8.1. Emergency plans are not dusty documents which sit on a shelf and have no relevance for daily life. Rather, they are dynamic statements of how an organisation will deal with an emergency, what resources it will deploy and how, what management arrangements would apply and how the organisation would interact with other responders.

8.2. The initial input to the planning cycle is a draft plan. This may be based on day-to-day operational procedures, the experiences of staff who have responded to an emergency or a plan produced by an organisation with similar responsibilities. The draft plan should be circulated within an organisation and all those who would be involved in responding to an emergency, whether on an operational or management level, should be included to provide comments and input.

8.3. When the organisation itself is happy that the plan would be effective, it should be shared as widely as possible with the emergency services and other organisations likely to be involved in the response to the emergency or outcome envisaged. They should be invited to comment both on the plan itself (many will have extensive planning experience) and on how it would interact with their own plans. If it became apparent that there was the potential for overlap or conflict with the response of another organisation, the situation should be resolved by discussion and the agreed procedures or actions written into all relevant plans. It may be advisable to draw up concordats or memoranda of understanding to cover those areas where the action of one organisation has a critical effect on the ability of another organisation to fulfil its role, or where the interaction between two organisations is particularly close.

8.4. Once any changes agreed with other organisations have been incorporated into the plan, the final version should be circulated to everyone involved, both inside and outside the organisation. A system should be established to regularly review the plan to ensure that staffing, organisational or accommodation changes are incorporated. All changes should be circulated to the original recipients of the plan (or their successors where the postholder has changed). Recipients should exercise good document security, ie old material should be destroyed as soon as replacement updates are circulated, and copies of plans should not be made or circulated to other people without the permission of the plan owner. More information on preparing plans is available in the Central Emergency Planning Unit document. ‘A Guide to Plan Preparation’ (see Appendix B: Bibliography).

8.5. The plan should not be regarded as complete until it has been tested. There are a variety of ways of testing a plan, mostly involving exercises of some sort. In most cases it would not be appropriate to organise a live exercise of the full plan as a first step in the testing procedure. It may be more advisable to test the plan in parts through a mixture of exercise types before going to the expense of a full live exercise. ‘Why Exercise Your Disaster response?’, ‘The Exercise Planner’s Guide’ and ‘A Guide to Emergency Planning in Northern Ireland’ (see Appendix B: Bibliography) contain more information on exercising.

8.6. After every exercise, the experience of the exercise players should be recorded and their comments gathered in a debriefing session. The insights gained from the exercise should then be used to review the plan and decide whether changes are necessary to make it more effective. Proposed changes should be discussed with all other organisations involved, in case they have knock-on effects on their plans. Once changes are agreed, the revised plan should be circulated to all original recipients.

8.7. Following a real incident, no matter how small, the same process of debriefing and review of the plan should be carried out.

8.8. The basic principles underlying emergency planning and response are those of Integrated Emergency Management (IEM). Please refer to ‘Dealing With Disaster’ and ‘A Guide to Emergency Planning in Northern Ireland’ for detailed information. In summary, IEM requires plans to:

• Focus on responding to the outcomes rather than the cause of emergencies.
• Reflect in emergency response activities the day-to-day responsibilities of organisations, including, but not confined to, statutory requirements.
• Be sufficiently flexible to cover a range of types and scales of emergency, with provision to scale up or down the response as required.
• Use normal procedures and management arrangements as far as feasible, as these are what responders are familiar with.
• Be integrated between different parts of an organisation.
• Be integrated between organisations.

8.9. There is no single format which would suit all plans. They should, at minimum, contain:

• A summary of the role of the organisation producing the plan, its management structure and areas of responsibility.
• A statement of the circumstances covered by the plan, and what the plan aims to achieve.
• An indication of the events or circumstances which would trigger activation of the plan, how the organisation would learn about an incident, and how a decision to implement would be communicated to the necessary staff.
• An outline (by post, not name) of individual roles and responsibilities within the plan, with contact details for each.
• Details of actions to be taken, appropriate to the purpose and aims of the plan.
• Management arrangements.
• Arrangements for scaling up or down activities in response to need.
• Arrangements for working with other organisations, including co-ordination arrangements.
• Arrangements for working with the media.
• Arrangements for concluding the emergency response, including consideration of long-term effects of the incident and implementation of any changes which need to be made to everyday or emergency procedures.
• Details of how the plan is to be validated and reviewed, including any training programme required to equip staff to fulfil their roles in the planned response.

