1. Simon Boor holds CBCI certification and has a career spanning business continuity, operational resilience and technology leadership across more than two decades. His career began at a point when business continuity, as a discipline, sat largely within ICT under the guise of disaster recovery, and he has worked through its evolution into the broader organisational and strategic function it has become. He has worked across global financial institutions, critical infrastructure environments and multi-site operational contexts, leading continuity programmes, crisis exercises, regulatory responses and mission-critical system transformations at senior level.
2. He is co-founder of Tapping Frog Management Ltd, a multidisciplinary organisation whose consultancy hub delivers business continuity and resilience services, and whose education hub delivers evidence-informed services in special educational needs settings. Tapping Frog has published an extensive body of work on resilience, including a formal proposal for an Office of National Resilience, first submitted to government in March 2025.
3. This submission is made in a personal and professional capacity, drawing on both practical expertise and a documented history of engagement with national resilience policy spanning more than three decades.
4. The submitter's engagement with national resilience policy did not begin with the current inquiry. In the early 1990s, following the privatisation of the water industry and in the context of the ongoing security situation in Northern Ireland and recent industrial incidents including the Camelford water contamination of 1988, a formal proposal was made to government advocating the establishment of an Emergency Coordination Unit for the water industry. The proposed body would have worked with the newly privatised water companies to plan for, mitigate and respond to emergencies arising from industrial, environmental or terrorist events, with statutory authority to assume control where responses were inadequate.
5. The proposal was acknowledged by the then Minister but not acted upon. The submitter subsequently lived through the 2007 Gloucestershire flooding, in which contamination of a major pumping station cut clean water supply to a significant part of the region for up to seventeen days, one of the most serious civil emergencies in modern UK history, and precisely the type of event the Emergency Coordination Unit proposal was designed to address.
6. The pattern established in the 1990s has since repeated. In March 2025, the submitter wrote to his Member of Parliament, Fleur Anderson MP, advocating for the establishment of an Office of National Resilience. That letter was forwarded to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and a ministerial response was received in April 2025 from Abena Oppong-Asare MP, Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office. The response acknowledged the principle of cross-cutting, multidisciplinary resilience and referenced the government's resilience review, which was due to conclude by end of 2025.
7. In April 2025, the submitter responded to the ministerial letter, expressing concern that the resilience review risked repeating the pattern of the 1990s: words of acknowledgement followed by incremental adjustment rather than structural change. That concern was grounded in the observation that the government appeared to be planning a resilience response centred on the last crisis, COVID-19, rather than preparing for the crises already emerging. A further letter to the MP referencing the published ONR proposal was sent in January 2026, to which a response is still awaited.
8. The submitter notes that the establishment of the House of Lords Select Committee on National Resilience in January 2026, and the terms of its inquiry, suggest that the government's resilience review did not deliver the structural reform that the evidence indicated was required. This submission is therefore made in the hope that the committee's work will break the cycle that has persisted for three decades: a cycle in which the case for structural national resilience leadership is acknowledged in principle and set aside in practice, with real-world consequences that consistently validate the original concern.
9. The United Kingdom lacks a single, accountable body responsible for preparing for the most consequential risks: those that cross sector boundaries, cascade across systems and threaten national continuity. This gap sits between local resilience forums, which are mandated to focus on the most likely risks within their boundaries, and national defence, which is structured for military threats rather than whole-of-society preparedness.
10. This submission proposes the establishment of an Office of National Resilience (ONR): a permanent, Cabinet-level body with a public mandate to set national resilience standards, verify implementation across government and industry, coordinate cross-sector preparedness and lead public engagement in practical resilience.
The case for the ONR rests on five interconnected arguments:
• The structural gap is real and widening. No existing body is empowered, visible and accountable to prepare for cross-boundary, high-impact risks. Local resilience forums cannot do it within their remit and resources. The MoD is not designed for it. The gap between them is where the UK is most exposed.
• Resilience is a form of deterrence. A nation that can visibly absorb disruption, maintain continuity and recover quickly is harder to coerce, destabilise or attack through hybrid means. The ONR would project that strength through transparent standards, published assessments and coordinated preparedness.
