How to write a council or community emergency plan that people can use on the day.

Sooner or later every area meets a situation its normal routines cannot handle: a flood, a storm that cuts roads and power for days, a loss of mains water, an incident at a nearby industrial site, a large evacuation. The emergency services will come, but councils and communities still have their own work to do. Residents need warning and information, people need somewhere to go and something to eat, vulnerable neighbours need checking on, and the council itself has to keep running.

A plan writes those jobs down before they are needed. A good one quickly answers four questions: who decides, who gets called, where things are, and what to do first in each likely scenario. If the answers sit in a 120-page document nobody has opened since it was signed off, they will not help much at six in the morning.

The legal section below describes the framework in England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own regulations and partnership structures, though the practical advice applies everywhere.

The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 places the planning duties on Category 1 responders, listed in Schedule 1. They include county, district, unitary and London borough councils, the police, fire and rescue authorities, ambulance and NHS bodies, and the Environment Agency. Utilities, telecoms and transport operators are Category 2 responders with lighter duties to co-operate and share information. Town and parish councils are not on either list.

• Category 1 responders must assess the risk of emergencies, keep emergency plans and business continuity plans, and maintain arrangements to warn the public and give information and advice when an emergency is likely or has happened (section 2).
• The Local Resilience Forum is how Category 1 and Category 2 responders in an area co-operate. Its chief officers meet at least once every six months (regulation 4 of the Contingency Planning Regulations 2005), and together they keep the community risk register (regulation 15).
• Every plan kept under the Act has to provide for exercises and for training staff, so the plan is known to work (regulation 25). In drawing up plans, responders must also have regard to the activities of voluntary organisations in their area (regulation 23).
• Local authorities have an extra duty to give businesses and voluntary organisations advice on business continuity (section 4).
• Lead local flood authorities (county and unitary councils in England) must keep a local flood risk management strategy covering surface water, groundwater and ordinary watercourses (section 9 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010) and investigate floods in their area where they consider it necessary (section 19).
• Town and parish councils have no statutory emergency planning duty. Many still write a community emergency plan, usually with templates from their district or county council, so that local volunteers link into the official response.

There is no prescribed format. The Cabinet Office publishes a community emergency plan template and toolkit, and many county councils and LRFs have produced their own versions. Whichever you start from, keep it short and put the pages you need in the first hour at the front. A common habit is to publish the main plan on the council’s website and keep the annex with personal contact details private.

1. Activation sheet. One page: what triggers the plan, who the clerk or lead contact calls first, where the team meets and the fallback venue if that building is affected.
2. Team and contacts. Members, deputies, phone numbers, the district council’s emergency planning duty officer, utilities, neighbouring parishes. Note who has a radio or a satellite phone, if anyone does.
3. Risks in your area. Take the relevant hazards from your LRF’s community risk register and add what only locals know, such as the brook that floods the lower street or the bridge that is the only way out of a hamlet.
4. Community profile. Rough population by area, schools, care homes, people who may need help to leave, possible rest centres, assembly points, water sources, generators, tractors and 4x4s available locally.
5. Action sheets per scenario. Flooding, prolonged power cut, loss of water supply, severe weather, a chemical incident, evacuation. Give each one a page or two with the first steps, who does what and what to tell residents.
6. Warning and informing residents. How you pass on official warnings: phone trees, a community WhatsApp or Facebook group, door-knocking, and who covers which street when the power is off.
7. Evacuation and welfare. Routes, assembly points, transport, places to shelter, food and water, and a way of keeping track of who went where.
8. Resources and agreements. Local businesses offering machinery, transport or supplies, and the volunteers you can call on, with any arrangements written down.
9. Records. How decisions and tasks are logged, who keeps the log, and how you report to the district council.
10. Annexes. Maps of flood areas, routes and key sites; personal contact details; who holds copies.

No law sets the make-up of a council’s response team, and principal councils organise theirs in many ways, usually with an on-call emergency planning officer and a duty director. For a town or parish council, five to eight people is workable: the chair or mayor, the clerk as secretary, a couple of councillors, the flood warden coordinator if there is one, and someone who knows the welfare side (schools, carers, people living alone). Give each a deputy, because a real incident lasts longer than one shift.

Decide in advance where the team meets, how that room gets power and a connection if the grid fails, and how decisions are recorded. Write each decision down with the time it was made and the reason. Insurers, the district council and residents will ask about it afterwards, and a decision with no record is hard to explain.

If you work alongside the emergency services, it helps to know how they organise themselves. Our guide to how emergency services coordinate in the UK covers JESIP and the strategic, tactical and operational levels.

In England the Environment Agency issues flood warnings for rivers and the sea at three levels: flood alert, flood warning and severe flood warning. Residents and councils can sign up to receive them. Surface water flooding from heavy rain is harder to predict and usually falls to the lead local flood authority, so check its local flood risk management strategy for your area and make sure your plan uses the same place names and trigger points.

Keep the flood section consistent with your LRF’s multi-agency flood plan and the district council’s arrangements. Contacts, maps and rest centres should match in all of them, and in a small community the flood group and the emergency team are often the same people anyway.

Sinkaos turns the maps, contacts and task templates from your plan into a standing operation your team can open on a phone. On the day it keeps tasks, reports and positions on one map and works offline. Everything is timestamped, so the record can be exported for the debrief and the report. See Sinkaos for council emergency response.