Risk Profile Statement For Northamptonshire
The importance of risk assessment is emphasised by the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (CCA). The CCA places a legal duty on responders to undertake risk assessments and maintain them in a Community Risk Register, and publish this register.
The Community Risk Register has been approved by the Local Resilience Forum (LRF). The LRF consists of Category One responders in Northamptonshire; these are the Eight Local Authorities, Police, Fire, Ambulance, Environment Agency and Health Authorities. Their role is to ensure that there is integrated emergency management for major incidents.
The Community Risk Register is the first step in the emergency planning process. The inclusion of these hazards, or the particular scenario (i.e. the outcome description) does not mean that the LRF believes the risk will materialise, or that if it were to do so, it would be at that scale. The risk scenarios are rather reasonable worst case assumptions upon which our risk assessment is based.
The likelihood assessments relate to the risk occurring over a five year period at the magnitude reflected within the outcome description. The magnitude is based on an assessment of a reasonable worse case scenario.
As part of the risk assessment process, we have been considering the likelihood and impact of a range of hazards occurring. The risk assessments only cover non-malicious events (ie hazards) rather than threats (ie terrorist incidents).
This does not mean that we are not considering threats within our risk assessment work, but given the sensitivity of the information supporting these risk assessments and the potential use by adversaries.
Threat scenarios that are being considered include, for example: Conventional attacks using explosives, Chemical/Biological/Radiological attacks, Electronic attacks, eg affecting utilities and communications.