Scottish Resilient Communities Conference

Scottish Fire and Rescue Service Headquarters, Glasgow, 27 October 2017

Conference Debrief

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SCOTTISH RESILIENT COMMUNITIES CONFERENCE: CONFERENCE DEBRIEF Introduction The purpose of this debrief report is to provide feedback for the resilience community on the Scottish Resilient Communities Conference, held at the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service’s HQ in Cambuslang on 27 October 2017. The conference provided a space in which a wide range of resilience partners, including statutory “responders”, voluntary sector organisations, community groups and private companies came together to share experience and explore how to:

Work more effectively, across sectors, to support communities to become more resilient; and

Build on our understanding of how communities function well: economically, physically and socially, in the context of change, uncertainty and adversity;

This report has been drafted by Jennifer Rao-Williams of the Centre of Environmental Change and Human Resilience at the University of Dundee, and Kate Anderson and Ralph Throp of the Scottish Government’s Resilience Division, based on notes taken on the day. As such it does not necessarily reflect the views of participants. Slides from all the presentations are available on Ready Scotland at:

http://www.readyscotland.org/voluntary-response/engaging-with-the-voluntary-sector/scottish-resilient-communities-conference/

This debrief report can be viewed and downloaded from ScoRDS at:- http://www.scords.gov.uk/course/view.php?id=92

Contents

1. Morning Presentations

2. Afternoon Workshops

Annexe A: Conference Format and Feedback

Annexe B: Agenda

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1. Morning Presentations

Jim Urquhart, Scottish Government: Welcome and Introduction

Jim Urquhart, head of Scottish Government’s Resilient Essential Services and Communities Unit welcomed participants to the conference and set the scene for the day. He reflected on the importance of being clear about the parameters of what we mean by resilience in the civil contingencies field, and how it fits into broader ideas of community resilience, which include social, environmental and physical aspects.

He developed this idea by referring to a number of emergencies that have highlighted the importance of communities as active participants in resilience during 2017. In the period between 22 March and 15 September, five terror attacks (in Westminster, Manchester, London Bridge and the Borough Market, Finsbury Park, and Parsons Green) took place, in which 37 people died, and several hundred more were injured. After two of these (Manchester Arena and Parsons Green) the UK terrorism threat level moved from Severe to Critical. Each of these events required effective emergency planning and action to respond and support the recovery process by statutory responders, but also highlighted the professionalism and capability of voluntary sector partners, and many individual members of the public, as well as the importance of community cohesion.

The Grenfell Tower fire was one of the worst civil disasters that the UK has experienced in recent decades. Although the process of learning from this disaster is still on-going, a number of significant resilience lessons have already been identified. There were important roles in response and recovery for responders, community and voluntary sector groups and members of the public. It is clear that as well as conventional resilience lessons, there are broader questions to be considered about community cohesion, inequality and the relationships between service providers and communities. Emergencies can shine a light on broader issues like community cohesion and inequalities, having the potential to both bring people together in a common cause, and create further conflict.

The emerging narratives around these events are complex and dynamic. These narratives are created between the responders, the media and the public in challenging and often unpredictable ways. It’s easy for emergencies to become highly politicised, and for that to become a significant factor in the recovery.

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The Wannacry and Wannacry 2 cyber-attacks also highlighted the potential vulnerability of some of our key services to emerging cyber-attacks, and the importance of what organisations can do to promote a culture of security and resilience, and the extent to which individuals take responsibility and act to make themselves and their organisations and communities more resilient.

Jim went on to describe some of the key areas of policy work which the Scottish Government is developing to support Scotland’s resilience. Scotland’s National Outcome 11, focusses on having strong, resilient communities. The Scottish Government is keen to make sure that as Scotland’s performance framework develops, we have a shared understanding across a range of policy areas about what makes communities resilient including civil contingencies resilience, in the context of broader economic, social and environmental concerns.

The Scottish Resilience Partnership (SRP), which brings together chief officers from Scotland’s statutory Responder organisations has been established. The SRP has agreed to focus on civil contingencies resilience as its remit – but it is very much conscious of the broader resilience context, and the importance of individuals, organisations and communities playing their part alongside traditional responders.

