The Cabinet Office has published a paper setting out the 2017-18 public summaries of the UK critical infrastructure sectors’ current levels of resilience to risks.
The water industry is one of the UK’s 13 critical infrastructure sectors required by the Government to produce annual Sector Security and Resilience Plans (SSRPs) .Securing the UK’s most essential public and private sector services against wide-ranging threats and hazards forms an integral part of the Government’s National Security Strategy.
The Plans, which are published by Lead Government Departments (LGDs), describe:
- LGDs’ approaches to critical sector security and resilience;
- their assessments of significant risks to their sectors;
- their approach to security and resilience in the UK; and
- activities they plan to undertake to mitigate and respond to those risks.
The SSRPs originated in the findings of the Pitt Review – the report produced by Sir Michael Pitt, ‘Learning Lessons from the 2007 Floods’. Originally intended to focus on resilience to flooding, in 2010 the scope of the Plans was expanded to cover all hazards and security threats relevant to each sector. Since then the SSRPs have included information on physical, personnel and cyber security as well resilience to hazards.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is the Lead Government Department responsible for Water sector CNI and for managing any risks. According to the summary, DEFRA has concluded that an all risks regulatory framework, effective mutual aid arrangements and high levels of investment continue to strengthen the resilience of the water industry to major disruptive events.
It also says that the piped water supply system is generally resilient to the loss of individual facilities, and there is a widespread ability to reroute supplies from other parts of networks.
However, it warns that disruption to electricity supplies or widespread flooding could result in the loss of mains water and affect the movement and treatment of sewage.
Full SSRPs are classified documents which contain sensitive security information
The full SSRPs are classified documents as they contain sensitive security information. However, the Government publishes annual unclassified summaries of the Sector Security and Resilience Plans to provide information on activity being undertaken in each sector to improve security and resilience.
Significant threats and hazards that can affect critical sectors identified in the summary include the risk that National Infrastructure could be targeted by hostile states, cyber criminals, terrorists or criminals for the purposes of disruption, espionage and/or financial gain. The Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) judges that National Infrastructure sectors represent core strategic interests for foreign intelligence services.
Water services are among key elements of the Critical National Infrastructure system deemed to be critical to the functioning of the country. The summary also flags up the fact that a significant proportion of the UK’s CNI is privately owned.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has judged that there is also a growing cyber threat. There are now more devices connected to the internet than ever before - the summary points out that with the growth of dependence on technology comes increased risk.
Flooding, severe weather and storms are also highlighted as natural hazards that can disrupt the day-to-day functioning of the UK’s National Infrastructure.
Key components of Infrastructure resilience identified in the summary are:
- Resistance: Concerns direct physical protection (e.g. the erection of flood defences).
- Reliability: The capability of Infrastructure to maintain operations under a range of conditions to mitigate damage from an event
- Redundancy: The adaptability of an asset or network to ensure the availability of backup installations, systems or processes or spare capacity (e.g. back-up data centres).
- Response and Recovery: An organisation’s ability to rapidly and effectively respond to and recover from disruptive events.
In September last year the Cabinet Office separately published the National Risk Register 2017 which explains the risks of major emergencies that could affect the UK in the next five years and provides resilience advice and guidance.
Click here to download the summary document Sector Security and Resilience Plans 2017
Click here to download the National Risk Register 2017
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