Emergency planning for events

[Music] Your listening to is all in the plan. The podcast for event management students. Subscribe now to hear about new episodes. [Music] It's all in the plan. Brought to you by Ashley Garick. [Music] In this episode, we explore emergency planning, resilience and response. With Andy Woplin and Alex Davies. [Music] Welcome to the last in the current series of it's all in the plan. The event management podcast. Now we've got a cracking episode lined up today. Event planners by their nature like certainty and predictability. So trying to think about the unthinkable can be quite a challenge and complex issue for them. However, no matter how difficult it might be, ensuring that you have adequate emergency plans. Can be one of the most important things you hope to never need. Joining me today are two individuals highly experienced in dealing with danger and having to think about the unthinkable. My first guest is Andy Woplin and he is regional head of emergency preparedness, resilience and response. Also known as EPRR for NHS England in the south. He is a fellow of both the Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management and the Royal Society of Public Health. And is co-author of the Edited Volume Health Emergency Preparedness and Response. Published with Chloe Selward in 2016 by CABB. My second guest is Special Inspector Alex Davies. Alex is a Special Inspector for the Metropolitan Police Service. With the specific responsibility for Hyde Park, the largest of the Royal Parks and a grade one listed space. Use for public enjoyment relaxation and hosting a range of commercial events. As a volunteer Special Inspector, Alex balances this with his full-time role as head of production engineering for jump trading LLC. Where he leads teams that build research, trading and infrastructure platforms and is responsible for cyber security and data protection. So thank you both for joining me. Andy Woplin, I'd like to come to you first if I may. Now, you've obviously been a very busy man recently, advising on the NHS response to the current coronavirus pandemic. But for you, this has not been a new or recent thing. An influencer style pandemic has been one of the most likely risks included on the cabinet office risk register for quite some time. And so I imagine there were very significant plans in place. But like most unexpected events, the coronavirus is a little bit different from other kinds of influenza. So my question is, if no emergency is ever quite like the one we expect or plan for, why do we need to have a plan at all? Thank you, she and a very good point and one that's often developed it. And I come from a perspective of providing a framework, providing the structures, providing the education and training that will allow individuals to come together and respond to any kind of incident or emergency. So you're right, if we are prescriptive and back in 2009 for the pandemic, we wrote a whole host of plans in advance of that that were very prescriptive. And the reality is where that didn't turn out quite the way we expected. Coronavirus has been completely outside of our comfort zone that has meant that we have had to create new responses. And if it wasn't in the plan, it wasn't part of our thinking that we would have whole community lockdowns. But if you have the individuals who are trained and competent to make strategic decisions, tactical decisions, operational decisions, you have a structure of interacting with other agencies and within your own organisation that you're used to. And if you're here, it's exercise in the trained, then individuals can help informed decision making at the right point at the right time in an in an order to a ball and legally safe way. And I'm always make the right decisions and another piece that I could talk about is the point in which you make a decision to worry and you risk compromising the risk of cause. You haven't got all the information too late and you've missed an opportunity. You just have to make a decision. We've learnt so much through coronavirus and there are decisions that I've made that I look back on. And I think maybe in hindsight, it would have been different, but you have to believe you have to have the conviction you have to be leaders in order to affect the response. So from my perspective, it's having a framework, it's having individuals who are familiar, it's having structures and the communication process to be able to share decision making information intelligence in a timely manner. Now I have a fun fact about Hyde Park. Did you know that it is the only royal park where policing of the park is managed by the Metropolitan Police and indeed the 1872 Parks Regulation Act gives Metropolitan Police officers the official role of park keepers. And there is indeed a special police station in the center of the park. Hyde Park represents a really interesting and special space in London. On the one hand, you've got this natural focal point for protest movements through the history of speakers corner, part lane being one of the common routes on marches on their way to Westminster, etc. On the other hand, it's a space for festivity for families, relaxation as well as hosting some of the most major events in London, such as the concerts, problems and winter wonderland. It all having common are large groups of people gathering for a defined purpose, but I wonder from a policing point of view, do you approach these things differently or is policing policing. I think both of those can be true. So policing is policing and everything you do is unique, even even within those events, there's an enormous difference between say winter wonderland and a concert. But of course, as you said, the speakers corner is pretty unique. Speakers corner sometimes becomes the start of a large march, which is very different to a normal speakers corner. And even depending on who is that speakers corner, there can be very different fields. And we've seen a lot of that in 2020. Of course, we haven't seen the concerts, we haven't seen winter wonderland, it feels very weird in that way. But we have seen a large number of other uses of the park and probably more of the sort of demonstration style events starting in in the parks. And of course, as the Royal Parks, it's not just high park that we cover, we cover all the Royal Parks, that includes green park and so James isn't these demonstrations often end up going all the way past palace and there's a fairly standard routes or a couple of fairly standard routes. So I think as Andy mentioned, you have a sort of structure you follow, you get used to some common themes, but the culture is very important to empower the people that are there to make decisions and there's any attempt to