In each of the 3 Regional Resilience Partnership (RRP) areas, there is a team of 4 Scottish Government employees, whose role is to support multi-agency working in those areas. These teams are now well established and we are beginning to see the benefit of this approach and future potential for enhanced resilience coordination and engagement.

The Scottish Risk Assessment (SRA) process has now looked at 10 key risk areas in which there is a significant Scottish dimension to risks identified at UK level, which means that the resilience community now has a better understanding of how major risks could impact at Scottish level.

The National Centre for Resilience, based in Dumfries, has a remit to bring research, policy and practice together, and it has started to deliver some tangible results. For example, the NCR has supported Education Scotland and Resilience Division’s collaborative resilience education initiative which will seek to embed resilience in the Curriculum for Excellence.

These developments and others mean that we are able to explain our work on community resilience in a clearer, more strategic way.

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Ralph Throp, Scottish Government: The Policy Context

Ralph Throp set out Resilience Division’s policy response to these issues, as described in Resilient Communities Team’s Strategic Framework and Delivery Plan 2017-21. Shaped by discussions during the 2016 conference, the Framework seeks to take a broad view of what is meant by ‘resilient communities’, and connects with a number of policy areas within Scottish Government. It does not represent a prescriptive strategy for Scotland, as the Scottish Government recognise that priorities and solutions differ in different locations and communities of interest. Responder organisations and communities are the experts in managing their specific risk profiles.

In summary the approach:

Focusses on resilience to civil contingencies emergencies;

Advocates a community development approach; and

Places community resilience in a broader context of factors that help communities function effectively in response to a broad range of challenges.

i.e. “Communities, individuals and organisations harnessing resources and expertise to help themselves access and understand risk, take appropriate measures to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies, in a way that complements the work of the emergency responders”. In communities that are: “inclusive, empowered, resilient and safe.” The Framework is available to partnerships and organisations in all sectors, offering a vision of a collaborative, forward-thinking approach to resilience in Scotland, which recognises several dimensions to the policy challenge.

1. It focuses on a diverse range of levels, including individuals, communities and organisations.

2. It recognises the potential in unlocking the assets that communities hold, and enables them to be focused on resilience (i.e. being more risk aware, and taking sensible measures to assess and prevent risk, to prepare and respond and recover from disruptive challenges) in a way that complements the work of the statutory responders.

The principles behind the Framework are summed up in the “5 E’s”, set out below:

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Engaged: It is important that the public understand the risks they are facing, and are aware of and motivated to take sensible measures to prepare. They can do that individually, but research shows that community level organisation is an effective way to build capacity to address local issues. Empowered: We know that there are now more than 300 specific community resilience groups – in addition to other community groups that may not primarily focus on community resilience, but nevertheless contribute to making their communities resilient. Enabled: The Scottish Government are keen to support local authorities, other responders and any organisations that want to help develop community resilience. This conference is part of that effort, but the Resilient Communities Team also manage a small grant innovation fund which stakeholders can apply to for support on innovative projects, breaking down barriers, and leveraging resources from other funders. Education: Recognising that building resilient communities a long term project, Scottish Government has worked to ensure that resilience is delivered in formal and informal educational settings by teachers and youth workers, working with responders. In partnership with Scottish utilities companies, SEPA, the National Centre for Regeneration and Education Scotland, Scottish

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Government is supporting the role of a Resilience Education Development Officer, whose task it is to assist in embedding resilience in teaching practice as part of the Curriculum for Excellence. Evaluation: the Resilient Communities Team are keen to ensure that all work is informed by appropriate evaluation, and are building the foundations for evaluating it at initiative level, including an evaluation of the resilience education initiative, on-going monitoring of the performance of the Ready Scotland Campaign, and producing a tool kit to enable community resilience groups to conduct light touch evaluation of their work.

