Clause 2 - Duty to assess, plan and advise
Civil Contingencies Bill
3:00 pm
Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley, Conservative)
The amendments are similar. Contingency planning is about preparation, and it is vital that we get everything right. Clause 2 focuses on the duty to assess, plan and advise: if we do not get those things right, planning is a pointless exercise. I have reservations about the lack of audit to ensure that all the responsible bodies are doing exactly what is required of them, and I do not want to leave subsection (1) as weak as it is. It states that
''A person or body listed in Part 1 or 2 of Schedule 1 shall—
(a) from time to time assess the risk of an emergency occurring,
(b) from time to time assess the risk of an emergency making it necessary or expedient for the person or body to perform any of his or its functions''.
What does ''from time to time'' mean? If one asks a child to clean his bedroom from time to time, it simply will not happen.
The sort of contingencies for which we are planning include the 11 September plane attack, which has been mentioned time and time again, and the prior attack on the twin towers; the Tokyo subway gas attack, which I am sure is still in people's minds; and bombings of ships. Those are all well-known international incidents. We are lucky that, although we have tremors now and then in the midlands and thereabouts—we had one in Wales once—we experience nothing on the scale of the earthquakes that occur in other countries. In Iran recently, thousands of people were killed in an earthquake, and there was criticism that the authorities were not prepared, even though the region is prone to earthquakes. I am not certain we prepare we can prepare for a disaster on that scale. Turkey and Greece have been hit several times by earthquakes, and there have been problems in a number of other countries.
We do experience severe weather. We may be hitting some now, and in future an unforeseen severe weather incident may arise that cuts people off for days on end. Advice is given about staying in the car, or carrying in the car a blanket that we can wrap around us to ensure that we stay a bit warmer than we otherwise might.