Public Accounts Committee

Oral evidence: Government resilience: extreme weather, HC 454

Wednesday 21 February 2024

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 21 February 2024.

Watch the meeting

Members present: Dame Meg Hillier (Chair); Olivia Blake; Sir Geoffrey CliftonBrown; Mr Jonathan Djanogly; Ben Lake; Anne Marie Morris.

Gareth Davies, Comptroller and Auditor General, Sian Jones, National Audit Office Director, and Marius Gallaher, Alternate Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, were in attendance.

Questions 1-139

Witnesses

I: Matthew Clarke, Resilience Director, Cabinet Office; Professor Penelope Endersby, Chief Executive, Met Office; Tamara Finkelstein CB, Permanent Secretary, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Roger Hargreaves, Director, COBR Unit, Cabinet Office; Clive Martin, Head of the Government Risk Profession, Government Finance Function. 

Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General

Government resilience: extreme weather (HC 314)

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Matthew Clarke, Professor Penelope Endersby, Tamara Finkelstein, Roger Hargreaves and Clive Martin.

Q1 Chair: Welcome to the Public Accounts Committee on Wednesday 21 February 2024. Today we are looking at how the Government handle resilience against major events. We are particularly focusing on extreme weather as an example, but we are keen to look at Government’s resilience more generally. There have been some major weather events recently: severe storms, high temperatures, droughts. They have all had a huge impact on individuals, businesses and communities, and they highlight the huge challenges faced by the UK from these risks. Of course, we recently came through the pandemic, which underlined the need to have resilience built into the system to deal with future emergencies. There are mechanisms in place, and we are grateful to the National Audit Office for its previous work for us on risk, and obviously for its Report that we are looking at today particularly focusing on extreme weather.

Extreme weather is really an illustrative example for this session, and we want to look more widely at the resilience issues in Government. This Committee has previously urged Government to set up a national risk office to deal with these issues, as we have in the banking world. We are pleased to have Mr Clive Martin here, who is currently the nearest thing we have to that. I will introduce our witnesses, but before I do so I want to thank everyone who has contributed. A lot of really good evidence from other bodies has been submitted, so apologies if we do not do it all justice today, but it has helped us in our preparation and will help us in writing our Report.

I will introduce the witnesses. It is a real pleasure to welcome Professor Penelope Endersby, the Chief Executive of the Met Office. She is next to Tamara Finkelstein, known to this Committee as the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Next to her is Matthew Clarke, who is the Resilience Director at the Cabinet Office, and next to him is Roger Hargreaves, who is the director of the COBR unit at the Cabinet Office. There is also Clive Martin, who is head of the Government risk profession and the Government finance function at the Cabinet Office. A warm welcome to you all.

Ordinarily, we would have the accounting officer for the Cabinet Office here, but he is about to leave the civil service. We just want to flag now that we will continue to raise this discussion with his successor, and we expect a follow-up session with them when they are appointed. Thank you very much indeed for coming. We have no declarations of interest or anything to raise at the top, so I will go straight to you, Mr Clarke. How resilient do you think the UK is currently? A big question.

Matthew Clarke: I want to start on how the Government define resilience, which is the ability to withstand or quickly recover from a difficult situation, but also to get ahead of those risks and tackle the challenges before they manifest. This covers the UK’s ability to anticipate, assess, prevent, mitigate, respond and recover from those risks. We as the Resilience Directorate have put out key new governance, processes, capabilities, training and products in the last 18 months, which means that we are better prepared across all these dimensions. I hope I will have the opportunity to talk more about them today.

Our capabilities assessment included looking at plans and procedures, personnel across the system, infrastructure and logistics, equipment and supplies, legislation and doctrine. That is really looking across the piece and testing against benchmarks how well set up we are for resilience across Government. 

The UK is generally a resilient country. We have stable utilities supplies and, by and large, people go about their day-to-day business without having to worry about there being clean water to drink or electricity coming out of the sockets. Of course, we cannot be complacent on that. In the 2023-24 winter season, we responded to 10 named storms. 242,000 properties were better protected across England by flood and coastal risk management schemes during Storms Babet, Ciarán and Henk, which was a significant success when compared with approximately 6,300 flooded. To reiterate that, there were 242,000 protected and 6,300 flooded, but that is not to downplay the impact of that. The fact that there was no escalation to the COBR unit, or that a COBR Committee-level response was not required, for any of those storms is testimony to our effective response structures at the local and national levels. 

Of course we are committed to strengthening UK resilience, and we have done that by creating the Resilience Directorate, of which I am the head of resilience, and the new cross-Government Governance for Resilience, which is overseen by the Deputy Prime Minister. We have a far-reaching plan, the resilience framework, that stretches to 2030, which is to strengthen our national resilience. That resilience framework was published in December 2020 in fulfilment of a commitment made in the integrated review. We are now working to deliver that plan. May I say just a little more?

Chair: Briefly.

Matthew Clarke: In December, the Deputy Prime Minister provided the first update to Parliament on resilience, and that was accompanied by the implementation update, which set out a range of activities that have been put in place—I can talk about those in more detail later perhaps—such as the national risk register, the capabilities assessment and the work that we are doing on critical national infrastructure. That really shows that good progress has been made and we are in a good place on resilience.

                            Chair:

Q2 One of the things here is determining the risk appetite of Government. I am not quite sure where that falls, if we talk less about the weather and more about the general resilience. What is the risk appetite? It is perhaps a difficult question for you to answer alone, but you have to put up advice to Ministers about the various risks in front of us, and what level of risk we take. There will always be a risk for Government, so what is the risk appetite of Government, and how do you determine that and advise on it?

Matthew Clarke: I can talk a bit about how we think about that as a concept. It will very much depend on the risk in question, of course, and will involve understanding the impacts of those risks. First off, we have the national security risk assessment. That defines the key risks that we need to be prepared for across the country, and what the impacts of those risks would be. In terms of risk appetite, that is the equation—what do we do about those risks? What is the appetite to act on those? What is the residual risk, and how do you want to act on those? That is the data, which we are collating across the system. We have done the capabilities assessment, which looks at how well-prepared Departments are. We are looking across the critical national infrastructure, the interdependencies, and where those vulnerabilities may be. It is really a case-by-case decision to be taken to Ministers, where we say, “This is the risk. This is how wellprepared we are for it. These are where the vulnerabilities sit. This would be the action that we could take against those risks, and these would be the costs and potentially the trade-offs.” Ministers can then make a rational decision based on that, but as I say, it will be case-by-case versus the full resilience system—this is the risk appetite there.

Q3 Chair: Let me turn to Mr Martin, as head of the risk profession. Every Department will make its own assessment, and as Mr Clarke says, there is the national risk register, with 89 major national risks on it, and there are other risks at different levels. Who is overseeing what the balance is between those, because there is going to be a finite amount of money in any situation? It will ultimately go all the way to the top, and the Prime Minister would have to decide on these things across the piece. What is the best practice, and what work still needs to be done in Government to ensure that we have a full, whole-Government approach to risk? What needs to improve?

Clive Martin: Risk appetite is quite easy to seek and quite difficult to express sometimes, but it is always important to consider. My colleagues do that in relation to the sorts of risks they were outlining earlier on. That is both risk by risk and sometimes in aggregate, in terms of what sort of responses would work well, whatever causes the disruption in the first place. More broadly, risk management decisions in Government follow the governance arrangements of Governments, and therefore flow from Departments through permanent secretaries and Ministers to Cabinet ultimately. To support that activity there is cross-Government work that is done through meetings of the civil service board, for example, where they talk about cross-cutting risks in order to be able to support the decision making through the line management and Government governance arrangements.

Matthew Clarke: We have had several tests.

Matthew Clarke: Again, this comes back to the national security risk assessment, the national risk register and the capability assessment that underpins that. It is about really ensuring that we have those generic capabilities in place. If there is a power outage, that will have knock-on impacts for other sectors and Departments. We know that the Departments are fit and ready to stand up and respond to what might be a power outage incident, but equally you will find that during a pandemic, for example, you will see similar challenges, whether it be schools staying open or testing the health system or the local response and the central Government response. It is really testing that that system is fit to go for whatever might be thrown at it in terms of challenges.

Tamara Finkelstein: It might be helpful to say how that plays through for a Department. That capabilities work and assessment, and the outcome of the exercise that Dr Clarke set out about the power outage,

gave information to my executive committee. We looked at that and, as a result, we have set up a resilience board and asked for quite a lot of information so that we can track our improvements against those capabilities because of that assessment, which we will be able to feed back.

I have noted quite a step up, with the creation of Dr Clarke’s team and that kind of work, in the way in which we look at these issues against others. When I look at my risk register, alongside some of the big corporate risks, we have added looking at the NSRA risks and at some of the other information we are getting from that directorate, and some of our very near-term risks. We look at that as a package. We have definitely taken a step up in that direction.