Professor Carol Tannahill, Chief Social Policy Advisor, Scottish Government: “Strong and Resilient Communities”: All things to all people, or a joined up approach? Professor Carol Tannahill, the Government’s Chief Social Policy Advisor, gave an excellent and very thought provoking key note speech on the broad scope of resilience thinking. She argued that societal resilience results from resilience of social, cultural, economic and built environments, and to deliver that, different types of infrastructure need to be in place. As the ‘risk-scape’ changes, new challenges require new knowledge and new players, who need to work together. Trustworthy, transparent, empowering systems are essential. By considering the principles and ways of working that are embodied in an empowering, community development approach, we can bring the different strands of what we think of as resilience together in a way that best delivers for communities. Resilience is at risk of being understood either as a personal capacity or as technological solutions to predictable events, but more usefully we could think of it as a matrix of factors within the fabric of lives of people and their communities which confer resilience. Individual and community resilience support one another. Resilient communities don’t just plan for emergencies, they have rich networks and connections of everyday relationships, kindness and mutual support. People feel safe, that they belong and they can trust others. Delivering these characteristics mean communities should have strong, diverse local economies with thriving private and social enterprise sectors providing access to good, quality jobs in which people have sufficient pay to lift them out of poverty.

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To respond to the challenges we expect (and the ones we don’t know about yet) we should keep a future orientation, build capacity in communities because they are likely to be first responders in many cases, and take a broad perspective on resilience. Government and communities should support partnerships between state and civic society by working in open, transparent and empowering ways. Resilient systems are created with, and by, the people they serve.

Robert Colburn, Emergency Response Operations Manager Scotland, British Red Cross: Working in the space between statutory responders and the community – experience from the Grenfell Tower fire. The Grenfell Tower fire in London is one of the worst civil disasters the UK has experienced in recent decades, and while the recovery is still in a relatively early stage, there is a huge amount of learning emerging from the response. The British Red Cross’s (BRC) Robert Colburn spoke very powerfully about his experience of running teams delivering services directly to affected people in the local community, many of whom were literally left with nothing by the disaster. The BRC played a vital role in working with communities alongside “blue light” emergency responders, in a space that would be very difficult for public sector organisations to occupy. There were a number of fairly traditional “care for people” roles, such as providing psychosocial support, acting as a trusted point of contact for refugees, and manning a support line, etc. They also managed appeals and fundraising events. But the scale and public profile of this incident generated some additional tasks. For example, the volume of public donations of clothing and other goods was initially overwhelming. However BRC were able to make management and distribution to affected people, and effectively manage distribution to affected members of the public and eventually, sale via the BRC charity shop of surplus donations. As well as public donations, the public also wanted to offer to volunteer. Managing convergent volunteers requires a significant co-ordination effort, and BRC was able to step into this role. The capability and commitment from Red Cross staff, both salaried and volunteers, helping others in this incredibly challenging environment, was very evident. Individuals and team leaders have an important responsibility to look after their own, and their colleagues mental and emotional wellbeing.

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Ewan Stewart, The Care Inspectorate: Placing values and ethics at the heart of critical decision making. Ewan Stewart described the approach that the Care Inspectorate have taken to improving their decision making in critical incidents by introducing a system of incident management that explicitly brings ethics and values to the heart of the process. The process was developed from the National Decision Making Model used by the Police, and other organisations, demonstrating the transferability of this way of thinking to different contexts.

The model encourages a consistent, structured process of developing situational awareness, identifying realistic options, and making choices that deliver a strategic aim. All the time, referring to organisational values and ethics in order to guide action. It encouraged everyone present to foreground how they, and their group or organisation, make decisions in difficult circumstances and embed their morals, values and ethics into those decisions. Crucially, organisations need to clarify what their values and ethics are, during slow-time, and not while an incident is on-going.

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Andrew Cassell, Media Consultant: A positive narrative? Working with the media to promote effective community response and recovery.

