We are publishing a 10-point resilience manifesto in advance of publication of the UK Government’s Resilience Strategy.
We believe that if implemented these interventions would help to prioritise the UK’s resilience, lead to improvements to risk governance, management and assessment, and to the management of CNI-, AI- and biosecurity-related risks specifically. We would also like to see steps taken now to educate young people about the importance of resilience.
The increasing dangers and volatility of current times and the breakneck pace of AI development in particular demand that the government focuses on resilience as a key component of defence and deterrence posture. It should ensure that the forthcoming Strategy is suitably bold and innovative in responding to the challenges the nation faces.
1. National Resilience Committee: an independent statutory body to provide scrutiny of the government’s risk management, established by a National Resilience Act. In the interim, a National Resilience Forum should be convened for invited external experts to perform this function. The Committee/Forum should report to the JCNSS (with an expanded remit to cover national preparedness and resilience).
2. National Resilience and Security Adviser (NRSA): re-title the National Security Adviser to reinforce the importance of resilience and boost its profile across government as part of the role’s existing remit.
3. Government Chief Resilience Officer: appoint an additional specialist DNSA to take this role, lead the directorate(s) comprising the COBR Unit and the Resilience Directorate and oversee preparedness and risk management across government
4. Enhanced National Risk Register (NRR): ensure acute AI-related and -accentuated risks are added to the NRR. Import the chronic risk assessment as a separate section of the NRR with a longer time horizon of at least 15 years. Introduce risk assessment methodology based on preparedness. Clarify risk ownership and cover mitigations in more detail by sector.
5. AI Security Coordination Unit: encouraged by the apparent success of the Biological Security Coordination Unit, add an additional coordination unit in the Cabinet Office to coordinate on cross-cutting AI-related risks. Headcount could be taken or seconded from existing teams in DSIT.
6. Implementation of the Biological Security Strategy (BSS): ensure the BSS is fully implemented, resourced and funded, including the commitments related to a National Biosurveillance Network (NBN), and that progress on it is comprehensively communicated.
7. Boosted supply chain resilience for medical countermeasures: the Department for Business and Trade and the Department for Health and Social Care should produce a strategy for the supply of critically important medical countermeasures for national resilience purposes. This should involve bolstering life sciences manufacturing in the UK, maximising the economic and resilience co-benefits of reshoring the production of medical countermeasures and their subcomponents. This point could be incorporated into a broader supply chain resilience section of the Strategy.
8. Enhanced Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) resilience: implement the recommendations of the final 2024 report of the former National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) on CNI resilience. This includes a requirement for sectoral regulators to receive regular vulnerability assessments of CNI by operators, involving stress testing.
9. Exercising findings: the Tier 1 pandemic exercise planned later this year is welcome. Such exercises should be conducted regularly, independently observed and evaluated, with findings published within three months and resulting actions assigned to accountable owners within the government and beyond, within defined timeframes.
10. Preparedness and resilience into the curriculum: it’s vital to educate the next generation about risks faced by the nation, the importance of preparedness and resilience, and individual and societal responsibilities related to these. These should be added to the National Curriculum.