There is a real challenge about risk appetite. On the two areas in the Report concerning us, on drought, we have set a one-in-500-year risk of drought to protect against and for water companies to do plans against. We look at those, and they set their investment alongside meeting that. We had conversations before on flooding and whether we have got that in the right place. Both you and the National Infrastructure Commission have challenged us on that, and we will be looking at what works in that space. It is just really hard to get something that will work. I do think that the team is right in saying that we need to look at that in particular areas, and then we need to look at our investment against that. 

You could say, “Well, what’s our risk overall?” and look at the set of resilience risks, but in the end that is competing against other financial questions. Really, it has all got to come together in a spending review where I think this set of risks and adaptation risks, which I am sure we will come to, are looked at alongside other things in a strengthened way. That is how I perceive it. 

Chair: I am going to bring in Professor Endersby.

Professor Endersby: Thank you. For risks where we are the lead Government Department—particularly for heat, where the risk may not be stable; with climate change, we know that some weather and climate risks are escalating—we have the capability to predict, to some extent, how those will escalate, and we do respond to that. 

We introduced the heat warning in 2021 ahead of the extreme heat in 2022. It might not have been the next year, but it was not luck that we added that tool to the Government’s playbook. Equally, in one of the areas where we anticipate there will be an increasing risk, surface water flooding, there is work going on between us and DEFRA to prepare for that, because it is an area where forecasting, warning and responding are particularly challenging.

Q14               Chair: Indeed. We touched on that in a previous inquiry, and we will come on to that in more detail. 

Finally before I pass on to Mr Lake, I want to go back to Mr Clarke. One of the things we have been puzzling over as we have been looking at this is what are the measures for what a good outcome will look like. You spoke earlier about how 6,000 properties were flooded but 242,000 were saved. Was there a measure in that? Why are you not getting more direct measures so you can be clear what you have achieved? It is interesting that the Australian Government have issued statements of responsibilities for the different bodies involved. If you could answer both those questions, please, then I will move on. 

Matthew Clarke: Certainly. Coming first to the responsibilities, there is a lead Government Department list, which sets out very clearly the roles and responsibilities of Government Departments for the sectors they are responsible for. In addition, the Civil Contingencies Act sets out very clearly the roles of the response community, effectively. 

reluctant to do that? Is it a reluctance or is it just too hard to do? Tell us. 

Matthew Clarke: It is not reluctance. Can I properly explain this? I think it comes to standards, assurance, goals and targets. I wanted to properly explain this, because it speaks to many of the recommendations in the Report. 

I think it is part of the same conversation. Standards can codify and provide the means to meet the goals and targets and then assurance, of course, can—

Matthew Clarke: We are doing the work to decide how the Government should take forward that requirement to put standards in place by 2030, but I am just saying that there is a complex interaction between regulations. Do you want to have regulations underpinning those standards and targets and the measurement of those goals, or is it of a voluntary nature? Are you relying on independent regulators, for example, to make sure that those standards that you have defined or they have defined are being met? 

There is definitely the work happening. I have met the Institute of Regulation, the UK Regulators Network, all sorts of critical national infrastructure sectors, to understand the approach that should be taken on the standards and the appropriate goals, and in many cases they are in place. For example, there is a guaranteed standard of performance that Ofgem has in place for the electricity sector—a system restoration standard whereby the system has to be brought back within a defined period if it goes down. 

the devolved administrations, the private and voluntary sectors, and the public are”. Have I misunderstood an answer that was given earlier?

Roger Hargreaves: The Civil Contingencies Act sets out clearly, in a way that has been copied in many countries around the world, a precise set of expectations around the fullest possible range of response organisations. The obvious gap in it—the big question that is addressed in the resilience framework—is whether there should be a set of parallel standards in relation to what central Government do. That is why there is a commitment in that framework to do precisely that bit of work. 

Matthew Clarke: Further to that, you mentioned “whole of society”, which is one of the three legs of the stool for the resilience framework: an understanding of the risks, prevention is better than cure, and a whole-ofsociety approach. That is why we are engaging. We have been in existence for 18 months and we have put out a lot of really foundational products, like the national risk register. There is more to come, like a public website so the public know what their response activities can be and how they can be prepared. There is a survey due on the public perception of risk and on the back of that we will work out again how to engage with the public and how to really take forward actions that resonate with them and they can take. We have a voluntary sector forum where, again, we are effectively consulting them and taking their views on how we can best encode their contributions. We are setting up a voluntary index so people can link into those volunteering activities as well. There is a golden thread through all we do, which is whole-of-society resilience, and we have that commitment to encode and build that in as we go forward. 

Q26 Ben Lake: Thank you. In that regard, I am interested to better understand the way in which various public bodies and, indeed, the private sector will understand the responsibilities and whether there is a central authority—it may well be yourselves—that undertakes regular checks to ensure that, first, a public authority in Wales will understand its roles and responsibilities, and secondly, that it has the funding and resourcing and the capability to fulfil those roles and responsibilities. Is there a central authority that would have that overarching view of things?

Matthew Clarke: In the sense that I am the head of resilience and I am therefore responsible for setting direction and the framework that supports all resilience, that is partly me. However, you mentioned Wales, and I work very closely with our colleagues in the devolved nations as well. The roles and responsibilities are clear and we are doing the work to set that out further. 

When it comes to spend, in the autumn statement the Chancellor announced a £10 million fund, which is really to get the analysis that underpins where that money is best spent and where there are fiscal or economic risks involved. The work is being done to underpin that and what we are thinking closely about as a directorate is working across Government so we can think across departmental boundaries about the system that we want here. So, where there may be a case for spend in one Department but perhaps the money is better spent on a resilience activity in another Department, we can have that conversation and look at the trade-offs between those policies. That is very much the approach we take, including on important things like climate adaptation. 

arrive more slowly, so we get to net zero and so on. We then have the second part—adaptation—which is about looking at the long-term change. Ultimately, the temperature is going to go up and we need to adapt. That is all part of resilience. You have the reactive bit—the one-off or shorterterm things that will happen—and then you have the long term. 

I am failing to hear, because it is as much a risk as the short term, what is in your plan or what the Government are doing in terms of managing the long term. I heard a little bit from Ms Finkelstein in terms of flooding and drought. If we take schools, for example, are we looking at changing school hours, as they do in continental Europe? Are we looking at when shops open, given the heat in the day? How much time are the Government spending on that longer-term part of “resilience”, which we have all called “adaptation”? It seems less attractive and urgent, but actually it is at least as urgent.

Matthew Clarke: It is at least as urgent, and I would not argue against it being equally important. I should probably turn to colleagues here, who can talk about the national adaptation programme, but I will first say that at the centre we are very seized of adaptation. I co-chair with a director in DEFRA the climate resilience steering board, which really ensures that, at a senior level across Whitehall, we are really considering what those climate adaptation impacts will be and building that into our resilience plans as well.

Matthew Clarke: But they are systemic things, I think. 

So far, I think we are on to the third report from the Climate Change Committee on adaptation and I have yet to see much that convinces me that we really have thought about what we need to put in place, given where we are predicting the climate is going to take us, to make sure that society works in a way that is appropriate. That is more than what Ms Finkelstein is doing, and what you are doing is brilliant. What about everybody else? 

Tamara Finkelstein: I have some responsibilities across the wider piece that I should ’fess up to. You described the work that we do on mitigation. It is the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero that has that responsibility: how are we responding on mitigating climate change? DEFRA leads on exactly what you are describing, which is: how are we adapting to climate change?

At the beginning of 2022, we asked, “Well, what is the UK’s climate change risk assessment, which we need to ensure that we are adapting against?” Actually, we get the Climate Change Committee to do that for us, but it is owned by the Government. We then have that risk assessment. 

We spent the time from then until we published this programme in the middle of 2023 doing our work, led by DEFRA but as a whole-ofGovernment effort. We said, “We have these 61 risks out of this risk assessment. Half of them are DEFRA ones that we have to deal with, but the rest are right across Government,” as you described. “What actions are we going to take to deal with these risks, which are long-running risks?”

Out of that, we have a programme with over 500 actions of things that we do. In some of the areas that I own they are things like the big flood defence programme, but there are also things for heat, like what we are going to do about our buildings and how we build them to be appropriate for extremes of heat. We then assess how we are doing against those actions, and develop the right indicators to see how we are doing against them. It is a big, whole-of-Government approach. 

One of the things that we committed to in the programme is that we would work with the Cabinet Office, because that helps us to get leverage right across Government. Dr Clarke talked about the committee that he jointly chairs with DEFRA, which brings everyone together, including the Treasury, because it is totally critical that we fund these things. That is what we have got in place. 

Q35 Anne Marie Morris: I hear what you say, Ms Finkelstein, but even in the NAO Report it is clear that there is a great concern that there is no Government goal focused on what you are trying to achieve to deal with the adaptation piece. Without goals, you are certainly not going to be able to achieve them and you will not be able to measure whether you have succeeded. 