Andrew Cassel, well known ex-BBC broadcaster, used examples from a number of previous incidents to demonstrate how the response and recovery are played out under the public gaze, and how the perception of them is mediated by the broadcast

and social media. His main message was that the media approach incidents as a “narrative”, the sort of information they’ll be looking for to tell the story as they see it, with a beginning, middle and end, and tensions can arise as a result. Andrew discussed how that has accelerated and changed in a world in which information flows are increasingly dynamic and difficult to anticipate. However, he also explained the code of practice that UK media outlets should adhere to, and encouraged delegates to engage pro-actively with the media in order to pro-actively influence emergency narratives.

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2. Afternoon Workshops While the workshops in the 2016 conference were heavily focused on group discussions, most of the afternoon workshops in the 2017 conference involved considerable information sharing, allowing a wide range of speakers a short slot to update fellow participants on work that is occurring in their geographical (or thematic) area. All workshop slides can be found on Readyscotland.org, here. The workshop facilitated by Marie Stevens, entitled “Reflecting on the morning’s presentations”, gave delegates a chance to reflect and share perspectives on the morning presentations, including discussion on what inspired, surprised, or concerned them. Kate Anderson, Scottish Government: “Community Resilience Evaluation Toolkit” Kate’s presentation introduced attendees to the Community Resilience Evaluation Toolkit that Evaluation Support Scotland have developed in collaboration with a number of Scottish Community Resilience Groups. In order to raise awareness of its benefits, encourage more widespread use, and prompt stakeholder feedback, she talked delegates through the five stages of the toolkit, from selecting outcomes and indicators, through straightforward ways of collecting and analysing the information needed, and concluding with reporting and presenting findings, in addition to outlining plans for future dissemination. The aim of the toolkit itself is to provide community groups with an opportunity to reflect on what they are trying to achieve and how, and to demonstrate the value of building community resilience, identify and share good practice, and from Government’s perspective, to identify how to support communities or resilience partnerships at different stages of building and developing their resilience. The toolkit is available free of charge from Evaluation Support Scotland at: http://www.evaluationsupportscotland.org.uk/how-can-we-help/shared-learning-programmes/building-community-resilience/ Paul Laidlaw, Scottish Flood Forum: “Good practice framework for engaging with flood risk communities” Paul introduced a pilot Good Practice Framework, developed by the Scottish Flood Forum, and the National Centre for Resilience, which is intended to provide resources to assist responders engaging with communities affected by flooding. It is not prescriptive, but collates and highlights existing good practice

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from around Scotland. Paul talked to delegates about the research, feedback and dissemination processes behind the framework, before outlining the content, which includes case studies, notes, templates and checklists, and noted the importance of empowering, educating, engaging and encouraging communities. The Framework is available on Resilience Direct. Gill Moreton, the Rivers Centre: “Lifelines Scotland – the “Staying Well Road Trip””

Gill gave an update on the Lifelines Scotland e-learning module, developed with Scottish Government support and LIBOR funding. The Staying Well Road Trip is designed to support the health and well-being of volunteer emergency responders across Scotland. Lifelines resources are available to anyone, free of charge at www.lifelinesscotland.org Unlike other resources, it focuses on taking a holistic approach to staying well, and aims to build resilience during “slow times”, as well as during and immediately after incidents. It was put together with the assistance of many front-line volunteers from a number of organisations. Gill gave delegates a chance to view the ‘Staying Well Road-trip’ module and noted that some additional Scottish Government funding will allow her to continue to work on embedding and extending the reach of the modules over the next nine months. Gill will be promoting the use of the module, liaising with the blue light services, working on the delivery of further training, and looking at how to future-proof the long term use of the resource for Scottish responders. Jim Reville, Scottish Government: “Voluntary Sector and Resilience Partnersip integration” Jim explained that due to variable effectiveness of VS engagement across the country, consistently reported to VSRP, a project was commissioned to capture best practice and develop guidance to improve the integration of voluntary sector organisations into the RP structures across Scotland.

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A covering paper, developed in collaboration with VS and responder agencies, sets out the background, the context and the principles for the project, and a Memorandum of Understanding sets out a blue print for good working arrangements between responder agencies and the Voluntary Sector, providing a framework that can be adapted to fit local needs.