• The risks are no longer theoretical. Active conflicts across multiple theatres, the demonstrated fragility of global supply chains, technology dependencies subject to political interference, and the accelerating erosion of norms against the use of force mean that what was once considered extreme is now within the range of expectation.
• Whole-of-society resilience requires whole-of-society engagement. Government cannot deliver national resilience alone. The ONR must engage the public, the private sector, civil society and the education system, embedding resilience awareness and practical preparedness across the population rather than concentrating it in institutional plans.
• The primary barrier is structural, not financial. The evidence presented in this submission spans thirty years of engagement. The consistent pattern is not a lack of understanding of the need, but a lack of an accountable body whose primary mandate is to act on it. The ONR addresses that structural gap directly.
11. The submitter's central recommendation is that the committee endorse the principle of a dedicated, Cabinet-level national resilience body and recommend its establishment as a matter of urgency. The food security working group, convening the Department of Health and Social Care, DEFRA, the FSA, the Home Office, Defence and the British Retail Consortium to define nutritionally sufficient rationing and develop an actionable food resilience plan, is proposed as an immediate first step that can be taken without waiting for the full ONR to be established.
12. The UK's current resilience arrangements treat risks as largely discrete: cyber threats handled by NCSC, food security by DEFRA, energy by DESNZ, emergency planning by local resilience forums. This siloed approach systematically underestimates cascading risk.
13. Real incidents do not respect these boundaries. A cyber-attack on energy infrastructure affects food cold chains, which affects hospital supply chains, which affects public health, which affects workforce availability, which affects every other system simultaneously. The 2007 Gloucestershire flooding did not simply cut water supply. It cascaded through businesses, households, healthcare and the local economy in ways that a water-specific response framework could not fully address.
14. The ONR's primary structural function is to hold the cross-sector view that no current body is mandated to hold. It would map interdependencies, identify cascade pathways, maintain a national risk picture that goes beyond the National Risk Register's current scope, and coordinate preparedness across the sector boundaries that risks routinely cross. This requires Cabinet-level authority. A body without the power to require cooperation across departments and sectors will default to the same fragmented approach that currently exists.
15. One further dimension of interconnectedness warrants specific attention: the UK's Overseas Territories. The OTs have significant autonomy but are dependent on the UK for foreign policy and defence, two areas that directly affect resilience posture. The submitter has direct operational experience of resilience planning in one of those territories, having been resident in the Cayman Islands during a period of active hurricane response and continuity work. The OTs are not currently integrated into the UK's national resilience picture in any meaningful way. The ONR should have an explicit remit to engage with the Overseas Territories: assessing their resilience requirements, providing coordination support, and recognising that their geographic distribution represents both a vulnerability and a potential strategic asset for the UK's own resilience posture.
16. The submitter's experience spans the transition from pre-digital civil defence infrastructure through the privatisation era of the 1980s and 1990s to the current technologically dependent landscape.
17. In the early 1990s, the newly privatised water industry presented a specific and underappreciated resilience risk. Privatisation had distributed responsibility without creating coordination mechanisms for emergencies. The Emergency Coordination Unit proposed at that time was designed to fill precisely that gap: a body with both advisory and statutory authority that could work across the newly fragmented landscape. Its rejection is instructive. The argument offered against it, implicitly that existing arrangements were adequate, was refuted by subsequent events, most visibly the 2007 Gloucestershire flooding.
18. The lesson is consistent across decades: resilience gaps identified before an event are almost always dismissed as unlikely or already addressed by existing arrangements. They are validated by events. The question for this committee is whether the UK will act on the gaps identified now, before the validating event, or afterwards.
19. Two historical observations are directly relevant to current preparedness planning. First, previous generations carried practical resilience knowledge, how to operate without technology, how to manage rationing, how to coordinate communities without digital infrastructure, that is no longer widely held. This generational knowledge gap is addressed further under question seven. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that even a relatively well-understood risk category, pandemic disease, exposed severe gaps in preparedness when the specific pathogen differed from the assumed scenario. Planning for impacts rather than scenarios, and maintaining flexible response capabilities rather than specific playbooks, is the lesson that should be drawn.