You are right; there are some things outside DEFRA. You have been looking at what you do about managing heat in homes. There are a number of discrete things. But you have not looked holistically at how people live their lives, and what it is that we are going to have to change in the way we live our lives. What is going on in the other Government Departments? There is a bit about Health, but dealing with the increasing number of people with heatstroke going into hospital isn’t going to cut it. I think that my ask is about what more you are going to do, because DEFRA shouldn’t be 50%; actually, you should be about 20%.

Tamara Finkelstein: When you look at the risks, a lot of them end up being quite significant environmental risks of that kind. That is why. But it is absolutely wide ranging. We do have a clear vision about what we want to do. We want to be a country that plans for and adapts to climate change and has resilience against each of those risks.

Anne Marie Morris: But that’s not a goal.

Tamara Finkelstein: That is what we planned against. We planned against managing all those risks. We are doing more to ask, “What are we measuring overall, in terms of our levels of resilience?” We are doing some more work on that measurement to improve it, and Dr Clarke might be able to give some more information on what we are doing. 

I would not pretend that we are doing everything that we need to do— there is a lot more to do—but we have taken a huge step forward in identifying what needs to be done. Some of that is about how we work with the public. Some of what we have to do on adapting to drought is around how much water we use and getting to 110 litres a day from 140 litres a day. There are things that are very much about how you engage the public, and there are ways in which we are looking to involve the public more in understanding more about what resilience means and various things that, Dr Clarke, you are building in your area.

Matthew Clarke: Can I come back, just once?

Anne Marie Morris: By all means. 

I am getting from this discussion too much of, “We’re thinking about the emergency measures once it’s happened,” and not enough about how we prevent the thing in the first place. Ms Morris’s questions on adaptation certainly come into that category. Can you reassure me that I am wrong and that we are doing more to think about prevention?

Roger Hargreaves: I think it is worth saying that we are in the business of disruptive events—those moments where the demands on Government accelerate very fast. I am looking at the immediate operational response to those and a six-month-out timeframe. The head of resilience is looking at longer timeframes, but that is still about building capabilities in relation to disruptive events. There is an important point of transition, as you go further into the future, where planning for disruptive events runs into planning for broader policy challenges. We are not the be-all and end-all of the Government’s work around extreme weather, or adaptation more generally; we are one part of a system for responding to it.

Q38 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: With great respect, Mr Hargreaves, you have just played straight into my analysis. You are saying that you are thinking about emergency measures for how to deal with it once it has happened. Mr Martin, you know I am very keen on the Government having a chief risk officer. We don’t want to rehearse that all again, but I am not sure that I am getting from this discussion that there is enough going on around the prevention part of those three Ps.

Chair: Mr Martin, your oversight on risk is what we are really after. What could be being done better?

Clive Martin: We have to take good risks in pursuit of opportunity, so prevention needs to be economic prevention, however we decide to measure that. More broadly, the risk management strategy that I have been focused on implementing involves improving the risk management capability of Government, and that can apply to any aspect of riskiness; it involves improving—increasing—the professionalism and the credibility of all those involved; and it includes increasing cross-boundary working. All those things will help, on any aspect of risk, whether it is pre-event work done for prevention purposes or pre-event work done for a post-event type of scenario.

One of the things we have been producing is a suite of toolkits. We do it in collaboration with a Department and then make it available to everyone— it is a faster way of doing things. One of the toolkits we have produced in the last year in collaboration with a Department is a risk scenario planning toolkit. We have worked with the resilience directorate’s activity going on with GO-Science to make sure that we have a cohesive set of tools that are available to Departments. 

Ours is practical and pragmatic in terms of leveraging from financial services capabilities and thinking about what we might need to do now to either avoid or deal with longer-term impacts. That fits with the higherlevel stuff that Dr Clarke was talking about earlier: the big themes and systemic shifts in people and movements that may need to occur. Through those toolkits and through the other work we are doing, which I can detail if you would like me to, I think we are making improvements in that space.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Dr Clarke, do you want to come in on that?

Matthew Clarke: I will just say one thing briefly, and apologies if I have not made the whole purpose of the resilience directorate clear. I talked about three legs of the stool—three fundamental principles of the reason for setting up the resilience directorate—the first of which, as I said, is a shared understanding of the risks, so thinking ahead and being prepared. The second is that prevention is better than cure. If things go wrong and there needs to be a response activity, that is very much for Mr Hargreaves and the outfit he runs across Government. The third one is that doing resilience is a whole-of-society business. But heavily encoded into the work that I do—one of the three key, fundamental principles—is that prevention is better than cure. That is why we have all the activities that we have been putting in place.

Q39 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: That is a really helpful answer. Can I take you to paragraph 9? I have got a bit of experience in what I am about to ask you. In the whole of the BSE crisis, we used to have emergency meetings every day of about 30 people sitting around a huge Government table. The net result of those meetings was that nobody knew what they were supposed to do, because everybody had chipped in with their little bit and there was no overall strategy. The BSE crisis was a very serious crisis. You were a long way from DEFRA at the time, Ms Finkelstein, but there was a proposal during that whole crisis that every single beast in this country was going to be slaughtered.

I will take you to paragraph 9 and we will look at the list of bodies and committees that are involved, rather than going back to the BSE crisis. I have highlighted them. They include the National Situation Centre to bring in data; a resilience director; COBR, which we all know about; a resilience sub-committee of the National Security Council, and a resilience forum. The Cabinet Office also appointed a head of resilience, and there is the Treasury’s climate resilience board. It seems to me that far too many people are involved, and if too many people are involved, they are all shuffling off responsibility to one another, which is exactly what happened in the BSE crisis. It seems to me that you need a simple system, so that everybody knows, in a given emergency, who is doing what. 

Roger Hargreaves: What you have there is a list of organisations that play a role on a whole range of risks, both in the preparatory phase and in the response phase. The response to emergencies is run in a much more streamlined form. You have the COBR committee, which brings together Ministers or officials. That is supported by my unit. The National Situation Centre services us in respect of data. That is a transformative change, which we introduced over the last two years. Ministers gather, they make decisions and they do that in a much more streamlined way than they would do ordinarily in Cabinet committees or Cabinet itself, though it has all the authority of those committees. So it is a very clear system in practice.

The other organisations—for example, NSCR, which is the resilience ministerial committee—are effectively for peacetime planning. So of your three, the proactivity bit is clear, and some of those things relate to the proactivity bit, but the planning task is done through the other structures. They are different in design, and that is why we use different things for different jobs.

Matthew Clarke: I am confident that we have a very good programme of work in place, framed by the resilience framework. We have spent the last 18 months putting in place those really foundational products—thinking about the national security risk assessment and the capabilities assessment. I have been leading some work on critical national infrastructure and looking at the interdependencies between them, so that if one piece of infrastructure is affected, you can see what the knock-on impact might be. 

I think we have made a very good start, but clearly there is still further to go. I have talked about some of the things that will be coming, such as the public risk survey, the public website and the volunteering index, on which the voluntary community can connect as well. I am confident that we have a good, collectively agreed programme of work, but of course there is always more to do in this area.

Clive Martin: I would agree with what Dr Clarke is saying in relation to this area of risk. We have been talking about civil contingency risk for the most part, but of course there are other aspects of risk and riskiness that the Government need to grapple with day in, day out. There are circumstances and events that affect the broader risk landscape, so it is not just about civil contingencies. It is about the extent to which various risks can impact the chances of different degrees of success or failure in Government policy on programmes and items like that. There is the work of the Public Sector Fraud Authority and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, both of which are focused on helping manage aspects of risk as well.

The arguments for an overall chief risk adviser seem to relate largely to the level of challenge, or the desire for more challenge of Government. The arguments against tend to point to the scale of the subject matter and the possibility that if you do appoint someone, others who actually have responsibility for risk may feel less responsible for it. I think the arguments on both sides have good merit. My challenge is how to take that forward. We have been doing work to get more to the substance of what such a role would consist of and point to the many places in Government where that is already happening. Partly from a prompt from the Public Accounts Committee, we undertook some work to set out the different contributions that different units make to the management of risk. We did that at quite a detailed level because we think the detail is important. That is where you can see this cohesion and where you can understand how they link to each other. I think that really holds the key to making more progress in this.

Q47 Olivia Blake: Okay. I am just curious about whether there is any role— and I mean no disrespect at all—with a significant enough leadership level to deal with not just contingency risks and resilience, but consequential risks and the risks you outlined there, Mr Martin. Are you confident that the system is robust enough as it is? Or is there a need for an additional role? Sorry to push you on this.

Clive Martin: I have got a lot of comfort from the work done on civil contingencies that we have described and the effort that has been made. More broadly, this is a work in progress as we try to work through all the ways in which we can bring continual improvement to the way in which Government manage risk. If we were to have one, for example, one of the things that we have considered is what level it should be and who they would be challenging, given the governing structures that we have in Government, because they need to work with them.