8.10. Evacuation is a complex response to an emergency situation, potentially involving a very large number of organisations from a range of disciplines. The key to providing an effective service to evacuees from the time the decision is taken to evacuate until they are safely resettled either in new accommodation or their pre-evacuation premises is co-ordination. As already indicated in this guide, a number of separate, but interlinked co-ordination arrangements will be required.

8.11. Co-ordination does not happen spontaneously. It needs to be planned and practised, not just by those organisations likely to take a lead role but by all responders. However, organisations likely to have lead roles to play in the different functional areas of an evacuation have a particular responsibility to make sure that they can discharge their functions. Organisations most likely to be involved in overall incident co-ordination are:

• The emergency services, especially the Police.
• District Council Chief Executives, within their local overall co-ordination remit and as representatives of the community.

Other organisations which would support these overall incident co-ordinators by co-ordinating within individual functional areas and/or by contributing to the overall co-ordination arrangements are:

• Other emergency services.
• Organisations owning property or operating sites where there is potential for a hazardous situation to develop, or engaged in activities which carry risks of causing a hazardous situation to develop.
• Community Trusts, with their general duty of care for the welfare of the population.
• The Northern Ireland Housing Executive, as a major landlord and with responsibility for housing the homeless.
• Government departments, agencies and NDPBs which deliver services with potential to develop emergency situations and/or which have strategic responsibility for public welfare and safety.
• Voluntary organisations.

8.12. In preparing their own plans, all these organisations should identify the situations in which they could take a lead role and agree these, at local level where appropriate, with the other organisations likely to become involved in an evacuation response. Plans of all organisations should include co-ordination arrangements within relevant functional areas, and arrangements for interaction with the overall incident co-ordinator.

8.13. Co-ordination of emergency responses can happen on three levels:

• Operational (Bronze) – active, hands on response, providing direct services to bring the incident to an end and ensure public safety and welfare.
• Tactical (Silver) – management support to operational service providers, ensuring that they have the equipment and manpower required and considering issues such as health and safety of responders.
• Strategic (Gold) – medium-to-long term issues about policy, responsibilities and activities of organisations, effects on budgets and future prevention / mitigation strategies.

8.14. Where more than one level of co-ordination is established, information must flow not only within co-ordination groups, but between groups at different levels.

8.15. Many evacuations, even quite large ones, will be dealt with at operational level or operational and tactical levels. The co-ordination discussed throughout this document almost always falls into these two categories.

8.16. In most emergency situations, co-ordination is best achieved by bringing together representatives of organisations involved under the chairmanship of a lead organisation. In most cases, physically meeting is the most efficient means of sharing information and discussing emergency responses, but it is possible to achieve co-ordination by phone contact or correspondence, if time allows. Co-ordination is not about telling individual organisations how to do their own work. It is about:

• Sharing information efficiently and effectively with all organisations with information needs.
• Collating information for briefing senior officers, elected public representatives and the media.
• Sharing information on resource needs and availability and agreeing mutual aid arrangements.
• Agreeing response roles and activities, within the parameters agreed at the planning stage, but taking account of the particular situation encountered.
• Responding quickly to any changes in circumstances, such as escalation of the event.
• Agreeing priorities, if it is not possible to carry out all desirable activities at the same time.
• Looking ahead to identify likely problems and agreeing action to prevent, or mitigate the effects of, them.

8.17. For a localised incident (as almost all evacuations are) the Police have agreed a protocol with District Council Chief Executives, which sets out how they will interact in providing overall incident co-ordination during an emergency. This involves the Chief Executive in any tactical co-ordination group formed by the Police during an incident, and allows for the handing of the lead co-ordination role to the Chief Executive at an appropriate point. It is expected that similar protocols will be developed between Council Chief Executives and other organisations, such as Community Trusts. As these are agreed, their contents should be incorporated into evacuation plans and arrangements.

8.18. All co-ordination arrangements should be flexible and able to respond to situations outside those envisaged in plans or risk assessments. Therefore all organisations should be continually assessing their involvement in co-ordination arrangements during an incident and whether changes need to be made to the membership or chairmanship of co-ordination groups.

8.19. The whole process of co-ordination during evacuations can be greatly enhanced by giving local managers the opportunity to meet and establish personal relationships before anything happens. This can be achieved through:

• Regular emergency planning co-ordination meetings held by Council Chief Executives or Council Group emergency planning co-ordinators.
• Multi-agency participation in local exercises.
• Inviting other local managers to emergency planning training or awareness-raising events held by individual organisations.
• Including other organisations in planning activities, for example, not just sending them copies of plans to comment on, but inviting them to meet to discuss them.