20. The geopolitical environment has changed materially since the last serious UK engagement with civil resilience at a national level. Three changes are particularly significant.
21. First, the norms that previously constrained the use of military force are weakening. Active conflicts in Europe and beyond, combined with the demonstrated willingness of state actors to use hybrid means, cyber-attacks, supply chain interference, disinformation, energy coercion, mean that the spectrum of threats facing the UK is broader and more immediate than at any point since the Cold War.
22. Second, the UK's technology dependencies have become a strategic vulnerability. Critical national infrastructure, government systems and the private sector are heavily reliant on technology platforms controlled by a small number of foreign companies, some of which are subject to increasing political direction. The 2024 CrowdStrike incident, in which a single erroneous software update caused global disruption to critical systems, demonstrated how a non-malicious failure in a single widely-used platform can cascade across sectors simultaneously. A malicious, targeted version of the same event is a plausible near-term risk. The ONR should coordinate a programme to assess and reduce these dependencies, with particular urgency given current geopolitical conditions.
23. Third, a workforce concentrated in draft-age demographics represents a specific resilience vulnerability that has not been formally assessed. This is addressed in more detail under question seven.
24. The UK retains significant strengths in institutional knowledge, professional expertise and civil society engagement that a properly structured ONR could mobilise effectively. The challenge is structural: creating the body that coordinates and deploys those strengths, rather than one of underlying capability.
25. The UK's critical dependencies span food, water, energy, technology, medicine, finance and transport. Several warrant specific attention.
26. Food security is the submitter's primary area of concern and the starting point for any practical resilience programme. The UK currently produces approximately 60% of the food it consumes. Global supply chains, upon which the remaining 40% depends, are exposed to geopolitical disruption, climate events and logistical failure. There is no current framework for nutritional rationing, no tested plan for activating such a framework at short notice, and no coordinated programme to increase domestic production toward a defined minimum sufficiency target.
27. The immediate practical step is a cross-government working group, convening the Department of Health and Social Care, DEFRA, the Food Standards Agency, the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence and the British Retail Consortium, to define what nutritionally sufficient rationing in the modern age should look like, develop an action plan to support UK agriculture to meet 100% of that minimum need, and create a framework that retailers can activate rapidly if required. This working group can be established without waiting for the ONR itself, and its work would provide immediate, concrete progress on one of the most fundamental resilience gaps.
28. Technology dependency is addressed above. The specific risk of operating systems and critical software controlled by entities subject to political direction warrants a national programme to assess exposure and develop sovereign alternatives where the risk justifies the investment.
29. The private sector more broadly presents a coordination challenge that the ONR is specifically designed to address. Individual organisations have business continuity plans; few have been tested against scenarios that assume simultaneous failures across multiple sectors. The ONR should have a mandate to require participation in cross-sector exercises and to set minimum standards for critical sector operators.
30. National resilience cannot be delivered by government alone. It requires the active engagement of the private sector, civil society, local communities and individual citizens. The ONR's communications and public engagement function is therefore as important as its coordination and standards function.
31. The model the submitter advocates is one in which resilience awareness moves from Business As Usual into Life As Usual: where practical preparedness becomes a cultural habit carried between home, community and work, rather than a set of institutional plans that most citizens never encounter. This requires visible, trusted, consistent communication from an authoritative national body, precisely the role the ONR is designed to fulfil.
32. Public engagement should be practical and achievable rather than alarming. Citizens who understand what they can do, and who have taken concrete steps to prepare, maintaining supplies, knowing evacuation routes, having contact plans, are both more resilient individually and more capable of supporting community resilience during an incident.
33. The ONR should also engage education at every level. Resilience awareness, including critical evaluation of information sources, practical emergency preparedness and an understanding of national dependencies, should be embedded in the national curriculum and reinforced through tertiary education and workplace training. This is both a long-term investment in societal resilience and an essential counter to the disinformation environment addressed below.