The MoU makes clear the wide range of expertise and assets the VS has to offer, covers what each party might expect of the other and encourages VS engagement at relevant RP planning meetings. The guidance also tackles tricky issues such as ‘liability and insurance’, ‘financial arrangements’ and ‘media and publicity’, as well as including a VS Code of Conduct .

Jim explained that the guidance is not a legal document, is not intended to be overly prescriptive, and sought to build upon existing arrangements that were working well. It was an attempt capture best practice from around Scotland and encourage improvement via an adaptive framework which RPs can use or borrow from to inform the way they work with voluntary sector partners.

Going forward, discussions with stakeholders continue to ensure that the guidance/MOU is as comprehensive and useful as possible when it is launched. The intention is to add all of the guidance to Preparing Scotland, with a letter to RRP Chairs issuing, in due course, to make all areas aware of the guidance. Contact:- Jim.Reville@gov.scot

Alan Simpson, Scottish Government: “Getting the most out of Resilience Direct” Alan spoke about the benefits of getting to grips with the full functionality of Resilience Direct, which can enhance information available to managers who may be called upon to lead, or contribute to, the management of a multi-agency event. Giving an overview of the content of the site, he covered the sections on organisations currently working in resilience (whether in Scotland or across the UK), the work of the RRPs, emergency contacts and plans and arrangements for response and recovery. As the learning and development co-ordinator for the West of Scotland RRP, Alan is happy to speak to individuals and groups about how they can get the most out of Resilience Direct. You can contact Alan at: Alan.Simpson3@gov.scot Becky Inglis, Scottish Government: “The Ready Scotland Campaign” Becky has extensive experience in the Scottish Government’s Marketing Unit, and brought that to bear on further developing the Ready Scotland Campaign. The Ready Scotland Campaign (RS) is a Scottish Government marketing

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campaign designed to promote resilience to Scottish households, communities and businesses. It is a key part of our strategic approach supporting more resilient communities.

It complements the Ready Scotland website and its key messages encourage the public to:

be informed (checking forecasts, signing up to Floodline, etc.),

be ready (preparations at home, on the road and at work); and

think of others (looking out for neighbours).

The campaign consists a combination of marketing activity in the form of local radio advertising and read-throughs by presenters, digital advertising and social media and partnership activity by stakeholders. These can be activated together (tier 1), or digital only (tier 2)

It is triggered by in response to weather warnings from the Met Office. If the warning is for heavy rain, particularly in conjunction with high winds, SEPA’s flooding communications team and duty flood advisor via SEPA’s Contact Centre will also be contacted before activation to ensure co-ordination with any flood awareness marketing activity.

Wendy Murray, East Haven Together: “Community Emergency Planning: East Haven Together” Wendy gave a fascinating talk from the perspective of a community engaging with resilience planning. East Haven is a small fishing village on the Angus coast, with an ageing population and no services within the village itself; although a number of risks were identified by the community, the ones Wendy focused on were access for emergency vehicles, unadopted roads and proximity to the sea. By proactively engaging with a number of stakeholders, such as Network Rail, the local authority, Scottish and Southern and Scottish and Southern Energy and RNLI, the community have been able to suggest innovative solutions to their risks, and have gone some way to making their village considerably safer. Jim Fraser, Scottish Borders Council: “Scottish Borders Resilient Communities Initiative” Jim spoke about his experience as a local authority resilience practitioner, supporting communities to become more resilient, in their preparedness,