not do that almost always goes wrong because the facts diverge from whatever the plan says and now you've got someone doing something that doesn't make a lot of sense or they're not following the plan and then they completely on their own and either of those is good. So we're not perfect, but I think that's definitely what we try to do. So when it comes to events, probably one of the most substantial parts of our emergency plans tends to be an evacuation plan, it often seems to be the sort of go to response when things are going wrong, we just evacuate. I wonder Alex is a evacuation always the right answer and if so, sort of what are the challenges that it presents. In most cases, those sort of evacuations are not decisions for the police in most cases that the event organizer would still be responsible for the event, the police would only completely take control in very extreme circumstances and we would hope that would not happen. That's a thing that we would facilitate, but the expectation is an event professionally run event in say apart is perfectly able to manage their own evacuation and they would decide when to do that as they have entitled to do would manage it and our role would be to support that provide a bit of advice and so on. So we would not typically consider evacuating events or core policing responsibility in most circumstances and Andy, is your approaching the planning for emergencies. How do you go about identifying and deciding which is the best course of action. So I think it's about having a tool box of options and not necessarily being descriptive and both Alex and I have come back to the point of it and not being too prescriptive. In that of a structure that people feel safe to make decisions and take action and that's a difficult balance. So it is looking at the risk to what are our risk and that can change from event to event and location by location. So a concert in Hyde Park is very different to a concert in Regent Park or a concert in a fixed venue like the O2. And it's therefore looking what the risks are that they've had and having a suite of options a suite of plans. Again, in my view, there is a single plan, a single structure that we keep referring to and potentially annexes or action cards that refer to a fire or an outbreak of food poisoning from a vendor or a suspect package which are individual actions which we still need some guidance for our decision makers. But a whole suite of those in order to help those confronting those issues to make good safe informed decisions and take action. So having a number of options from a number of risks. is always worth following for events. We sort of see that in our risk assessment document. It's probably one of the most important documents that we produce. But I'm often acutely aware that certainly from my point of view, I often present the process of risk assessment almost as sort of a universally agreed-on process. But really, the precise assessment of any risk comes down to the judgment of the individual looking at it. And the more we think about the different people that are involved in either the planning for or the responding to emergencies, the more you realise that everyone has slightly different priorities and different agendas. I wonder Andy, how universal desire assessment of risk need to be and what can we do to try and ensure that everyone's on the same page? So I'm a believer of risk assessments being done multi-agency. I don't think one agency can sit and do a risk assessment and blissful isolation because you're right. There will only look at things from a single agency's perspective. So specifically around events, I would want the event safety team to own a collective risk register. That doesn't preclude individual organisations having their own because from health it will be a different focus rather than doing a completely different risk that you just assess it slightly differently. But having everybody around the table and I'm old enough and remember the introduction of community risk registers and I sat through painful days in various boroughs in London going through each of the risks as a multi-agency team because everybody had a perspective about that. A fire could have significant health impact or it might not, depending on one, what burning ought to, who's involved. But you only get that input by having those different perspectives from different agencies also around the table. And Alex, I suppose that's quite interesting to explore that from a policing perspective because I don't know whether it's a simple assumption to say that perhaps sometimes the policing priorities have the potential to conflict with the priorities of other groups. Certainly it's a different perspective. I wonder how do you go about approaching that kind of situation? Yeah, I wouldn't think that generally is a huge problem. So I think that the police are commonly at the center of these joint decision-making, whatever you want to call them, depending on the event. But you traditionally would find the police often ends up in a sort of chairing-like role, whether that's formal or informal. And that's important. I don't think there's generally much conflict. I think if the police start acting as events stewards, then it's very easy to get conflicted because you have a very different perspective on how to do that. Where the police stick to core responsibilities, there's very limited conflict. And that's where we want to be. And that's definitely the best practice. Let the event organise a run the event. And we will support and help if required. And that's the same for most other agencies. What are those core responsibilities that you talk about? And where should an event organise a C, the role of the police and when would you want to get involved? Well, in general for an event, the police shouldn't need to do anything. So if the event goes as planned, there's very rarely a police responsibility to do something. The police core responsibilities of course are protecting life and saving living, protecting criminality and all that sort of stuff, which shouldn't really be happening on mass in an event. There are some exceptions. So for example, where you have CT threats against events, we don't expect organisers to mitigate that. So you'll find of course some police assets there, but they're very much out the way. They're not likely to be very involved. And I think that web will stick to their responsibilities. It goes very well. Sometimes you see situations where an area may not be being stewarded as well as some people want. And it's very easy for the police to suddenly suddenly become stewards. And you've got a really confusing situation with slightly unclear who's responsible for stewarding the event. And you've also