The role involves leading various activities and holding strategic responsibility for Council Services with regards to Emergency Planning and Operational Resilience including Business Continuity: Protect and Prepare Counter Terrorism (Martyn’s Law): Safety Advisory Group: Community Groups: Corporate Security: representing the Council at SCG (GOLD) within the Local Resilience Forum, with the authority to make effective decisions. Leading on new legislation, the role requires a high level of intellectual rigour, negotiation, motivation and flexibility to deal with a wide range of complex resilience issues, advising and making recommendations regarding a wide range of services across the district. To do this requires high levels of political awareness and engagement with a wide range of partners at a regional and national level.My role has leadership responsibility for delivering and developing the Council’s strategy and statutory responsibilities for resilience, business continuity, security and risk management and ensuring leaders understand their responsibilities within this.I am the strategic lead ensuring the Council responds to crises in an effective way and is the subject matter expert and Principal Officer for the organisation on Emergency Planning, Business Continuity, Counter Terrorism, Preparedness and Recovery. This includes responding to incidents, horizon scanning risks and strategic forward planning.I provide strategic advice, coaching and training to the Chief Executive, Council Management Team (CMT) and Senior Leadership Team (SLT) on various resilience arrangements and act as a sounding board for new concepts. I represent the Council at Gold (SCG) and Silver (TCG) level at Local Resilience Forums and in incidents affecting the Bradford District.

This is a key post within Corporate Services. I have contributed to key groups within BMDC and across organisations both regionally and nationally and attend management meetings both within the organisation, partner organisations and on behalf of the Director of Corporate Services. I am responsible for the leadership and day to day running of the Emergency Planning team, its mandatory and none mandatory functions, including overseeing the delivery of the statutory responsibilities of the Director of Corporate Services. I hold responsibility for Council Services with regards to Emergency Planning and Operational Resilience including Business Continuity, Protect and Prepare Counter Terrorism (Martyn’s Law), Safety Advisory Group, Community Groups, Schools, Mortuary, representing the Council at SCG level (GOLD) within the Local Resilience Forum.Leading on new legislation, I am required to have a high level of intellectual rigour, negotiation, motivation and flexibility to deal with a wide range of complex resilience issues, advising and making recommendations regarding a wide range of services across the district. To do this requires high levels of political awareness and engagement with a wide range of partners including all Council Departments, Police, Fire, Ambulance, NHS, other LA’s and others as needed.I was also the Licensing Manager for a period of 10 months but due to a restructure and high profile Emergency Planning work this function was moved internally.

I have been working on a contract for the National Covid Response Centre (NCRC) working as the Deputy Lead for the Surge and Rapid Response Team. The Surge and Rapid Response Team (SRRT) provides support to Directors of Public Health (DsPH) and Local Authority (LA) operational delivery teams. I am responsible for the management, planning, and delivery of all the strategic decisions driving the operational aspects of the deployments working with the lead planners for the LA’s, Clinical Care Commission (CCG) to ensure the measures of effect are delivered for the LA, for example, an uptake of 50% on vaccinations. Thinking strategically to identify and mitigate operational risks to the deployments and communication with all key stakeholders has been key to our success.I led the team by communicating what was required, to the team leads on site, driving them to deliver high quality and meaningful doorstep engagements around the vaccination programme and signposting them to where the LA have situated pop up centres. In all, over 30 deployments were delivered and by data capture and atmospheric insight collection I was able to continuously learn and make significant changes to the next deployment.Our overall budget was £3m to deliver this Surge and Rapid response work and we managed to come in under this. We have had to work to very short deadlines. A request could come in and 2 weeks later we could deploy a full team of 30 operatives on the ground delivering leaflets and doing doorstep engagement to increase the uptake of vaccinations. My project management skills are therefore excellent, and I am experienced in dealing with 3 or more projects at the same time at different stages of the deployments.Weekly briefings have been given by me to the Senior Leadership Team in UKHSA via Situational Awareness Meetings and Bronze Meetings. I have also chaired the multiagency stakeholder meetings.

I was the company expert on the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. I sat on 2 Local Resilience Forums driving best practice in the resilience arena and ensuring that utility companies (Category 2 responders) were represented under the Act. I sat on both tactical and strategic groups whilst we built our strategic team. I lead on the National Category 2 group for water and was the deputy chair for the North East, Yorkshire and Humber group. I have presented at some large multi-agency exercises the impact on the water industry in the event of severe weather, mass power outages and terrorism. The benefit to Yorkshire Water of me being on these groups at a national level was that I could ensure we knew the risks and potential threats to our industry and ensure our own plans are robust. I was also the key contact for The Cabinet Office with regards to information portal Resilience Direct and ensuring that they had all the information they required from us.I have been the lead emergency planner for the past 5 years on events such as The Tour de France and the Tour de Yorkshire the UCI World Championships. This involved both internal and external liaison with key stakeholders.I was instrumental in driving the Incident Management Process and have written many new processes to support this. (Multi Agency Response Plans, Severe Weather Plan. I represented Emergency Planning in the Incident Management meetings that effected my area of the business and was the company representative at a multiagency Tactical or Strategic Co-ordination group.We have 2 co-ordinators in the team who I work closely with to train and supervise. I recently recruited the current coordinator. I have mentored the previous 2 coordinators.I am experienced in identifying and highlighting further business opportunities to improve service, performance and process improvements in relation to significant events, risks and threats.