ICE recommendations

Well defended critical infrastructure is central to the security and stability of the nation. The UK must take action now to improve the resilience of our critical infrastructure, or pay the economic, social and environmental price in the future.

From the evidence submitted to ICE, the following recommendations are made to government:

1. Establish a new single point of authority for infrastructure resilience to:

• Ensure coordination and communication between threat-based resilience bodies as well as sector-based regulators
• Pick up the resilience issues currently overlooked
  1. electricity supply and demand
  2. system failure
  3. multiple sector/failure approach
  4. interdependency
• Support CPNI, Natural Hazards Team and sector based regulators in their work to increase infrastructure resilience
• Provide overview for resilience of infrastructure
• Achieve resilience by encouraging reserve capacity and connectivity
• Support local authorities to implement resilience guidelines
• Ensure planning is in place so that in emergency situations, contingency measures are communicated to the public (eg loss of public transport)
• Ensure there is sufficient technical engineering expertise in government to enable the defence of critical infrastructure
• Liaise with elected officials to ensure an apolitical approach is taken to resilience
• Improve government accounting to effectively manage critical infrastructure liabilities, and increase the cost of political failure
• Improve cooperation and information sharing between national, regional and local authorities and improve coordination with the emergency services
• Ensure that adequate contingency planning is carried out by critical infrastructure asset owners
• Encourage the Treasury and the Office of National Statistics to enable and increase a better understanding of the value and cost of critical infrastructure maintenance
• Carry out necessary modeling to enable proper cost benefit analysis for the protection of critical infrastructure

2. Ensure that the new natural hazards team will:

• Challenge private asset owners (through regulators where necessary) to ensure they are accounting for infrastructure resilience
• Cross-reference the CPNI critical infrastructure list with EA flood maps
• Work closely with the Met Office to ensure that climate change data is correctly interpreted into defensive measures by critical asset owners

3. Enable regulators to:

• Drive infrastructure resilience through regulation
• Ensure that regulated utilities´ investment, maintenance and charging plans reflect the need to protect critical infrastructure
• Enable appropriate funding mechanisms for infrastructure development
• Guard against the dangers of interdependency of critical infrastructure
• Increase resilience through reserve capacity and connectivity between assets
• Incentivise private critical asset owners to build in resilience and redundancy

4. Ensure full implementation of the Planning Act 2008 to:

• Ensure the new Planning Act is workable and effective
• Support local authorities in the implementation of relevant planning guidelines including PPS25: Development and Flood Risk and its equivalents