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Coping with an emergency

A Business Continuity Plan can help a business survive disruptive challenges.

Business Continuity needs to be considered by small companies as well as larger organisations. Incidents can have catastrophic effects on your business and the threats can come accidents, criminal activity or natural disasters.

• 80% of businesses affected by a major incident close within a month.
• 90% of businesses that lose data from a disaster are forced to shut down within two years.
• 58% of UK organisations were disrupted by September 11th, of those 12% were seriously affected.
• Nearly 1 in 5 businesses suffer a major disruption every year.

Why have a plan?

Unfortunately, we can all recall events that have seriously affected businesses over recent years:

• Bombings
• Flooding
• Explosions

If your premises could not be accessed for days or weeks, what would the effect be on your customers and your business?

A plan will help ensure the key aspects of the business are covered and you are in the best position to continue your business.

An incident even of a relatively minor scale could have any of the following detrimental consequences:

• A complete failure of your business.
• Loss of income.
• Loss of reputation and/or loss of customers.
• Financial, legal and regulatory penalties.
• Human resources issues.
• An impact on insurance premiums.

The Council has produced a leaflet on Business Continuity, which summarises much of the information contained in these pages and could be used to help raise awareness within your business. To find out more Business Continuity Management click on the following links.

• Business Continuity Management

Further information

Information on Business Continuity and Emergency Planning can be found from:

• The Business Continuity Institute - 0870 603 8783 www.thebci.org
• Emergency Planning Society - 0845 600 9587 www.the-eps.org/
• The Institute of Risk Management www.theirm.org
• MI5 - There is a specific section on business continuity www.mi5.gov.uk
• Continuity Central - www.continuitycentral.com
• UK Resilience www.ukresilience.info (This link will open in a new window)
• SurreyAlert www.surreyalert.info
• Continuity Forum www.continuityforum.org

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