Advice to businesses and voluntary organisations

Nearly one in five businesses suffer a major disruption every year. Yours could be next. Experience has shown that organisations with business continuity arrangements in place are more likely to stay in business and recover quickly in the event of an emergency than those that do not.

Developing a business continuity plan will help you to manage the risks to your organisation to ensure that you can continue to operate to a predetermined minimum level in the event of disruption. This will enable you to continue to operate during and following an emergency.

What is business continuity management?

Business Continuity Management is a process that helps you to manage the risks to the smooth running of an organisation or delivery of a service. These risks could be external (such as a power failure or severe weather) or they could be internal (such as a systems failure or high staff absenteeism). The process can be applied equally to private business or to service sector such as voluntary organisations.

This section of the website provides information, advice and guidance in four easy steps to help you to develop your business continuity plan.

The 4 steps of developing a business continuity plan are:

• know your business - understand the critical functions your organisation needs to stay alive
• assess your risks - what effect will risks have upon your business?
• formulate your plan - develop a checklist of actions to be taken during an emergency
• test your plan - once staff are aware of the plan, make sure it will work

Other links are available to other sources of more detailed information.

Disclaimer:
This guidance is provided as general information about planning for emergencies. It is not intended to replace detailed guidance and planning specific to you and your business. You should consider whether and from where you need to obtain this. To the extent permitted by law, the West Mercia Local Authorities exclude any liability arising from the use of the guidance and plans on this website.