34. The submitter's professional experience demonstrates that resilience awareness is most durable when it is embedded in everyday systems and behaviours rather than delivered as periodic training. Organisations that design resilience features into the tools and processes people use daily, rather than maintaining resilience as a separate specialist function, develop more robust and responsive cultures.
35. The same principle applies at the national level. Public awareness campaigns that are event-driven, responding to a crisis rather than building sustained preparedness, are less effective than consistent, low-intensity engagement that normalises preparedness as part of ordinary life. The ONR's public engagement mandate should reflect this, funding sustained programmes rather than reactive communications.
36. Local resilience forums are an underutilised asset. With appropriate resourcing, mandate and national coordination, which the ONR would provide, they could become the delivery mechanism for community-level resilience building that currently has no coherent national framework behind it.
37. This is an area where the submitter has recently published substantive work and where the evidence points to a structural gap that is not currently being addressed.
38. The workforce homogeneity problem in resilience planning is real and operationally significant. Many organisations, including emergency planning teams, have workforces concentrated in a narrow demographic band. This creates specific and mappable vulnerabilities.
39. Lived experience gaps. Effective resilience planning draws on the full range of human circumstances: different caring responsibilities, different relationships with technology, different experience of crisis conditions. A planning team whose members share similar ages, life stages and backgrounds will systematically underestimate the needs of populations whose circumstances differ from their own.
40. Technology generation gaps. Business continuity planning must account for operating without technology. Workers who entered the workforce before ubiquitous computing carry operational knowledge that is genuinely rare in a younger workforce and that is directly relevant when digital infrastructure fails during an incident.
41. Demographic concentration as a single point of failure. A workforce concentrated in a particular age cohort is exposed to the risks that disproportionately affect that cohort. COVID-19 disproportionately incapacitated older workers; the Spanish flu of 1918 was unusually lethal to young adults. A workforce concentrated in the mid-twenties to mid-thirties demographic would have been severely disrupted by the latter pathogen. More immediately, in a period of growing kinetic risk, a critical workforce concentrated in draft-age demographics represents a dependency that should be on the risk register but rarely is.
42. The age discrimination that is driving experienced workers out of the labour market is therefore not only a social justice issue. It is reducing the resilience of the workforce at precisely the moment when the range of experience within it matters most. The ONR should have an explicit mandate to address this, both within its own structure and as part of its standards-setting function for critical sector operators.
43. Resilience in the education system requires specific attention. Schools and other educational settings serve some of the most vulnerable populations in any emergency. Emergency planning frameworks must account for the full range of settings, including those serving students with significant additional needs, whose evacuation and closure requirements differ categorically from mainstream provision. The submitter has documented, through close personal observation, planning failures arising from the application of standard frameworks to non-standard populations, including a case in which atmospheric dispersal conditions and a school's specific transport and pastoral requirements were not adequately factored into closure timing decisions during an industrial pollution incident.
44. Public trust in institutions is a resilience asset. It enables coordinated action, reduces panic, supports compliance with emergency measures and sustains social cohesion during prolonged incidents. The erosion of that trust, through institutional failure, poor communication or the disinformation environment, is therefore a resilience risk in its own right.
45. The ONR's communications function should be designed with this in mind. Transparency about risks, honest acknowledgement of gaps, and consistent follow-through on commitments are the foundations of the public trust that makes effective emergency communication possible. A body that communicates only during crises, or that frames preparedness primarily in terms of reassurance rather than honest assessment, will not build the trust it needs.
46. The submitter also notes that visible, overt resilience is itself a form of deterrence. A nation that demonstrably prepares, that publishes honest assessments of its readiness, and that communicates practical preparedness to its citizens signals to potential adversaries that disruption will be absorbed and responded to effectively. This visibility has strategic value beyond its direct preparedness benefit.
47. Disinformation has always been a tool of adversarial actors. What has changed is the cost and scale at which it can be deployed. State-level propaganda previously required significant infrastructure and distribution capability. Social media and digital communications have reduced the barrier to entry to the point where coordinated disinformation campaigns can be run at scale by small teams, and organic disinformation, false information spreading without malicious coordination, can fracture public trust in institutions during exactly the moments when that trust is most needed.
