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Appendix 1 Transcript of Item 5 – Scrutiny of the London Resilience Forum and London Resilience Team Jennette Arnold (Chair): Let us then go to item 5, the Scrutiny of the London Resilience Forum and London Resilience Team. Members have received a note following a letter Richard [Barnes] [Deputy Mayor] received yesterday. In summary that letter stated that Richard could not make public or discuss the response of the London Resilience Team to the Coroner’s recommendations in the London bombing of 7 July 2005, which is fine, but we still have some general questions about the London Resilience Team. Can I start by asking you, can you tell us how you think the work of the London Resilience Team is progressing following the transition of the team from the Government Office of London to the Greater London Authority? Richard Barnes (Deputy Mayor): I regard London Resilience as an issue for all of us and the more open we can possibly be about it, the better. It is a pleasure to introduce Hamish Cameron, who is the Manager of the London Resilience Team. Apropos the Coroner’s inquest, can I assure the Committee that we have held our hearings, we have drawn together our conclusions, a response will be signed off by the Mayor within the next few days and it will be sent to the Coroner. Until the Coroner publishes our response, it remains the papers of the court and, as a consequence, not something which can either be discussed or published abroad, until she has so agreed. Once that has happened we are more than happy to come back and discuss those findings with the Committee. As you say, the instructions came only yesterday, or the guidance came only yesterday and I am sure nobody here wishes to be in contempt of court. Responsibility for the London Resilience in the London Resilience forum transferred to the GLA from the Government Office for London (GOL) on 1 December last year. In terms of numbers it was a relatively reduced number of staff and quite a substantially reduced budget which came with it. We are now beginning to shape it up, for a process, and a team which can reflect what is needed across London. In the hiatus, dying days of the Government Office for London then the Resilience Forum, which was at GOL, it seemed to have lost its way and gone substantially quiet. The last formal meeting under Government Office for London’s auspices had 55 people sitting around the table, which to my mind is a conference rather than a committee or a forum. It is very difficult for people to make decisions when there are 55 people around the table. It would also be difficult to take responsibility for those decisions and see them delivered and taken forward. Hamish and I have been looking at the numbers of people who actually constitute the Forum that will be meeting on a regular basis here: it is our intention to reduce that number down. We are currently down to about 30 at the moment, this will enable us to have a Forum that actually takes responsibility for the decisions it makes. There is a structure across London which involves local authorities, the transport systems, the London emergency services and indeed others who have a role to play, but they can play that role , at a level below the Forum, and then their chairs can report in to the Forum itself, take the work programmes out and feed it back in. The Government Office for London was effectively the bureaucratic structure for the Minister of London I think my own view is that the Forum in the past was there to protect and inform the Minister for London: we are a different type of beast to that; we are a publicly accountable body. There is a readily identifiable individual who is ultimately responsible: that is the Mayor of London, whoever he or she may be. I believe that we should be as proactive as we possibly can, be as outward looking as we possibly can, and to be imaginative in the way in which we apply ourselves to London. You may well have question marks which flit across your mind when I say that. Let me give you a classic example. The fire underneath the M1 Motorway could - luckily it did not - have shut the M1 and its feeder lanes into and out of London for weeks. The impact that that would have had on transport systems, and indeed that part of London, would have been quite devastating. We would all have noticed it, and yet there is no process of looking at what is underneath our bridges, or indeed what is underneath our railway arches. Hamish has already initiated an examination with a transport subgroup to start looking at these issues. We all know that there have been fires underneath the arches at London Bridge, but there is no register anywhere of what is stored, used or kept underneath our railway arches. One could imagine if the last fire there had been had been caused by acetylene bottles or other types which could have exploded; the impact that that could have had on the transport system into London Bridge would have been devastating! Indeed, there are a large percentage of people who work within this building that use that route into work and indeed home again. We are beginning to identify those issues where we should be spreading wider. The big challenge is to get the local authorities involved in fulfilling their statutory responsibilities to businesses in their local areas under the Civil Contingencies Act, where they are required to be in conversation and in contact with the businesses within their borough. Often one hears that it is difficult to get small businesses or medium-sized businesses to attend meetings, that it is difficult to communicate with them; this is probably because they are so busy running their businesses and keeping their heads above water that they do not necessarily want to sit in the Town Hall. However, given that we are based here there are other mechanisms which we can use to communicate with businesses across London, which were not necessarily available to the Government Office for London. I think they are on CompeteFor, for example which has got the email addresses of some 40,000 businesses across the whole of London, which is available for us to use as a communications network and technique. It enables us to put them in touch with a website, which I recently launched together with the Home Office and the National Counter Terrorism Agency, whereby small businesses can analyse where they are with business continuity and business resilience: it is a free service, which is available over the net. Had they paid consultants to do it for them it would have probably cost them between £2,000 and £3,000, but we have developed this program which they can use. Through the forum we can promote that benefit and get in to contact with local businesses and as a consequence enhance what local authorities are doing. Our biggest challenge is the engagement of Londoners into making it real, because resilience, looking forward ties into community cohesion, community tensions which can arise over London throughout its different communities. All these things - my other responsibilities - feed together and help build a picture of where we can work, and where we can get people prepared: I always endeavour to personalise business resilience and continuity. People, businesses, commerce, emergency services, everyone who is involved within London life should be involved in business resilience and continuity, because it affects us as individuals. It affects those that matter to us and those that we care about. We want to know when we go home that our families will join us and when we go to work our business is there. However, it is not just a matter of the severe tensions which exist with the international counter terrorism, it is fire, and it is also flood: indeed we are sitting below the Thames within this building. We know that when it rains severely part of this business floods, but we do have a backup system which keeps us going: it is pandemics of whatever sort. It covers all those matters which can impact devastatingly on London as a whole, or indeed, parts of London. It is getting people to realise that it matters. After the floods in Gloucestershire and Cheltenham, more businesses went bankrupt after the water had receded than the numbers that went bankrupt during it, because business had lost their business records. They did not know to whom they owed money and indeed they did not know who owed them money. Few people after a major incident ring you up and say, ‚I think we owe you £1,000‛. It just does not happen and many small businesses just disappeared because their business records had gone. Buncefield [Hertfordshire], which is on the edges of London, is where an industrial accident took place, an accident that wiped out a significant number of business because records had gone, their business had gone, and they simply could not operate. It is bringing that together, giving it a true face for London; that is what we are endeavouring to do. This morning I was speaking at the Security Institute, at their annual conference, involving them. The great challenge is clearly going to be the Olympics, although one should not see the Olympics as a separate point in 2012. The Olympics are an event which happens from 27 July to 6 September; and before that we have the Diamond Jubilee, which is four to five days.