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response and recovery. He discussed the contents of community emergency plans, and noted the benefits to communities themselves in creating and maintaining them, particularly in relation to both the increased safety of community members (especially those who are vulnerable) and their access to resources and support from their local authority. He also highlighted the Ready Scotland website, and local council websites, as sources of further information. Marie Stevens, Scottish Government: “Reflections on the morning presentations” While facilitating her workshop, Marie noticed two key commonalities; firstly, as was also noted in the formal feedback (see below), there was enthusiasm for delegates to be able to meet each other and share the breadth of work that they do. Even very basic networking opportunities allows those interested in resilience to link their work into (and benefit from) that of others in the field, collaborate on projects, and minimise duplication. Secondly, there was a great deal of positivity regarding the breadth of topics raised in the conference. The field of resilience in Scotland is varied and complex, and delegates were pleased that resilience was being considered broadly, rather than with a more narrowed focus. In particular, recognising the importance of issues such as social capital and the psychosocial impacts of resilience work were very welcome. During the workshop, discussion focused around three key themes: the importance of people as individuals, rather than units of measurement; managing the IEM cycle; and the relationship between statutory responders and volunteers. It can be tempting, particularly for those in large organisations, to focus too heavily on policy and procedures, at the expense of managing people. However, delegates recognised that good leadership and good people were what will make the difference in driving resilience forward. That perspective can be further expanded to consider social capital – an important point within Carol Tannahill’s keynote speech – and that if we are to ‘mainstream’ resilience, we need to encourage and support it. Adjusting our focus to include social capital will inevitably raise issues around inequalities, which has long been an issue on the minds of those seeking to improve resilience in Scotland. Centralisation and austerity measures means that a proportion of the most vulnerable population are at risk of losing out. It seems likely that approaches to address such inequalities in resilience will be a theme of the work of our community over the coming year.

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Ensuring that we balance and manage the IEM cycle is also something we are continually working on. In previous years, a focus on the response element of the cycle led to some excellent work on developing plans and preparation. However, it is now important to ensure that adequate attention is given to risk assessment and recovery phases, and that we do not constrain the response phase with overly restrictive plans; our plans need to ensure maximum flexibility in response, allowing for the involvement of assets – particularly community and volunteer groups. Similarly, our opportunities for exercising need to be flexible and practical; to ensure that groups get the most benefit out of exercises which are tailored (in scope and content) to their size, capacity and circumstances. Finally, some delegates noted an almost inverse relationship between statutory responders and volunteer responders, at least in “slow time”, depending on whether the response is urban or rural. In urban areas response is often firmly focused on statutory responders, with relatively little community involvement. In urban areas, as in the response to the Grenfell Tower Fire, an overwhelming demand to engage can “emerge” from communities around where an emergency occurs. In contrast, rural areas see far more engaged and active communities in slow time and routinely during incidents – particularly when remote locations make it difficult for statutory responders to reach them quickly and safely. Although models of community resilience in urban areas look very different to that in rural areas, it is true that urban community resilience to civil contingencies is under-researched. This is in part because, communities are comparatively more based around shared interest and identity rather than geography. However, this does not mean that individuals are less likely to volunteer on behalf of their community, only that such volunteering may look different. Clearly we must learn to recognise and work with a mixed economy of urban community resilience, and identify the best way to support it.

Jennifer Rao-Williams Centre for Environmental Change

and Human Resilience University of Dundee

Kate Anderson Resilience Division

Scottish Government

Ralph Throp Resilience Division

Scottish Government

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Annexe A: Conference Format and Feedback Who was there? In order to deliver the conference objective it was important to have a broad range of participants, from a range of sectors, and an open invitation was sent out to resilience stakeholders. Due to high levels of oversubscription at the 2016 conference, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service kindly offered the use of their facilities so that participant numbers could be doubled to 200. The extra space enabled a range of participants to attend from local and national government, statutory responders, third sector organisations, community groups, and corporate organisations, with 186 delegates signed up. What happened on the day? Please see Annex C for the agenda of the day, which lists the speakers and workshops. You can find the speakers slides at Ready Scotland. In addition to the talks and workshops, a variety of exhibition stands were set up in the reception and entrance, demonstrating the work of some of the organisations there. There were also a number of emergency vehicles available in the car park outside for delegates to view. Feedback on the conference On the day of the conference, all delegates were asked to fill in feedback sheets. Forty seven responses were receive. The overall usefulness of the day, on a scale of 1 – 9 (where 9 is optimal), received a mean score of 7.9. The importance of networking, sharing good practice and building relationships was a recurring theme in at least a third of respondents feedback; it was valued as part of the day, delegates said they would like more opportunities to network in future conferences, and many said that networking would be an explicit action they would work on after attending the conference. One of the most positive aspects of the day from this perspective was the diversity of the delegates themselves, and particularly the presence of