48. The ONR's response to disinformation should operate on two levels. The immediate level is operational: establishing authoritative, trusted, multi-channel communications that can cut through a contested information environment during a crisis. The longer-term level is cultural: embedding media literacy and critical information evaluation in the national curriculum and in public resilience training, so that the population is better equipped to assess the information it receives before a crisis occurs.
49. Disinformation is also a threat to the political will required to sustain resilience investment. Narratives that undermine confidence in collective action, in public institutions or in the value of preparedness spending are themselves a form of resilience erosion. The ONR's public engagement function must be designed to counter this at the cultural level as well as the operational one.
50. The submitter's experience provides direct evidence of the primary barrier to national resilience improvement: a structural tendency toward acknowledgement without action, in which the case for change is accepted in principle but set aside in practice in favour of incremental adjustment within existing arrangements. This pattern has repeated across three decades and two governments.
51. In the early 1990s, a proposal for Emergency Coordination in the water industry was acknowledged and not acted upon. The 2007 Gloucestershire flooding validated the concern. In March 2025, a proposal for an Office of National Resilience was submitted to the MP for the submitter's constituency and forwarded to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. A ministerial response received in April 2025 acknowledged the principle of cross-cutting resilience expertise and referenced the government's resilience review as the vehicle for change. In a follow-up response, the submitter noted the parallel with the 1990s and warned that a review process risked producing a resilience strategy centred on the last crisis rather than the next one. The resilience review concluded without producing the structural reform the evidence indicated was required. The House of Lords subsequently established this inquiry.
52. The barriers are not principally financial, though underfunding of resilience is real. They are structural and political.
53. Structural: There is no body whose primary mandate is national resilience. Resilience is a subset of multiple departmental portfolios, which means it is consistently subordinated to other priorities. The ONR addresses this directly by creating a dedicated body with Cabinet-level authority and a statutory mandate.
54. Political: Resilience investment is difficult to justify politically because its benefits are most visible when nothing goes wrong. The incentive structure of short-term political cycles works against the long-term investment that resilience requires. The ONR's independent verification and transparent reporting functions are designed to create accountability that persists across political cycles.
55. Cultural: There is a persistent tendency in government and organisations to plan for the scenario rather than the impact, to focus on the most likely risk rather than the most consequential, and to wait for certainty before acting. The precautionary principle, that early action under uncertainty is preferable when the cost of delay is asymmetrically high, is consistently underweighted. This is not a criticism of individuals but of the institutional culture that the ONR's standards and exercise mandate should be designed to change.
56. The submitter's direct experience illustrates the cost of this cultural tendency. On 9 March 2020, three days before the WHO declared a pandemic and eleven days before the UK lockdown, the submitter published publicly available commentary advocating for phased social distancing, immediate direction to employers to enable remote working, and a nuanced school approach that would reduce transmission while supporting key workers. The government waited for numerical thresholds before acting. The cost of that delay in human and economic terms is documented extensively in the COVID-19 Inquiry.
57. The United Kingdom's national resilience has been structurally inadequate for at least three decades. The evidence for this is not theoretical. It is documented in the Camelford contamination, the 2007 Gloucestershire flooding, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growing catalogue of near-misses and actual incidents that have exposed the gap between local resilience capacity and national resilience requirement.
58. The solution is structural. It requires a visible, accountable, Cabinet-level body whose primary mandate is national resilience: the Office of National Resilience.
The submitter makes the following specific recommendations to the committee:
59. The submitter would welcome the opportunity to give oral evidence to the committee if it considers that useful. The arguments set out in this submission draw on a breadth of direct operational experience, a documented advocacy history spanning three decades and a published framework that has been developed specifically to address the structural gap this inquiry is examining. The submitter is available at the committee's convenience and would be glad to respond to questions, expand on any aspect of this submission or engage with evidence from other witnesses.
19 March 2026