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Civil emergency whole system preparedness: 2025 report

Report on whole system civil emergency preparedness 2025 - COVID-19 recommendation eight.


5. Engagement

The Devolved Governments and UK Government

We recognise the value in sharing good practice and learning from others, in our continuing drive to improve. The Scottish Government is closely engaged in four nations structures on resilience. The Scottish Government has well established and positive working relationships with UK Government and Devolved Governments and will continue to work with them on a wide array of matters including risk assessment, operations and exercises as well as working together to establish such groups as a Four Nations Ministerial Group. The risks and threats that we face transcend borders, so working together ensures that we are continually improving our understanding of resilience, risk and preparedness across the UK.

Voluntary and Community Sector

The involvement of the voluntary sector is crucial to ensuring the resilience of communities, and voluntary sector organisations are supported to collaborate effectively with categorised responders. The Voluntary Sector Resilience Partnership brings together voluntary and public sector response organisations and encourages collaboration and improvement between them.

We recognise the power of bringing people together to share their experiences and learn from one another. In 2024, the Scottish Government hosted The Scottish Resilient Communities Conference, bringing together resilience practitioners from statutory and voluntary and community sectors with policy makers and academics to focus on empowering local communities to better prepare for and respond to emergencies. The event had a strong emphasis on collaboration, innovation, and practical action. The face-to face conference was followed-up by a series of online workshops to build on, and maintain, effective connections across the sector.

The Scottish Government is working on plans to build on the engagement around the 2024 conference by bringing together stakeholders later in 2025, and in 2026.

The Scottish Government takes action to strengthen and improve whole society resilience by mainstream and embedding community resilience in emergencies across a range of policy areas and published strategies plans including the Scottish National Adaptation Plan 2024-2029, the Disability Equality Plan, the National Flood Resilience Strategy and the Volunteering Action Plan. It also encourages collaboration across and between sectors, providing advice and support to empower communities to identify and address their resilience priorities at a community level, and raising public awareness of risks, and sensible measures that can be taken by individuals and households.

National Centre for Resilience

The Scottish Government established the National Centre for Resilience in 2014. The National Centre for Resilience, hosted by the University of Glasgow, is a cross-sector partnership, which brings together Scottish universities, the Scottish Government and responder organisations. The National Centre for Resilience is in place to support resilience professionals and organisations to build Scotland’s resilience to significant natural hazard events by enabling and facilitating knowledge development and exchange between resilience experts and professionals, policy developers, researchers and communities to promote a whole society approach to emergency resilience.

In recent years the National Centre for Resilience has supported local authorities and practitioners with tailored training and capacity-building resources, while third sector organisations and communities have been supported through project funding and educational tools that foster grassroots resilience. These have included community-led resilience plans, flood preparedness toolkits, regional food resilience action planning, and education-based workshops in schools and colleges.

By March 2025 their children’s preparedness education project, an interactive educational game, “Are You Prepared?” which was designed as an educational toolkit, reached all Scottish primary schools. The resources were also delivered to local authorities, categorised responders, Members of the Scottish Parliament, the House of Lords, and the UK Cabinet Office. The game has been adopted by education providers and emergency services across the UK, with evaluation underway in partnership with UK Health Security Agency.

Contact

Email: civilcontingenciespolicyteam@gov.scot

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