UK Resilience

Capabilities Programme

1. The Capabilities Programme is the core framework through which the Government is seeking to build resilience across all parts of the United Kingdom.

2. 'Capability' is a military term which includes both personnel, equipment and training and such matters as plans, doctrine and the concept of operations. 'Resilience' is defined as the ability to detect, prevent and if necessary handle disruptive challenges.

This includes but is not limited to disruptive challenges arising from the possibility of a terrorist attack. Many elements of response to natural disaster require a similar capability to those of a terrorist attack, and vice versa. The scope of the programme accordingly extends to the full range of responses to the full range of contingencies likely to face the UK in the first part of the 21st century.

3. The aim of the Capabilities Programme is to ensure that a robust infrastructure of response is in place to deal rapidly, effectively and flexibly with the consequences of civil devastation and widespread disaster inflicted as a result of conventional or non-conventional disruptive activity.

In the terms of the programme it is intended that this should be achieved by identifying the capabilities necessary to build UK resilience and ensuring that each of these is developed in accordance with the delivery techniques developed by the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit (PMDU) in connection with the Government's Public Service Agreement.

4. Following a review by PMDU and the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS), the programme consists of a total of 19 capability 'workstreams'¹.

These fall into three groups:

• three workstreams which are essentially structural, dealing respectively with the central (national), regional and local response capabilities;
• five which are concerned with the maintenance of essential services: food and water; transport; health services; financial services; and utilities
• ten functional workstreams, dealing respectively with the assessment of risks and consequences; chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) resilience; site clearance; infecious diseases (human); infectious diseases (animal and plant); mass casualties; evacuation and shelter; warning and informing the public; mass fatalities; humanitarian assistance, flooding and recovery.

See Annex A for the 19 Capability Workstreams.

5. Each of these workstreams is the responsibility of a designated lead Department. Within each lead Department, a workstream leader at Senior Civil Service (SCS) level is responsible for the management of a programme of work set out in a delivery plan agreed with Ministers and with the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) at the centre. Within the Cabinet Office, an SCS-level programme director reporting to the Director of Civil Contingencies is responsible for the management of the programme as a whole, on behalf of the Permanent Secretary, Intelligence, Security & Resilience, Robert Hannigan.

The programme director holds a quarterly meeting of workstream leaders (the programme management team) and provides a quarterly report of progress to TIDO(SD)(PREPARE)², the official committee on UK resilience chaired by the Permanent Secretary, Intelligence, Security & Resilience.

Ministerial oversight of the programme is exercised through DOP(IT)(PSR) committee³, the Ministerial committee on UK resilience chaired by the Home Secretary.

6. The leaders of the ten functional workstreams have responsibility for developing capability at the national (UK) level. The well-established regional resilience teams in each of the Government Offices for the Regions [External website] are responsible for co-ordinating activity at the local (local authority or police force) area, and for communications between workstream leaders at the national level on the one hand and local authorities and first responders on the other.

To this end each of the SCS-level regional resilience directors has been given a lead responsibility on behalf of his or her colleagues for one of the functional workstreams. Responsibilities at the local level have been formalised through the provisions of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, and through regulations and guidance issued after the Act passed into law.

7. The programme has no defined end-point or outcome. An important part of the work is to continually identify, challenge and monitor the current levels of resilience in each of the areas covered by the workstreams. This enables Ministers to decide what increased level of resilience they wish to achieve in each area, and then to plan and if necessary to allocate additional resources to achieve that increased level of resilience.

Testing and exercising make an important contribution to this assessment. The delivery plan for each workstream explains how resilience is to be tested and exercised. A key component of the central response capability workstream is the management of a cross-Government programme of exercises and training, structured around the Capabilities Programme.

8. The Capabilities Programme is intended to cover the whole of the United Kingdom, including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (the devolved administrations). Where the content of a particular workstream is devolved, responsibility for that part of the workstream rests with the devolved administration. The devolved administrations have observer status on TIDO(SD)(PREPARE), and, as well as individual lead Departments liaising with their Devolved Administration counterparts on their workstreams, the Capabilities Programme director meets with representatives of the devolved administrations once a quarter, to ensure a consistency of approach across the United Kingdom.

 ⁽¹⁾When the programme was initially scoped in 2002 it consisted of ten 'capabilities'. One of these was subsequently divided into separate workstreams dealing with mass casualties and mass fatalities respectively. A further workstream, the regional response capability, was added in April 2003 following the establishment of a resilience capability in each of the Government Offices for the Regions. Most recently, it has been decided to treat the essential services capability as five separate workstreams managed by Defra, DoH, DTI, DfT and HM Treasury respectively. It has also been decided to split the Infectious Diseases workstream into two, one covering Human Diseases and one covering Animal and Plant Diseases.


⁽²⁾ TIDO(SDR)(PREPARE) is the Official Committee on Domestic and International Terrorism (Strategy and Delivery), (Preparedness)

⁽³⁾ DOP(IT)(PSR) is the Ministerial Committee of Defence and Overseas Policy (Sub-Committee on International Terrorism), (Ministerial Group on Protective Security and Resilience).

[return to top]