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several community council representatives who were all keen to share best practice. The actions that respondents said they would take after the day were extremely wide-ranging, reflecting the diversity of the delegates themselves; some were very strategic, focusing on issues such as cascading the information from the conference within networks and organisations and concentrating on improving cross-organisational communications. However, a large proportion focused on the practical work within community resilience groups - many respondents mentioned creating, reviewing or updating their community plans, while others simply discussed their keenness to get involved or reinvigorate stalled community resilience initiatives. The information provided throughout the day on voluntary sector working arrangements, and available resources and services was clearly valued, and a number of respondents noted their intention to investigate these further. When asked what was most useful, many people talked about the actual sessions; interestingly, while Carol Tannahill’s keynote speech and Robert Colburn’s discussion of the Grenfell Tower response were both mentioned the most, there was a very even spread of each of the other sessions being mentioned by a few people. This indicates both the breadth of delegates and the range of focus that they bring and, encouragingly, implies that the range of content was well designed to meet the needs of a diverse group of stakeholders. There was a lot of learning to take from the day; many delegates proposed a longer day to allow for more workshop time, in addition to broadening out the workshops to allow for more discussion, Q&A, and input from delegates themselves. There was also a desire for greater recognition of the range of experience and situations of the delegates; several of the community resilience group representatives were keen to see workshops aimed at their experience, including more focus on the practical approaches to smaller incidents, and a reduction in exclusionary practices such as excessive use of acronyms. Logistically, it was also clear that where large changes are made to organisation, such as a change of venue or significantly increasing the numbers of delegates, the practical implications are considered and planned for – for example, adjusting the registration approach to avoid long queues.

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Annexe B: Agenda

Time Subject Speaker

09:30-

10:00 Registration – refreshments available

10:00-

10:20 Welcome and introduction.

Scottish Government’s vision

for resilient communities.

Jim Urquhart (Chair), Ralph Throp,

Scottish Government

10:20-

11:00 Keynote speech

“Strong and Resilient Communities”: All things to all people, or a joined up approach?

Professor Carol Tannahill, Chief

Social Policy Adviser to the Scottish

Government.

11:00-

11:25

Working in the space between statutory responders and the community – experience from the Grenfell Tower fire.

Robert Colburn, Emergency Response

Operations Manager Scotland, British

Red Cross

11:25-

11:40 Break – refreshments available

11:30-

11:55

11:55-

12:20

12:20-

12:40

Communities and crises

Placing values and ethics at the heart of critical decision making.

A positive narrative? Working with the media to promote effective community response and recovery.

Panel Q&A

Ewan Stewart:

The Care

Inspectorate

Andrew Cassell:

Media Consultant

12:40-

13:45 Lunch - Exhibition, vehicles and networking.

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Workshops and presentations (each will be run twice) 13.45–14.35 And 14:40-15:20

Auditorium Presentations and Q&A (100 people)

Workshop 1: Working together (25 people)

Workshop 2 Communicating well (25 people)

Workshop 3 Community engagement (25 people)

Outside Tour (25 people)

Community Resilience Evaluation Toolkit (Kate Anderson, SG) Good practice framework for engaging with flood risk communities. (Scottish Flood Forum) Lifelines Project Resources. (Gill Moreton, the Rivers Centre)

SG/SFRS Voluntary Sector/RRP integration framework (Jim Reville, SG) Getting the most out of Resilience Direct (Alan Simpson, SG)

The Ready Scotland campaign. (Scottish Government Social Marketing team) “Fast time” comms: Good practice from incident comms in the last year. (Chris Starrs, Police Scotland)

Community Emergency Planning: “Our Easthaven” (Wendy Murray) Scottish Borders Resilient Communities Initiative (Jim Fraser, Scottish Borders Council)

Tour of SFRS College training facilities

15:20-15:30

Concluding remarks and close (plenary) Ralph Throp/Jim Urquhart: (Scottish Government)