Often, in the private sector, a chief risk officer might be of a comparable grade to a chief financial officer. When you pose the question of who the chief financial officer is in Government, some people will say, “Well, that is a ministerial role. That is the Chancellor.” Others will say, “No, it is the head of the Government finance function.” Others may have other reactions. Depending on how we look at that, it creates the opportunity for thinking about the chief risk officer as either a civil servant or maybe even as some form of ministerial role, if we think that that is the sort of work necessary. That is all subject to thinking about legalities and all of this, which we have not managed to get to yet.

Chair: I think the legalities could be sorted if the principle is agreed. I will bring in Ms Finkelstein here.

Tamara Finkelstein: I will just say something about how it feels playing out, especially as a lead Government Department, for some of the risks. The whole area has been raised in its importance by the chief operating officer for the civil service and the head of the Government finance profession, Mr Martin. Between them, the key roles here all report in to the two of them. They are at the most senior levels and bring that to the attention of the set of permanent secretaries and the civil service board, which they are both on.

It would be quite hard to compartmentalise the role described, whereas we have a set of roles. There is the role that Mr Martin plays, which builds on our professional capability and the way in which we deal with risk in Departments. There is Dr Clarke, who has brought the resilience directorate together, which provides an absolute focus on the national security risk assessment and how we deal with those risks. We then have the civil contingencies secretariat. They come under those two most senior people. That is how it plays out. I am a little less convinced of whether another role in the mix would help, partly because as a permanent secretary of a Department holding some of those risks, a lot of managing those is for me and my executive board, while feeding into this crosscutting report. That is how it feels sitting in that role.

Q48 Olivia Blake: I possibly may disagree, but we will not get into that. I will move on to funding, which links quite strongly. By whom and how are decisions taken and made on what gets spent and what the prioritisation across Government is on this? I think we have had a lack of conversation about preparedness and prevention, so if you could pick up some of those themes it would be helpful. I do not know who wants to take that up.

Matthew Clarke: I can certainly start. There will be different risks that need action taking for them. Those will quite often be in Departments, so it is right that the accounting officer and the structures that sit beneath them make those decisions about what gets funded in the Department. As I mentioned earlier, we clearly have an interest in ensuring that we get a coherent framework for resilience across Government. We work closely with the Treasury in particular, because there will be trade-offs to be made when we are looking in the round, and money spent in one area might be better spent in another area, because it reduces the risk more. That is where the conversation comes in and where collectively, for example around the National Security Council resilience table, those different views will be input.

As I say, we are working with the Treasury on how we can use the data we have amassed across the resilience system to set out where the gaps are, where the vulnerabilities are and where we think it is best to direct the money, and we are part of those conversations across Departments as well. It is our role as the resilience directorate to bring that conversation together with the Treasury to get best value for money and best risk reduction. The Chancellor in the autumn statement announced the £10 million fund that I mentioned, to really get to the root of this: what are the different risks that we need to understand? What are the vulnerabilities that we need to look at? What data do we need to inform that? That £10 million fund will be directed to answering some of the questions you have been asking.

you to invest now, rather than having to pay out in Bellwin consequences—if that is the right phrase—for major incidents? Take Hull, for example, which is predicted to be underwater by 2050 if we are not careful: if that local authority is consistently having to deal with flooding from both sides, that is going to have an impact. How are you going to make sure that they will be able to deliver on a continuing basis? Because flooding is not just going to hit randomly, is it? There will be communities that are hit again and again.

Matthew Clarke: There’s lots of analysis in the area that shows the return on investment for investing in resilience effectively versus dealing with the consequences down the line. It is usually a positive return, or in many cases anyway, but it is very specific to the risk we are talking about—whether it is a particular flood defence, for example, or a national capability. That return on investment is really key to us. One message that we really want to get out alongside the resilience framework is that people should be investing in that resilience.

The return on investment can be good, and you need the evidence base and the data to underpin that approach as well. It is also complementary to productivity and to growth. It means that businesses can focus on generating profits rather than fighting the fires and dealing with the issues. That is an argument we are really keen to get across as we try to build this resilient approach across the whole of society, including in business. We are working with the insurance industry as well, which is helping us to underpin the figures on what it costs to deal with the issue versus investing ahead of the issue.

Roger Hargreaves: We shouldn’t sugarcoat where we are in terms of the resourcing. If you look at funding for local authorities or the way they spend money on resilience, it has fallen. If you look at the pressures on public spending generally, but particularly the way we feel those pressures, if we think of this as an insurance policy, we have pretty much pared it back to third party and that’s it. If you want to spend more on this, you have to accept two things. First, there is a risk that you will spend on the wrong items. We are in the game of, particularly in the future, really marginal low-likelihood risks, so there is a prospect that we will suggest investment in something that simply never happens. There needs to be a collective official and ministerial will that sometimes you will spend money and it doesn’t come to anything.

Roger Hargreaves: Yes. There are some areas where it is easier, such as flood risk, where there is a much clearer patten of analysis around returns on investment in flood defence, but others are much harder to assess in terms of likelihood. The other difficulty is that if you want to spend more money, there may be hard choices about where it comes from because you are choosing not to spend it on other activities that might be more important.

I recently went to Finland to do a bit of comparing and contrasting around their work. They have put a levy on people’s energy bills to pay for aspects of resilience. If we want to copy that model, given the broader debate about energy bills and the way they fall on people, that is a really hard political choice. I am not suggesting that we would copy it, but it is an example of spending on resilience for things that might happen taking away from spending on things that you know will happen. That requires a certain kind of political debate at large.

Chair: We appreciate that some of this definitely falls to politicians.

states: “We found limited evidence that government tests and assures contingency plans.” Mr Martin, and perhaps Mr Clarke, is that a fair assessment? How is the Government going to assure that contingency plans are effective in the wider public sector and also in the private sector?

Roger Hargreaves: That is probably one for me. We do regular testing of contingency plans, and there are different forms in which that occurs. As risk pathways start to develop so we can see things coming towards us, my unit effectively calls in departmental plans to look at how robust they are and works with those Departments to develop them as necessary. We test them against standardised models for the delivery of effective response. We also run exercising programmes; some of that is longer term, others are conducted on a much more short-term basis, focused on emerging risks. We have specific exercising models that are quite unique, which we use to deliver that. We are continuously testing a whole variety of risks, and that intensifies as the risk pathways open up.

In terms of flooding, weather and so forth, we have run a series of flood and other severe weather exercises through the autumn. They have been very helpful in terms of being effective in responding to the events we have seen over the last three months. We have also run lessons learned exercises, which retrospectively reflect on what has been experienced, and see whether there are any lessons. Again, we have run those feedback loops even within this present weather season.

Roger Hargreaves: It might be that there is a difference about the intensity of the work required. I am describing to you a whole series of events that we have done in relation to the risks that we are talking about here. On the broader point about the level of exercising and how much exercising we do across the full range of 100 risks in the national security risk assessment, undoubtedly it is the case that some of those risks will be exercised less. But severe weather is one of our most active areas of business and one of our real examples of success in terms of preparedness and capacity.

evidence” that existing contingency plans have been tested. It seems to me that that is a big issue. Mr Hargreaves, am I wrong?

Roger Hargreaves: My view is that we are—well, we are—calling in plans from Departments on emerging events continuously. Severe weather is without doubt our busiest area and where we are more active in exercising, in calling in plans and in response. From where I sit, it is one of our real exemplars of effective behaviour, but that is in part driven by the fact that it is such a common risk. If we had much greater resources, we would have a more ambitious national exercising programme that looked at risks further in advance of need.

was a lack of clarity on what outcome government is looking to achieve, such as target levels of preparedness, resilience, and an agreement on the level of tolerable risk, based on a well-informed risk appetite”—this is the really important sentence—“Without these, it is impossible for government to identify the actions needed and evaluate progress.” How do you react to that? That is pretty strong speak for the NAO, and you have agreed that wording. What is your response to that?

Matthew Clarke: Very much like the standard that is put in here on a one-in-200-years severe drought impact, that is exactly the work that we are working on with organisations such as the National Infrastructure Commission to work out what the relevant standards are that we should be working towards. As I said, however, there is a wider set of targets and outcomes, and a regulatory framework. Sometimes there will be regulatory standards to meet service continuity like that; sometimes they will be hard-coded into legislation as well, and there will be Government powers that sit behind those. It is really important that we get this right, based on the right evidence, so while I would love to say that across all the different risks here, we can pin it down to, “You must be ready for a one-in-x-years event”, or, if it does go down, “You should be able to recover in x number of hours or days”, we just need the evidence base to underpin the approach, because there will be costs. We want the right outcomes that we are seeking here as well, and we are doing that foundational work to make sure we’re there.

Professor Endersby: As Dr Clarke already mentioned, extreme weather is one of the events we deal with most frequently. It is well understood because they are events that we see regularly and deal with. Inevitably, the ones that we understand least well are the ones we have not seen yet—the unprecedented ones. Those tend to be linked to climate change. The Report makes a very fair point about the extreme heat in 2022: there were impacts that we absolutely anticipated—the health ones and the infrastructure ones—and then there were some areas where the impacts were probably worse than we anticipated, such as the wildfires and the cold-shock deaths of young men, particularly from jumping into cold water and dying unnecessarily, not of drowning, but of the cold.

