since this report was published and informed the Committee of the work still outstanding.

 

Members were advised that in 2016, the Emergency Planning Service underwent a restructure and Business Continuity became a part of that Service.

 

It was noted that the Emergency Planning unit had seen an unprecedented amount of incidents over the last 12 months.

 

Members were guided through the report and were provided with the opportunity to ask questions to the officers present in relation to the information contained within the report and some of the points raised during discussion included the following:

·         In terms of IT capacity for individual councillors and staff and the regularity with which councillors were not able to function, it was queried when it stopped being 'business as usual'.  It was also queried what emphasis was put on councillors not being to be contactable on a reliable basis, as they were not able to function in the way that they wanted to.

·         It was noted that corporate communication plans had been developed about how to communicate with staff and members in events of IT outage, and how to inform people that there was an IT problem.

·         As part of the Steering Group work, the Service was looking for an elected member to champion business continuity.

·         It was commented that the Committee should be concerned with whether the new processes were being put in place and whether it could get assurance on the processes.  However, it was thought that these assurances were in place.

·         It was queried how often the documentation was reviewed, and members were advised that training was carried out for staff as well as managers.  The assessments were revised on an annual basis as things changes and Emergency Planning and Business Continuity Officers would go through these with managers.

·         All key staff would be identified as part of the process.

·         It was queried whether the Team carried out any horizon scanning.  Members were advised that Plans were based around four things – loss of people, premises, IT or utilities.

·         It was queried whether there was a Business Continuity Plan in the event of non-executive councillors IT failure which was not fixed within three days.  It was noted that Plans were generally focused around critical systems or services, and in the event of a critical incident, all the relevant people would be brought together.  It was suggested that this query be taken to the Steering Group to seek assurance, about keeping key people connected.

·         With regard to the Sustainable Transformation Plan (STP), it was commented that this could cause a lot problems in relation to business continuity due to reduced resources in the NHS.

·         It was queried whether IT issues for councillors fell into 'business as usual' for Democratic Services.

·         In terms of horizon scanning, it was noted that during the last IT outage, some of the areas which had not been deemed critical, did become critical due to the time of year that the outage occurred e.g. school transport.

·         It was also noted that as the authority had experienced these critical incidents, those areas which did have a BCP in place, had since put one in place.

·         In terms of finance, there was only one critical system, which was the ability to perform the treasury management function of the Council.

·         It was also noted that not being able to maintain the governance of the organisation was also a critical issue.

 

RESOLVED

 

            That the Committee note progress made since January 2018 and also notes the work that was still outstanding.

Supporting documents:

 

 
 
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