lost the resources that you had there from resilience. In case something happens, then if they're now all being stewards, they're a bit stuck. So I think certainly I've noticed in my time, when I first joined the map, we did a lot more of this sort of accidental stewarding and people didn't really think about it. People are much more careful about that now. They see that there's a risk to it. There's a downside. It's not just being helpful and you sort of need to stick to your responsibilities. I think the same is actually true in the health sector. You've already seen that there's much more of a culture on organisers should be able to provide to run their event. And the NHS, of course, is there to deal with things they can't deal with. But when if an organisers can't deal with things that are predictable than routine and minor, and it's just dumping that onto the ambulance service or the local hospitals, you'll see the NHS turn around much more and say, "No, you can't do this. You can't run another event like this." Which I think was not really happening that much as much 10 years ago. Yeah, I mean, Andy, that's in the interest of the. I certainly think that we've got a lot better in the last decade from a health point of view about thinking of the impact of our event in a way beyond the event footprint site. I mean, what's sort of your experience on where should an organisers be thinking in terms of their health impact? For the vast majority, the event organisers should be consuming their end's workers who say so. The vast majority of casualties or patients should be able to be dealt with sufficiently on-site and discharge back to the event. When it gets the person who's paid, asked for their money for their ticket, the option to go back and enjoy the event, there will always be a small percentage that will need to go to hospital because they've come with underlying health conditions or they've had a significant incidence, which sometimes are on-planned, they happen. And therefore, they need to get hospital, but from my perspective, as minimum impact is possible, we don't see that with all events. We have two extremes, so something like Gastonbury has GPs, it has suturing, it has X-ray, it's all on-site. So the impact on the NHS is very low. Other events, the organisers, the pride-ending, and you find ambulance services and gel ambulance and other organisations stepping in for nothing in order to try and minimise the impact on the NHS because you're right, the vast majority of people can have a plaster, perhaps a small bandage on their ankle and they can go back out and enjoy the event that there's been lots of money paying to be. Gastonbury is a really interesting example, and I wonder it makes me think the extent to which geography plays a part here because when I certainly look at a lot of the events, a lot of the larger events in London, of course, London is blessed with having quite a developed health infrastructure and indeed policing infrastructure, with lots of additional resource that can be utilised, whereas the village of Gastonbury certainly doesn't. So I wonder how much does this vary around the country, perhaps Andy first? Yeah, absolutely, and again, shame on my hair, let's call it experience. One of the reviews of the Green Guides, I pushed hard to introduce the geography because you're right. And it has its plus and minuses, so events in London, yes, you're very close to some good major trauma centres, heart attack units, stroke units, etc, etc, which is good. The disadvantage is that people can make their own way, so it's a non-controls response into the NHS, whereas Gastonbury is very controlled because people weren't made their own way. But equally, so things like the Great North Row and Gastonbury do need to be far more self-sufficient because the time it will take to get to a major trauma centre or a heart attack centre or a stroke unit is considerable. It also means your resources away from the event even longer, if you've got more than one issue going on at once. So there is a fine line and a risk assessment, and we did get that into the risk score and one of the iterations of the Green Guides going back in that geography and distance from acute services was a consideration to what you should have on the site. Is that the same in the policing world? It's obviously slightly different because you're not slightly worried about people sort of making their own way to police stations. I think the point in London is that there is a course just more resource around. So in an event of an emergency, there is obviously more people available in a relatively short period of time, because it is London. It's a much larger force or more resources. On the other side, there are probably more people in London. So it's out of you relying on the reserve is not a particularly great plan. So if you know your Gastonbury, for example, you're going to have a relatively large number of offices assigned to that, and then you're going to have a lot of offices in an enormous event compared to what normally happens there. And there is just no way you could rely on the local resourcing for something like that that's obvious. In London is much more grey. You could have situations where events and we see this with raves getting out of control and so on. So you have the unplanned events, which are large events thousands of people, sometimes tens of thousands of people that shocks spontaneously. And that's a thing that just couldn't realistically happen in most parts of the country. You get noticed if you started creating that number of people relatively early on, and it wasn't necessarily happened London, you could easily gather thousands of people in high part. And people may not even notice that it's happening until they all start marching down Park Lane. And so there's a big, there's a big reliance on intelligence and that's very ready. You know, that's the situation isn't common problem because people do tend to know what's going on. But I think that you can rely too much on the fact that there are there is a lot of resource. There is a reason for that resource and it's not just sitting there waiting for events. So I think the culture in the whole country is pretty similar now, which is that there is quite a professional interaction, you know, safety advisory groups work most of the time. And people do come together and that the issue of sort of completely, completely off of run events doing whatever they like is. I'm sure it exists everywhere, but it's it's pretty small. And I think that was probably happening on awful lot more 10 years ago with events that were just sort of happening because they'd always happened. And no one really did any risk assessments and there was no sag and there