There is another event I would draw out in terms of climate change and its impacts on the UK. As you would know, we are expecting hotter, drier summers, warmer, wetter winters and more intense rainfall in summer when we do see it. While I think the 2022 heat event was pretty close to a reasonable worst case for what we can expect in today’s climate, the event we have not seen is extreme heavy rainfall, what we describe as convective rainfall, and the consequent localised surface water flooding. We have seen those events in neighbouring countries—Germany and Belgium had an example—and we have seen them on a relatively smaller scale in the UK. Trying to get ahead of that is the area that is probably less well-characterised.

Professor Endersby: There is a lot that we already are doing. I should say that all of our ability to predict those impacts is built on our national capability to forecast weather and climate. A big investment already goes into that—in particular the Hadley Centre climate programme, where we do the research, which then manifests itself through things like the UK climate projections, which DEFRA fund for us, and give you what extremes you might expect on a two-kilometre grid across the UK.

The other thing we can, and do, do is look at where partner nations have already experienced those events and learn from those experiences. Wildfire is a great example of that; we anticipate that could be a rising risk in the UK, but there are many countries that deal with it routinely, such as Australia, Canada and France. We look at what they already do in order to characterise our national systems. 

Professor Endersby: Could you point me to a page please?

Olivia Blake: Page 25. It is the Government’s national assessment of extreme weather risks. I wondered whether that framework needs adjusting slightly to zoom in a bit more, or are you comfortable with it?

Professor Endersby: We had lots of opportunity to feed into those risks through the national risk assessment process, and those levels in Figure 4 are well characterised. If we thought the risks should have been somewhere else, we would have fed that in at the time; compared with, I guess, nuclear disaster or the UK’s total power system going down, there are even worse things that can happen. 

Roger Hargreaves: It is a system that covers a longer list of risks, some of which push further into those categories. The ones that are most difficult are the “Likelihood” categories, because these are quite hard events to predict. In terms of the material that flows from it, you get a detailed scenario against which you plan and key assumptions about the capabilities that you need. Derived from that is a list of operational activities that you need to create. 

There are descriptions of variations and different scenarios, so there is not just a single scenario—that is one of the important changes that we made post pandemic—and there are models for recovery from the event too.

There are quite detailed descriptions of the most severe manifestations of those events, but, when it comes to severe weather in the UK, we rarely get things that run beyond the top end. For example, the events in the Report that relate to windstorms are based on the Burns Night storm in 1990 and the great storm in ’87—events like that are at the top end.

Matthew Clarke: I would only add that there is a methodology that sits underneath this as well. What you are doing is measuring the impact across a number of dimensions, including human impact and the economy, just to name two. There is a long list of different things where there is a clear evidence base that places it within the square that it is in.

Roger Hargreaves: And the methodology has been completely overhauled post pandemic in partnership with the House of Lords Risk Assessment and Risk Planning Committee—set up for this purpose—and the Royal Academy of Engineering, for an independent view. We have just been through a process to absolutely test and overhaul it. 

Secondly, isn’t there an issue about culture change? At the moment, people do not see that all this means they will have to change the way they live their lives. What are the Government doing to work with people, because it will not work if you try and do things, just two people, to get the change? I have a small example on flooding. In my community, I find if people are on a floodplain, a defence system is put in and they are offered money for gates. They will not have the gates because they are worried that they will not be able to sell the house, so that is selfdefeating. How are you going to help them understand what the future risks are, so that they get any help? Also, how are you going to get them to understand and accept a change in the way they live their lives?

Matthew Clarke: That is an excellent question. In the perceptions of risk, it will not just be asking, “How prepared do you think you are in relation to what has happened before?”, but “How prepared do you think the system is? How prepared do you think you are? How far do you understand your own personal role in resilience? Do you, for example, have water at home that you could use if the water went off? Do you, for example, have candles should the power go off?” It is really taking a benchmark, first off, of how prepared people are and how far prepared they think they are. It also sets out a number of different future scenarios to test this against. So it is not the abstract question, “How prepared are you for risk?” It really tries to drill down and get some answers that will inform our approach.

I completely agree with you on this being about culture change. As always, with anything that is to do with culture change, it is big and it takes lots of engagement and lots of conversations. We are having those conversations directly with the public. We have held a series of roadshows and more are planned. We will have the public website, which will be a portal for people to understand how they can be prepared and the actions they can take, not just in response to things but preparing ahead of time as well. Then, I would say that it is a very developed conversation and it is not something that one website or a roadshow will solve. It is a really interesting debate about the role of the Government in supporting the public and communities, and the role of individuals in making sure that we have a whole-of-society resilience estate. It is for businesses, as well; they will have a role, separate from their individual roles. 

It is about having that developed conversation and making sure we are hitting every different part of society, including vulnerable people. We have some vulnerability guidance that allows us to speak to people about how they may be vulnerable, making sure they get the support they need when something does happen and making sure there are preparations in place for those vulnerable people ahead of time. We have thought really carefully about what all the different dimensions of society are, how we engage with them effectively, directly or through organisations that can represent them, and how we best talk about the risks and have that conversation about respective roles in that system. There is a lot of way to go still, but we are starting that conversation, I think. 

Professor Endersby: Can I just build a little bit on that by talking about working with our media partners as well? Extreme weather is actually how the population experiences and will experience climate change. We are able, to some extent because we have good relations with the media and they all carry the severe weather warnings, to draw a distinction between weather you have seen before and weather you have not seen before. We had fantastic support from across the whole of the UK media in the extreme heat to go, “This is not weather you have seen before and it will require a different response at an individual level. This is heat that can harm healthy people as well as vulnerable people. You want to keep your windows and curtains closed, which is not what you normally do on a hot day, and you might want to consider going to a cool place.” It is quite hard to characterise which are the heat deaths because they are not as obvious as deaths from wind and storm, but in terms of the excess deaths we saw subsequently, in all likelihood people did act on that. Certainly, we measured the awareness and the people who said they took action, and it was up in the high 90s. There is the opportunity, as you said, for a wholesociety response. Responsible media can really assist with helping people adapt.

Anne Marie Morris: This smacks still of doing to society, not with society. It really does not cut it. They still do not understand what the risk is. You can do what you like but, until they think it is going to happen to them, they will ignore it. The work that Ms Finkelstein has been doing with the water companies to educate people about how much water they use is not working. Unless there is a national campaign and we have water meters in our homes so that we can actually see how much we are using when we run our baths, it will not happen. Forgive me, Dr Clarke: this really is not going to cut it. We are not communicating. People do not engage and accept and understand the risk. We have not really got that proper Government approach to getting this to work so that, in the longer term, we can get the change that we absolutely have to have. People are going to have to change the way they live their lives.

Chair: I want to alert witnesses and Members that we are expecting votes at 4 o’clock and they are on schedule. I turn to Jonathan Djanogly MP with that in mind.

Roger Hargreaves: It can be done; yes. It is done every two years routinely and has been for about 20 years. 

Matthew Clarke: Previously, the dynamic national risk register was highly periodically based. Now, if new data comes to light or a new event happens that changes the perspective, it can be done on a bespoke basis. We are bringing in other expert voices. There are panels of experts crossing all the disciplines who opine upon these risks and their right placement. We are devising a more structured external experts programme as well, so that diverse views can be brought to bear. That avoids any perception of groupthink and allows us to take on board the views of a wider set of experts. I hope those are both good improvements that mean that it is more dynamic and takes more data into the process as well.

Q81 Mr Djanogly: Take Storm Babet, Ms Finkelstein. Could you just explain the process of reassessment following that storm?

Tamara Finkelstein: We did not do a reassessment following that storm. I can tell you about things that we learned from that storm. I will come back to talking about that and link it in to the question that you asked. There is something quite important about the risk assessment framework we use for our long-term planning work. What you described was a worsening of flood risk over time. There is something more than, “Have we got the right scenario right now for a response? Are we investing properly to deal with the risks that we are seeing?” We are doing a fundamental reassessment of that risk in our national flood risk assessment, which we will do by the end of this year, which leads into our long-term investment scenarios. They will allow us to do some of the investment in flood defences—indeed, we will see more risk over many decades—like things we are already on to, such as the Thames estuary being ready for 2100, because you have to look at that. The Thames barrier, which was mentioned before, will not be adequate. We have to take a whole-scale, new approach to the Thames estuary. That was just on that long-term planning.

In terms of Storm Babet or any of our recent storms, after each of those storms we look at what we experienced, what happened and what we can learn. We take a lessons learned approach. We took a number of lessons from Storm Babet, one of which was being clearer. Some of it hit in slightly different areas than those that are used to experiencing flooding. It showed that in local resilience forums that are less used to dealing with storms and flooding, there was potentially a lack of clarity as to who was doing what, so there is more we can do about being clear about what the Environment Agency does and what the local resilience forum is expected to do.

