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Integrated Emergency Management
Operations Integrated Emergency Management is responsible for ensuring West Midlands Police (WMP) is able to respond effectively to the threats that face our organisation and the communities of the West Midlands.
This is achieved through working closely with our partner agencies to establish plans as a response to identified risks. To ensure WMP is able to provide an effective response, our team is also responsible for ensuring the force has both the capability and the capacity in terms of trained officers and staff to react to major incidents.
Major Incident testing and Exercise
WMP has a variety of plans in place, such as incident response, contingency and business continuity plans. These plans ensure WMP can respond to a range of major incidents.
The plans are kept up to date and ready for use, which includes having officers trained to fulfill their roles and responsibilities, running exercises and events to check plans are fit for purpose and testing systems and system components to ensure they will work in the scenarios.
Events are carried out as part of WMP’s testing and exercising programme, which delivers a series of tests and exercises each year in a variety of formats including:
- Seminar Exercises: Seminar exercises are generally low cost activities and inform participants about the organisation and procedures which would be called upon to respond to an incident. The emphasis is on identifying and solving the problem rather than decision making
- Table Top Exercises: Table top exercises are a very cost effective and efficient way of testing plans, procedures and people. They are difficult to run with large numbers, but those ‘players’ who are involved are given an excellent opportunity to work with and understand the roles and responsibilities of the other agencies taking part
- Live Exercises: Live exercises range from a small scale test of one element of the response, like evacuation – ranging from a building or ‘incident’ site to an entire community – through to a full scale test of the whole organisation's response to an incident. Live exercises provide the best means of testing how well emergency communications work, and the use of 'casualties' can add to the realism
Business Continuity
As a ‘blue light’ emergency service, WMP has a duty under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 to have up-to-date business continuity plans in place, to ensure ‘business as usual’ can be maintained in the event of any disruption to our service.
The Act requires us to:
- Identify the structure and critical functions of the organisation
- Identify and carry out risk assessments of threats that may disrupt our normal business
- Devise plans to ensure critical functions will continue in the event of a disruption
- Regularly review and test these plans to ensure they are fit for purpose
- Arrange relevant training and awareness-raising exercises for WMP personnel
Emergency Planning within West Midlands Police
Emergency planning is a statutory duty for WMP as a ‘blue light’ emergency responder under the Civil Contingencies Act (2004). In order to comply with the Act, WMP has a designated Emergency Planning team.
Emergency planning involves creating plans to address a wide range of incidents which could impact on the West Midlands force area.
To do this we need to: anticipate what might happen, assess the potential impact it could have if it does happen, carry out actions to prevent the incident happening, carry out actions to be prepared if the incident does happen, ensure the incident response is planned and ensure that any required recovery arrangements are made / considered and documented.
