Fewer than 20% of the UK’s larger companies have effective contingency plans in place to ensure they can carry on if a serious incident leads to major business disruption

Fewer than half of large UK businesses currently have business continuity plans to ensure they can continue trading if disaster strikes – and many of those plans are thought to be ineffective.

The quality of many of the existing plans is so poor that the true proportion of companies with no effective strategy in place to deal with business disruption could be below 20%, according to the Business Continuity Forum.

Many businesses that do have plans never bother to test them, even though 70% of unrehearsed plans fail, says the Forum, which promotes best practice in business continuity and has worked closely with the Cabinet Office.

The Forum also warns that continuity plans often over emphasise the threat of IT systems crashing while sparing little thought for other possible issues. The recent industrial action at the Grangemouth oil refinery, for example, had nothing to do with IT but is reported to have cost the oil industry £50 million a day.

The greatest risk facing British businesses, according to the Government, is completely unconnected with IT failures or computer viruses. It is the threat of the H5N1 virus (bird flu) infecting the human population and causing a pandemic, which could lead to illness and death among many thousands of workers.

Cause and effect

Russell Price, Chairman of the Continuity Forum, believes that the simplest way to approach business continuity planning is not to consider the potential causes of problems as much as the likely effects, which are often similar.

For example, the impact of the Grangemouth strike was similar to that of floods in such places as Gloucester last summer, when large numbers of people were unable to get to work. Even the recent teachers’ strike saw workers unable to get to the office because of childcare responsibilities.

Price explains: “We try to get people to think less about the type of event that might happen, whether it’s a terrorist bomb, a flood or a computer virus, and actually look at the consequences. If you do that, you can simplify your planning.

“There are a thousand and one things that can go wrong. If there’s a police cordon around your building because of a murder and you can’t get in, it has the same effect as if you have a flood. Once you start looking at it like that, it makes your planning a lot simpler.”

Alternative sites

Many large companies have alternative sites that are ready to be used in the event of business disruption. However, Price warns of the need to consider such arrangements carefully to avoid further disruption.

He points to a recent example when a call centre was forced to relocate to a waiting recovery site when it was struck by disaster. Although the site was technically perfect, the company had failed to consider the number of people needed to carry out the work, and it was far too small.

There is also a danger in having an alternative site too far away from the original, as employees are likely to start looking for other jobs if they have to travel too far for too long.

Best practice

Public sector organisations such as the police and ambulance services already have an obligation to develop an effective business continuity plan, but there is no such legislation for the private sector.

There is, however, a British Standard of best practice for such plans and the Forum believes that this could eventually be developed into a legal requirement for some business activities, such as supplying technical services to the emergency services.

Businesses can find out more about the support and advice available from the Business Continuity Forum at www.continuityforum.org

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