There was also the potential for confusion between the Met Office information and what the Environment Agency put out in terms of its warnings. Again, we have learned from that as to what we can change. We also learned quite a lot from that about how to get the information about what is happening to everybody really quickly. We actually used some of the improvements when we had Storm Henk. We learn after each of these storms, and there were some particular areas, rather than us shifting the scenario.

Roger Hargreaves: Storm Babet is quite interesting as a storm. Effectively, as a weather event, it kind of stalled over the UK, so you have the rain continuing while the flood event started to emerge. Ultimately, it was handled almost entirely at the local level. We did stand up some national structures but didn’t go in all guns blazing because it was handled so effectively. What the Permanent Secretary has described is something that is about reflecting quite hard and tweaking things so that they are good. It wasn’t that we reflected on it and saw significant failure in the response; we looked at it and thought, “We’ll just tweak this and that,” and we definitely saw the benefits. 

One of the interesting things about this storm season is that we have been through about 10 named storms and have not needed to activate our COBR arrangements at all, because it has all been dealt with so effectively at the local level. That comes from not being complacent and continuing to tweak what is a very mature system, rather than just saying, “It’s fine. I’m sure it works.”

Professor Endersby: The point I was going to make, first of all, was to agree with Ms Finkelstein about the lack of practice of some LRFs. We should remember that there is a lot of variation in storms year to year. Last year we had no winter storms at all, and this year we have had a very severe run of them. We do have a winter resilience network and a summer resilience network, where we draw the LRFs together and talk about what might be coming, but there was perhaps more of an element of lack of practice. I certainly would not say that we were outwith the reasonable worst-case scenario window. If you think about the 1987 storm, we were not in that kind of territory.

I wanted to say something, if I may, about how we characterise those reasonable worst-case scenarios. Because we are in a changing climate, we cannot just look back. We run a technique we call UNSEEN, where we model 1,000 summers or 1,000 winters in an unchanged climate, in our current climate and in a number of future climates. That means we can get at the tails of that distribution and say what a one in 100-year event looks like in today’s climate or in a 2050 climate. That information is taken up and fed into policymakers, for instance through the National Infrastructure Commission, DEFRA and so on.

In terms of the whole system, I think there is an extremely well-practised system—coming on to your second question—in which information is communicated to resilience professionals as a whole, largely through the LRFs, as Dr Clarke said. We have civil contingency advisers, one for every local resilience forum, who help us to convey the information that is relevant to them. Obviously, we also have the ability to warn the public directly through the National Severe Weather Warning Service, and I have some stats on how widely that is taken up, both for those storms and generally.

a handle on how Government are planning longer-term resilience. 

Mr Martin, we have given you one stab at this, so can I start with you? You are head of the profession. What do you think Government could be doing better on, in simple terms? What are the top two or three things that Government could be doing better on long-term resilience? Is there the will behind this in Whitehall? You cannot really answer for the politicians, but is there a will behind this in Whitehall? You are here as an expert in risk, from your previous professional background.

Clive Martin: The specifics of the cross-Whitehall and ministerial support that Dr Clarke mentioned earlier on are very strong indicators, and there are good indicators of progress in what has been outlined in relation to resilience, whether that is proactive work in relation to activity that should take place before an incident occurs, or proactive work now that will help in the event that an incident occurs.

When it comes to risk more broadly—we touched on this a little bit—it is important to keep in mind that, for most risks, we are talking about distributions of outcomes. The well-developed methodology takes a point on those distributions for certain risks. But the tail that Professor Endersby was talking about earlier on is always important. I would like more of that. I think more of that stochastic assessment of riskiness would be really helpful when having to make really difficult prioritisation calls on investment, whether that is for resilience or other purposes. But it is quite hard to get to, because there isn’t always the data available and sometimes the shape of those distributions can be fuzzy. 

The more we encourage people to think that way when they are making decisions on anything, whether that is about a particular risk or whether about a particular policy or programme—the more we get them to think in that distribution-type way, and think about overall riskiness and what all the factors are that are influencing the variability of that, then the sharper the interventions can be—

Clive Martin: It forms part of the new Minister induction programme, so the conversation is likely to be a slot of about an hour, depending on the way—

Chair: Better than nothing, I suppose. I am just thinking of a new Minister coming in, with lots of things on. One hour—okay. 

Clive Martin: Yes, but it is a step forward. There is new accounting officer training, too. We have been developing the risk content in that. 

In terms of your overall planning, how are you going about trying to identify which parts of the country and which geographies are going to be most impacted, and how are you timelining getting the preparation done to make sure we are ready for when the event happens? Perhaps I could ask Dr Clarke. 

Matthew Clarke: Are we talking specifically about flooding events?

Anne Marie Morris: Just as an example. I used coastal erosion as an obvious one. Obviously, if you don’t have a coast, you won’t have coastal erosion. 

Professor Endersby: That is part of the UK climate projections, so I will come in quickly on those. One of the projects we produce on behalf of Government is the UK climate projections, which talk about how climate change is going to impact the UK, on a 2.2 km grid. That absolutely will include the impacts of sea level rise all the way round the coasts, over different timeframes and in different emissions scenarios. That is very much used by local authorities in their planning, as well as in critical national infrastructure planning. 

Roger Hargreaves: They own that locally. They have a statutory obligation to deliver that collectively locally, and that is what they do. In most instances, they publish that.

Roger Hargreaves: They are not brought in and examined systematically. It was done many, many years ago by the Home Office, when the Home Office had responsibility for this area. It was abandoned, I think, in the early 1990s, when it became apparent that everyone was dutifully sending their plans in and no one was looking at them. 

Chair: We love your honesty.

Roger Hargreaves: A view was formed then that it simply was not practical to interrogate these plans. There was discussion, at the time that the Civil Contingencies Act was delivered, about whether some kind of independent inspectorate should be created. Powers were taken in the Act to do that, but at the time the general view was that the individual inspectorate organisations, like the inspectorate of a constabulary, should look at the work of the organisations within their area. However, where we have some particular areas of risk, we will engage with local areas to look at the quality of their planning. From my perspective, that is generally as we see risks emerge.

Tamara Finkelstein: I would need to write and tell you exactly how it operates.

Chair: It would be helpful to know. If it is bidding, that raises a number of concerns.

Tamara Finkelstein: It looks as if there are a number of areas already getting funding through that in the East Riding, Norfolk, Dorset and Cornwall. I do not have more information than that.

Q102 Chair: It would be helpful if we could find out. Dr Clarke or Mr Hargreaves, if we are getting information from the Met Office that there is going to be a big challenge in Brighton and Hove, Portsmouth or Dawlish, for example, who sees that in the centre and says, “Actually, there is going to be a big problem if we don’t give more money to this council to deal with it”? How does it sift up to the top, so that you can assess that?

Roger Hargreaves: Is that in relation to an emerging and more acute risk?

Q103 Chair: Yes, the longer-term risks that are emerging, such as coastal erosion or flooding at the coast.

Roger Hargreaves: If we have an issue like coastal erosion, then, as the permanent secretary describes, there is a broader scheme for funding projects there.

Q104 Chair: That is very well—that happens—but do you at this end of the table see that, from where you are sitting?

Roger Hargreaves: If we thought there were acute problems emerging, we have systems to look right across the whole of Government and have those filter through to us. From my perspective, that is risks that are up to six months out. That is acute problems that are starting to emerge; it is not your point on something that is further out.

Q105 Chair: So who in the centre, apart from each Department, is looking at that? I should declare that I grew up in Southsea and they always said the house that I grew up in would be underwater by about next year—happily, it is not. It seemed like a long way out when I was a kid, but it is actually very real now—there is a real risk. In Dawlish, we saw the railway swept away not that many years ago. There are real issues happening. Who in Government would have predicted, seen or helped support Dawlish railway station at the time that that happened?

Roger Hargreaves: DLUHC has a large resilience function. It sits on all the local resilience forums and feeds issues through. Some of those will require—

Q106 Chair: That is the central Government mechanism, really.

Roger Hargreaves: Yes. They are the liaison structure. They will feed acute issues through to me and my team. Where there are medium-term or financing issues—structural issues—they might go to the relevant Department responsible. That means that we have eyes on the problem all the time.

Q107 Chair: Mr Martin, is it good enough for you that DLUHC is holding that risk management and long-term assessment?

Clive Martin: That is not something I feel comfortable commenting on. 

Q108 Chair: Okay, fine. But you do support members of teams in that Department, in terms of their ability to understand and measure risk. 

Clive Martin: Yes, because fundamentally on responsibility for risk, the default position is that it is with the responsibility for running Government. Where it is devolved and where there are local powers and responsibilities for managing risk, they hold and retain that. Only in exceptional cases, such as the one that Mr Hargreaves outlined, would someone from the centre intervene. 

