Regional Civil Contingencies Committee
From SR
History
Most emergencies are dealt with by local responders at a local level. This has always been, and will continue to be, the norm for responding to emergencies. However, recent experience has highlighted that there may be very exceptional circumstances when the response to an emergency would benefit from co-ordination at a regional level. Such circumstances could include where the local response, including locally agreed mutual aid arrangements, is overwhelmed, or where an emergency affects the majority of localities within a region. This is most likely to arise during emergencies without a definable scene.
Roles
Regional Civil Contingencies Committees (RCCCs) are intended as a means of co-ordinating the response to and recovery from an emergency at a regional level in England. They are likely to be convened only very rarely and only where they can add value to the response.
Regional Civil Contingencies Committees (RCCCs) will be the key means of delivering the co-ordination of response at a regional level. An RCCC is a multi-agency group including representatives from across the region of the emergency services, local authorities, the Government Office (GO) and others, as applicable.
RCCCs are likely to prove particularly useful in wide-area, high-impact, “rising tide” emergencies where the deployment of scarce resources can be co-ordinated regionally and a fully informed network of responders and affected organisations can be created.
It will be charged with improving the co-ordination of the response to an emergency across a given region with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on consequence management and the recovery phase after an incident.
While the detailed role of the RCCC will vary according to the nature of the emergency, generic aspects of that role are likely to include:
- Collating and maintaining a strategic picture of the evolving situation within the region
- Assessing whether there are any issues that cannot be resolved at a local level
- Facilitating mutual aid arrangements within the region and, where necessary, between regions
- Ensuring an effective flow of communication between local, regional and national levels, including reports
- Raising, to a national level, any issues that cannot be resolved at a local or regional level
- Ensuring that the national input to response and recovery is co-ordinated with the local and regional efforts
- Guiding the deployment of scarce resources across the region by identifying regional priorities providing, where appropriate, a regional spokesperson.
RCCCs will not, except in the most exceptional circumstances, supersede existing command and control structures and will observe the principle of subsidiarity – the building blocks of response will remain at the local level.
Reporting Hierarchy
RCCCs will be able to meet at one of three levels: prior to an emergency, during an emergency, or when special legislative measures have been taken. RCCCs can be convened at the request of the Lead Government Department, or with its agreement, following a request from a member of a local Strategic Co-ordinating Group (SCG) or from a member of the Regional Resilience Forum
