The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 has provided the UK’s legislative framework for emergency preparedness for more than two decades. It establishes the roles and responsibilities of organisations involved in preparing for and responding to emergencies, as well as the emergency powers available to government in the most serious circumstances.
The UK Government is now reviewing the Act and its accompanying Regulations as part of the statutory five-yearly review of the Regulations, and has published a Call for Views. There is an obvious audience for that consultation: emergency responders, Local Resilience Forums (LRFs), public bodies, infrastructure operators and those working professionally in emergency planning and business continuity. But I think there is a much wider audience who should take a look, particularly those whose work touches on the infrastructure, technologies, institutions and communities that shape our collective resilience.
The systems on which society depends are increasingly interconnected, technologically mediated and interdependent. Cyber incidents, digital infrastructure, data dependencies, communications platforms, AI-enabled systems, complex supply chains and the integrity of the information environment all create dependencies that cut across traditional organisational and sectoral boundaries.
Resilience is therefore not simply a question of individual organisations being prepared for emergencies. It is increasingly a property of complex socio-technical systems — involving technology and infrastructure, but also institutions, organisations, communities and people. Understanding how those systems behave under shocks and stresses, where dependencies and vulnerabilities sit, and how disruption can cascade from one system into another requires perspectives from well beyond the traditional resilience community.
This is not an entirely new observation; in 2022, the National Preparedness Commission published an independent review of the Civil Contingencies Act and its supporting arrangements, which argued strongly for a more integrated, whole-of-society approach to resilience. Four years later, the current Call for Views explicitly recognises that risks are becoming more interconnected, with impacts capable of cascading across administrative boundaries, communities, services and the economy.
It asks whether the structures established under the Act remain fit for purpose in that environment, including questions about local resilience, critical national infrastructure (CNI), the voluntary, community and faith sector, and national resilience arrangements. It also comes at a time of significant machinery-of-government change, alongside developments in devolution and the organisation of public services.
In Wales, this sits within a distinct resilience landscape: the Wales Resilience Framework 2025 sets out a whole-of-society approach to resilience across devolved and reserved responsibilities, with an explicit commitment to work with partners across the UK.
This makes the Call for Views relevant to people working across a much broader range of fields: universities and research; digital, data, cyber and critical infrastructure; utilities and communications; businesses and industry; local government and public services; voluntary and community organisations; and preparedness, risk and business continuity.
This broader conception of resilience is also reflected in the refreshed DCMS Areas of Research Interest document published in May. Resilience is one of the cross-cutting research themes, reflecting the importance of social, cultural and information infrastructure during periods of disruption, as well as the need for a whole-of-society approach to managing shocks and longer-term change. More broadly, the ARIs emphasise the value of drawing evidence from across academia, industry, civil society and communities when addressing complex policy questions.
That breadth of evidence matters here, particularly because you do not need to have a view on every aspect of the Civil Contingencies Act to contribute to this Call for Views. The consultation explicitly says that respondents are not obliged to answer every question. If your expertise or experience relates to a particular aspect of resilience — perhaps infrastructure, cyber, communications, local delivery, community capacity or how organisations respond to disruption — you can concentrate on the questions where you have something useful to contribute.
Where changes are proposed, the consultation is also looking for clear evidence. Reviewing legislation as significant as the Civil Contingencies Act should be informed not only by those who operate formally within the resilience system, but by evidence and experience from the much wider set of systems, sectors, organisations, communities and citizens upon which societal resilience ultimately depends.
There is an important national conversation taking place about resilience, and some of the people whose evidence we need may not yet realise that they are part of it.
The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 Call for Views closes on 5 October 2026.
Digital Society & Policy 