Police National CBRN Centre
From SR
Contents |
Background
The Home Office leads the Governments CBRN Resilience Programme, a cross-government initiative that aims to ensure that fewer lives will be risked or lost in the event of a terrorist or accidental CBRN incident. Included in this programme is the Police National CBRN Centre.
Roles
CBRN refers to any Chemical, Biological, Radiological or Nuclear event.
The Police National CBRN Centre provides CBRN response training to emergency service personnel, government staff and other public service staff, through several expert organisations. The centre aims to have 5% of police officers in England and Wales trained to be able to respond to a CBRN incident,providing training, equipment and CBRN support to the police service nationally.
Police National CBRN Centre (PN-CBRN) at Winterbourne Gunner, is a specialised, multi-agency emergency services training organisation, which develops and runs a series of intensive, high level CBRN training courses and command exercises for the entire UK emergency service sector. The PN-CBRN Centre is established and co-ordinated through the Contest strategy of Britain’s Home Office.
Responsible for training and equipping the UK Police Forces to respond to and manage CBRN incidents, the Centre has established itself in four key sites:
- Ryton in Coventry, where the programme senior management oversees the increase in capacity and capability
- The Scottish Executive, where a team manages elements of the project and the impact upon the devolved governments of Scotland And Northern Ireland
- The Home Office, where a procurement team manages the development and acquisition of new equipment.
- CBRN Training Centre, which is co-located within the MoD joint services CBRN Training Facility at Winterbourne Gunner.
Each month the Centre conducts a three-day Silver or Gold level multi-agency residential training course for senior UK officers from Police, Fire, and Ambulance services. Following a programme of lectures and specialist CBRN training, officers working in individual service groups as well as in multi-agency command groups, must manage a complex simulated day-long CBRN incident conducted under experienced CBRN Training Centre staff and specialist external advisors. The following day, delegates participate in post-exercise analysis sessions, assessing how their responses could have been improved and recording lessons learned for possible future events. Supporting these exercises with training and exercising software, scenarios, mapping, simulated news footage and exercise injects, along with exercise management expertise and command support technology (GIS mapping, Smart boards etc), is a leading UK training, simulation and command technology company: VectorCommand, developer of the Emergency Command System family of emergency training and simulation products and services.
Structure
A core principle of the Centre’s ethos is multi-agency working, and to achieve this its staff establishment is unique within the UK, with Fire, Police and Ambulance staff working alongside each other to develop joint policies, capabilities and training, from concept stage to delivery. The partnership working and support received from agencies such as The Chief Fire Officers Association, Ambulance Services Association, Department of Health, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, the Atomic Weapons Establishment and the Ministry of Defence, to name but a few, has been essential in achieving this aim.