Q109 Ben Lake: Can I come back to the LRFs for a moment? Mr Hargreaves, you explained that the LRFs will have some input from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, which will take some sort of view about whether the plans are effective or not. Is there any discussion in Government about whether the LRFs have resilience themselves? In other words, do the authorities and public bodies that contribute to the execution of these plans have the resources, the staff and what have you to do it effectively? Is there a process in central Government for having a horizon-scanning moment to see whether we can depend on the continued functioning of LRFs in the future? As Dr Clarke explained, they are integral to the response to extreme weather events. 

Roger Hargreaves: There is a narrow answer to that and a broader answer. The narrow answer is that local responders have statutory obligations to maintain not just emergency plans but their own business continuity arrangements and so forth, so they have an obligation to be able to respond. The system operated by DLUHC means that, where we identify problems with people’s capacity to respond, that is picked up quickly and passed through to us, and we can contemplate what sort of operational support we provide. 

There is of course a broader issue. Local responders are the sum of their parts, and the challenges that some local responders have in terms of their capacity and focus is well documented. When a local authority engages in a response—for example, by housing a large number of evacuees from whichever latest place we are evacuating people from—it is not about the strength of their emergency planning team alone. It is about the strength of their social services department, their children’s services, and their ability to muster effective executive decision making and draw on other local partners. We can fix our bit, but we are only as strong as the broader system, and that is generally true of resilience issues in the round. Resilience is often a function of the capacity and capability of a system more generally. 

Matthew Clarke: I just want to say a little more about the stronger LRFs programme. This is the thing that has been announced whereby you are really embedding resilience in political decision making locally. Where resilience is important within the wider services that Mr Hargreaves talked about, those decisions are being made at a top level in those LRFs. There is a pilot being rolled out across eight local resilience forums, and that will really be a test of how that could be rolled out across the piece. We are taking the evidence from that programme and building out from there. 

Q110 Ben Lake: Let me move on to finance. Specifically, what is the Government doing or intending to do to encourage greater private sector investment in extreme weather resilience? 

Matthew Clarke: The green finance strategy last year, which was called “Mobilising Green Investment”, was about working with private sector partners to improve the approach to climate resilience assessment and disclosure, and trying to collaborate on making sure the things that need to be funded are funded, including through the UK Infrastructure Bank. There was a goal within that for £500 million of private finance per year into nature recovery in England by 2027, rising to more than £1 billion per year by 2030. 

I would also add that the Government is considering the inclusion of an adaptation objective in the upcoming UK green taxonomy, which again will really help adaptation activities be defined as something that should be invested in by the private sector and by the Government. 

Q111 Ben Lake: That is good to hear. In terms of your own work, how closely do you work with regulators such as Ofgem and Ofwat? It strikes me that they have quite an influential role, especially in some of the infrastructure. Network Rail is another one. When they set the control periods for investment, how does that work?

Matthew Clarke: It is a really important point, and one which the National Infrastructure Commission has made as well. There is a window going forwards, and we want to ensure that our interventions are getting ahead of those spending control periods. I work with both of the regulators individually, but there are 13 critical national infrastructure sectors. If I were to meet all of them all the time, that would clearly be quite difficult. However, I have regular meetings with the UK Regulators Network. I have meetings—more are lined up—with the Institute of Regulation. We are really trying to take a holistic piece here. Of course, I work through the Departments, which have those relationships with the regulators for their sectors as well.

Q112 Ben Lake: Let us take Ofwat as an example. At the moment, there could be a situation where freeze-thaw incidents may happen. We had one about two years ago in my own part of the world where unexpected changes in temperature meant that, just in my own constituency, nearly 5,000 homes were without water for about a week. What discussion with or responsibility on Ofwat is there to build into its expectations a water company’s plans to invest and improve resilience in their infrastructure? It is becoming evident now that there are these extreme weather events that can be serious and perhaps unexpected, in terms of timing. However, if in a changing climate we expect these instances to occur more frequently, is there a responsibility on Ofwat to take that to the water companies and say, “Look: you need to build into your investment plans a credible solution to make your infrastructure more resilient to these instances”?

Tamara Finkelstein: I can give an example. The water companies are required to produce water resource management plans that look ahead and give assurance. The plans set out the kind of investment that needs to happen in order to assure that water supply into the future. They have just done a draft set that will be finalised by the end of this year, and they are expecting a whole set of investments to be made in reservoirs, various ways in which water transfers can happen and so on. They are required to do that. What they are required to do and what they are able to raise funding to do is then agreed as part of our price review mechanism. It is absolutely stitched into an aspect of what Ofwat is looking to them to do.

Q113 Ben Lake: So I would be correct in understanding that it is a role or a responsibility on Ofwat to ensure that there is resilience.

Tamara Finkelstein: It is stitched into the whole price review process. For the bit that water companies are expected to do, they must show the investment they will make to do that.

Q114 Ben Lake: I appreciate that water is just one example, but is there a similar responsibility on regulators of other key national infrastructure?

Matthew Clarke: Yes. In Ofgem, for example, I know that there are those conversations about resilience and the particular standards and requirements in the licence conditions as well.

Professor Endersby: It is in the process of being upgraded through the National Infrastructure Commission’s work on climate resilience as well, because they have had conversations with us about what data regulators should require infrastructure operators to use. It is still being built into the full breadth of critical national infrastructure, but it is definitely an improving picture.

Q115 Ben Lake: Forgive me, Chair, but I will ask one last question if I may. Is it your understanding that the National Infrastructure Commission will have the role of sense-checking that all the regulators have a correct understanding of the type of resilience we are looking for and want them to impose on relevant companies?

Matthew Clarke: Broadly, yes, they will have a role in that. Those are the conversations that I am having with the NIC as well to ensure that it is a coherent system across the board.

Q116 Chair: Who does the assurance that those plans are good? Presumably for water it would be your Department, Ms Finkelstein.

Tamara Finkelstein: Ofwat will ensure—

Q117 Chair: But if Ofwat are requiring it, who assures that they are asking for the right thing, given that we are talking about a risk here?

Tamara Finkelstein: We have a national policy statement where we set out what we require of Ofwat through the price review. An aspect of that is that they need to ensure that the water resource management plan is funded. That is through the price review.

Q118 Chair: So you are confident that that happens smoothly and quickly.

Tamara Finkelstein: Yes.

Q119 Olivia Blake: I just think that is an interesting question, about how that joins up. We had a major incident in my constituency where Ofgem and Ofwat both got involved.

Chair: Do you want to explain the incident? It was quite extraordinary.

Olivia Blake: It was a burst asbestos water pipe. Water was released and bored a hole in the gas main, and millions and millions of litres were allowed to pump into the gas main, which meant that water then came out of people’s gas fires and gas cookers with such force that it was hitting the ceiling. It was an absolute disaster that affected thousands of people. The gas main, however, was a new main. When there are infrastructure discussions going on, how do you make sure that you are seeing right across the picture in terms of investment, and that Government priorities on resilience deal with some of those cross-cutting issues of where things are located, for example?

Q120 Chair: Is that something that crosses your radar?

Roger Hargreaves: We encounter the “it’s not mine, it’s yours to deal with” problem all the time. I fear it is a feature of humankind. Organisations do not necessarily want to take responsibility for everything, and often these are complex, intertwined problems. In some instances, we find ourselves interceding to pick through that. It is particularly relevant where you have local incidents at the boundary between public sector bodies and private sector bodies. Often, some of the private sector demarcations are clearer or they are more confident about covering costs and then sorting it out subsequently.

I don’t see an easy remedy to this, because ultimately these things will all be in slightly different ownership. We or the LRF can step in to say, “Regardless of how we pick through this, we will find a solution now, and then come back to it.” We have done that in several instances over the last couple of years, where we have stepped in to effectively bankroll local authorities, so they can be the force for good within the system as the lead agent for the public sector.

Q121 Olivia Blake: They actually dealt very well with the situation, and just got on with it. Afterwards, there was the question of whose fault it was, which is fine. My question really is, how do we ensure that 1970s infrastructure is on your radar? If a gas upgrade is going on, is it resilient if it is next to 1970s water infrastructure? How do you see those risks and the consequences of that?

Chair: That would surely be above the local resilience forum.

Roger Hargreaves: Are you talking about the building controls element of it? Certainly, where major infrastructure goes in, there is a very tight process around—

Q122 Olivia Blake: It is just awareness of that risk. It is probably not anywhere on the gas companies’ radar that their pipes will be a problem, because they are brand new pipes.

Chair: It is their silo; it is a good box to tick.

Olivia Blake: How do you bring it together into the real world?

Chair: Do you offer guidance to companies?

Roger Hargreaves: Generally, there are a lot of building control mechanisms around new infrastructure and how it intersects with existing infrastructure and its mapping. Many of those utilities either hold those records or work to extend them. Very old infrastructure occasionally causes a problem, but it is—

Q123 Chair: We could go down a whole squirrel hole on this. After Grenfell, secondary legislation is now being passed about keeping a map of what is going on in flats so that there are records. Loads of blocks of flats do not have that, and it will take years to get. I am not suggesting that you were saying it is all perfect, but let us be clear that there are an awful lot of gaps.

