Website of the UK government

Why prepare for emergencies?

Emergencies can disrupt businesses, affecting profits and operations. This can have a detrimental effect on employees, shareholders, customers and communities.

It makes sense to put in place business continuity management arrangements because they help to:

Develop a clearer understanding of how the organisation works

To ensure the continuity of an organisation, you first have to understand how it works. The process of analysing the business can yield sources of increased operational effectiveness and efficiency.

Protect the business, and ensure that your business can help others in an emergency

Business continuity management will help ensure that the impact of emergencies on the day-to-day functions of the business is kept to a minimum, and that disruption to your critical business operations does not deepen the impact of the emergency on your employees, shareholders, partners, contractors, stakeholders and customers.

Protect the reputation of the business

Customers expect continuity of services, even in the most challenging of circumstances. They expect you to be fully in control, and to be seen to be in control - your organisation's reputation is at risk if you are not.

Produce clear cost benefits

Identifying, preventing and managing disruptions in advance can reduce the costs to an organisation in terms of financial expenditure and management time. By ensuring that you have robust business continuity plans in place, you may also be able to drive down your insurance premiums.

Ensure compliance and corporate governance

Many organisations are - to varying degrees - subject to performance standards, corporate governance requirements and in some cases specific requirements to do business continuity management.

There are also links between good business continuity planning and good management of health and safety issues. Establishing business continuity arrangements will help ensure compliance with this wider framework of responsibilities and expectations.

This may seem daunting but businesses shouldn't try to plan for every possible eventuality. Business continuity planning should, in the first instance, be generic, rather than focusing on every single possible emergency (such as terrorism or flu pandemic).

Just as the government maintains generic plans and capabilities focused on possible impacts of different types of disruptive challenges, so business should focus first on the possible impacts of an emergency (eg absence from work, temporary loss of premises, loss of power, etc).

• General business continuity advice

More information

The CMI's survey report, which was supported by the Cabinet Office and Continuity Forum, emphasises some of the key business benefits of BCM. It shows that those with plans really believe that they make a difference and reduce disruption. And it shows that a vast majority of businesses have suffered some form of disruption over the last year.

• Download Chartered Management Institute (CMI) Business Continuity Survey 2009 Report (PDF, 429K)

UK Resilience website

You can get more information about other civil protection topics on the UK Resilience website.

• UK Resilience Opens new window