Roger Hargreaves: I am just saying that from what we see, they are alive to the problem. Because of that, it very rarely comes up to our level of interest. I am not suggesting for a second that it is a non-problem; it is probably a very significant problem, but it manifests locally.

Q124 Mr Djanogly: On infrastructure, we have been concentrating on Ofwat, but as the NAO Report says and as Ms Finkelstein also made clear, Ofwat is the exception, because it has an explicit adaption requirement. The NAO Report says at paragraph 3.10, “Most infrastructure regulators do not have specific duties regarding climate resilience.” Ofwat is the exception to that, but what about the rest of them? How are we going to give regulators consistent climate resilience roles? What is missing here?

Matthew Clarke: That is part of the mapping that we are doing, which is really about understanding the current regulatory landscape across all of those critical national infrastructure sectors—the ones that deliver the critical services that we rely on—and that is the aim. We have the aim in the resilience framework of 2030, regulating where needed in this place, but as I said earlier, it is not that we have a jolly until 2030 and then it is magically in place; we really want to build the evidence base, work out where the regulation sits—where there are current standards and whether those are good enough—and then put in place something that is coherent and consistent. That could be vertical regulation, where you are looking at individual sectors, or it could be something horizontal where we say, “You’re all important sectors; you all need to meet a resiliency requirement to be able to deal with a one in x years event.” We are building that evidence base to inform the approach that we take— horizontal, vertical, or thematic based, around some of the adaptation risks that we have been talking about.

Roger Hargreaves: We do see it operate in practice effectively. It is not always the case that those resilience obligations are framed around a particular risk, such as severe weather, or a driving force, such as climate change. Often, they are about outcomes, such as, “Customers must get access to x litres of potable water every day.” If you take, for example, Storm Arwen, when that occurred two or three years ago, we saw a very large number of customers disconnected—and disconnected on an extended basis. The response to that was a recognition from Ministers, and I think from the industry as a whole, that they had not done a good enough job, and it was Ofgem that led the work with, then, the Business Department, to put together a comprehensive lessons learned report, which it then took to operators and which we saw operators respond to. 

If you look at Storm Arwen, you have maybe 40,000 customers off supply for more than three days and 4,000 off for more than a week. That is very difficult for those people, and it was very difficult for us, looking at it and not necessarily having the levers, because the levers need to come from the companies. In subsequent events, such as Storm Eunice and some of the more recent events, we have seen the operators change their procedures, be much more proactive and actually respond. It was the regulator that played a central role, on behalf of the Secretary of State, to make that happen. So, it does feel to us like the regulators have a lot of focus and a lot of traction here.

Q125 Mr Djanogly: The implication of that is that there is more going on with the regulators than appears in this NAO Report.

Matthew Clarke: I think so, and I think that they will have general continuity-of-service requirements, whether for electricity, water or whatever. And the companies, in meeting that obligation to provide the water or the electricity, will be looking at our national risk register and saying, “Are we prepared for the risks that are set out here?” Then, they will need to make the plans and justify, through the regulator, that they are managing the risks. They will need to provide evidence and will be inspected, and enforcement will be in place as well. I would not want the perception to be that, because we are not, from the top of Government, defining standards across the piece here, there are not already those outcome-based standards across the utilities—the essential services.

Q126 Mr Djanogly: I am hearing stories of bits and pieces going on here and there, but not a coherent—

Matthew Clarke: That is the mapping that we are doing. 

Mr Djanogly: And that seems very slow.

Roger Hargreaves: The distinction is that, in terms of our system, we have quite vertical regulation in these sectors. So, where we regulate the performance of water companies, we do it as a whole. We do the economic regulation and the safety regulation, and the resilience is part of that. The same will be true of energy, or whichever sector we pick. 

It would be possible to switch that around and do more horizontal regulation, where, effectively, you have common resilience expectations across all sectors and they are defined uniformly. The Australians have looked at doing more of that kind of thing, but it has proven very difficult because, essentially, you are swapping one problem for another.

Q127 Chair: Do any of the three of you at this end of the table make these recommendations to anybody—that maybe there is a different way of doing it?

Roger Hargreaves: We looked at it.

Matthew Clarke: We are doing the work exactly to do that, yes.

Roger Hargreaves: If you decide that you want to take an aspect of regulation of energy companies out of the very complex energy regulation system, you then have to build a complex interface between that bespoke bit of regulation and the general system, and where costs are imposed by your bespoke system, they need to be factored into the broader system.

Q128 Chair: So it is challenging.

Roger Hargreaves: It is not impossible, but the Australians looked at it and thought it was a good idea, but it proved pretty tricky and they are stalling a bit on it.

Matthew Clarke: I was only going to say that recognition of that complexity is why, originally, an achievable date of 2030 was given. However, I want to be clear that that does not mean that we are aiming for 2030. We want to do it sooner and we are working with the NIC and others who are advocating for much sooner than that. 

Q129 Mr Djanogly: Is there some kind of work plan here?

Matthew Clarke: Absolutely, yes.

Q130 Chair: Can we see it?

Matthew Clarke: We can set out the engagement that we are doing and the broad plans, yes. 

Q131 Chair: Even if there are elements that maybe for national security purposes are not public, we often get access to Government papers—Ms Finkelstein will testify to that—which we read appropriately and do not reveal. We have never leaked anything in the last decade. If we could push that, that would be good.

Just before we finish, can I ask you, Dr Clarke, how big your team is?

Matthew Clarke: Do we normally disclose things like that? 

Roger Hargreaves: Yes.

Chair: How do you measure it?

Matthew Clarke: I have a team of 78 people. 

Q132 Chair: Are they all based in the Cabinet Office with you?

Matthew Clarke: They are based in the Cabinet Office, yes. 

Q133 Chair: How senior are those people? Does that include down to AO level or is it more senior?

Matthew Clarke: It is the whole spectrum of people, from the deputy directors I have through the whole spectrum of grades.

Q134 Chair: Okay, so every grade. Mr Hargreaves, same questions to you.

Roger Hargreaves: About 110.

Q135 Chair: How senior? Or how expert—that is a bit of a proxy for senior?

Roger Hargreaves: Is it?

Q136 Chair: Perhaps not in the civil service.

Roger Hargreaves: I am not sure it is anywhere. We have a senior management team to allow us to cover all our responsibilities and then we have people doing a whole range of specialist roles. Quite a lot of my team do quite technical or specialist things.

Q137 Chair: I should imagine that in your field.

Roger Hargreaves: We have a lot of people who have accumulated quite in-demand crisis management skills. The other thing I will just observe about resource, though, is that we have done a lot of work since the pandemic to really overhaul the way we operate resource. We are engaged in a large-scale training programme for everyone in Government on crisis management, which is now seeing all permanent secretaries, all directors general, all senior officials, all new fast-streamers and a very large cohort of other officials trained in the disciplines of effective crisis response, which is quite a profound culture change.

Q138 Chair: What is the turnover like in your teams? Are people on rotations? Do they come for two years and then move on, or do you have people who specialise?

Matthew Clarke: We have a mixture of people: some who are new arrivals, some who will do a typical two or three years in role and people who have been around since I was in the civil contingencies secretariat 15 or 16 years ago.

Roger Hargreaves: Mine tend to stay on for longer. The work is very interesting, but also the accumulated knowledge that you get makes you more effective.

Chair: That was my point.

Roger Hargreaves: Then we have quite a lot of people in technical roles where the specialisation is high. If I can afford to pay them enough to keep them and stop them from going to the private sector, I do.

Q139 Chair: Finally, Mr Martin, you have this overarching responsibility for the risk function. We heard a lot about the challenges. What powers or freedoms would help you develop the risk profession and develop the risk understanding—really, it is understanding across Whitehall as well? This is your moment to ask, given that we are going to be writing a report on this in the next few weeks.

Clive Martin: On a point of clarification, there is not a risk function per se, with a capital “F”. My team, which is a very small risk centre of excellence, is housed within the Government finance function as part of Treasury. Our remit is to look across the piece. I have a very small team. There is a group of about 1,200 risk specialists across Government who we have connected with and we meet regularly. We share information with each other and I consider that to be my extended team. Everybody has responsibility for the management of risk.

We are developing the strategy that was outlined a couple of years ago and we have been delivering on that. As part of that and as part of the work I mentioned earlier, where we are looking at all the different parts of what I call the risk management machinery of Government, opportunities may emerge that require the sort of change of authority that you pointed to, so we are addressing it through that work and seeking those improvement opportunities through that.

Chair: That was diplomatically put; thank you. I thank you for your time. The transcript of this session will be available on the website, uncorrected, in the next couple of days. We will be producing a report, which is likely to come after the Easter recess, assuming no election is called before then. If an election is called, we will move it faster. Thank you for your time.