was wasn't a medical provider. And the expectation was that the police would just shop a close the roads and the ambulance service would turn up a tree patients. And certainly in my experience has become extremely rare. And as an organiser, you're playing a dangerous game if you do that because there's likely to be some consequences for you in a way that perhaps the wasn't 10 years ago. what comes out. very strongly there and has been a consistent theme in lots of our discussion is the importance of lots of different people working together. I think one of the biggest impacts of any emergency has to be how many people suddenly and unexpectedly need to work together and coordinate a response from police fire and ambulance but also through to perhaps power companies, water companies, local authorities and all of the other stakeholders that are involved in our events. I wonder how do you go about ensuring there isn't complete chaos, Pat's Alex, how do you begin with that? I think that we've done really well recently is really focused on this idea of co-locating and communicating between these these commanders and I think of when I'm speaking to sort of new officers, if there's one thing they take out of training, it's not learning fancy in pneumonics and it's not learning flow charts and it's it's learning that it's that when you get to a scene the person in charge for each agency needs to get together and all the data and all the evidences that if people in charge of all the agencies stand together, work together, it might still be a mess but it will be much much much less of a mess than if they don't and where they go and disappear into different car parks and see their different control rooms and try and email each other, it is never good and it doesn't work. So and I really do feel that that culture has enormously changed, enormously changed. When I when I started doing events you know 10, 15 years ago it was quite common for the command teams to have completely different cultures. Some of the organizations would put silvers out on the ground and some would be in control rooms and there wasn't great communication between those control rooms, that's completely changed and I think my personal perspective is that makes an enormous difference and then for more recently people have realized that the same is true for spontaneous events, it's almost more true, you have to find a way of doing that and I don't think that exists 10 years ago, it does exist now and where that happens, good things happen and we're training it and we're drilling it and you know it's a feedback loop and I think that's that's super important, Andy. Yeah I agree and the point of coming together before the emergency I think is hugely important from my experience 777 in London, we had trained as a multi-agency group regularly and we came together in Hendo which is where the Estrituatic Coordinating Centre was and the police command us to sat us down on that morning I remember very clearly and it said isn't it great that we all know each other, isn't it great that we trust each other and we'll do the right thing for London right now and we went on, did what we needed to do but events is the same and the co-location of the services and preferably the people who have been planning it in the weeks and months beforehand because that builds the relationship, it builds the trust, it also builds the world, you did promise that you were going to supply batteries for, oh yeah rather than it being a stranger on the phone saying how to my plan said you were going to supply batteries until you hear why that, so that co-location of everybody you get a common recognised picture because you're sharing information and intelligence and that is hugely powerful when responding to events and emergencies and the point that Alex made around the same language the emergency services interoperability programme which has not been rolled out, did just that we found in a number of emergencies that our language is different, we were talking different things and that had a detrimental impact, thought we knew what they meant but it didn't and it also forces us to come together to do the collective risk assessments, the situation awareness and decision making and that is working much much better, there's a single language now it's on the cabinet office website and we have to ensure that we all follow in our planning but the realities are there is no ambiguity anymore, there's no I thought you meant but you know to me that's what that means or no to me that's something else and there were detrimental impacts because of that so lots of work and we are in that position now where we are much clearer about each other's language. I think these organised frameworks play an important part particularly given the nature of how people behave in an emergency which I think that for many many event organizers and certainly perhaps those with a bit less experience have a difficulty having an insight into because if you haven't seen an emergency unfolding I think it's quite difficult to sort of appreciate what happens I mean I wonder can you give us some insight into actually what happens when these things start to unfold. From my experience and there is some literature around it the initial issue and depends if it's an acute or a slow burn there is uncertainty I would go as far as a bit of chaos so there is lots of information going around and you have to try and pull that together you have to have this multi-agency team who are drawing from their own resources to try and create a picture so I was involved in 37 as I said and the initial hour in fact it was slightly longer and we thought there were seven bombs because the passengers of the two were coming out one end of the train up in one station the other end of the train in another station and ringing 999 we thought we had seven bombs and it wasn't until we were collating all that information pulling it all together that we realized we only had four and then you can move your strategy forward it is feeling uncomfortable in that period where you don't have enough information you don't know what has gone on and what the implications are but coming together as a collective and holding your nerve until you get to the point where you've got sufficient information to start making the decision to start setting your strategy, setting your tactics for an acute incident that's quite a short period of time because there are lots of mechanisms to try and pull that into the structures that we talk about for the pandemic that period was longer here that was several days of uncertainty and that that chaos and it isn't quite chaos but that uncertainty and the anxiety that you see in lots of people but holding your nerve and saying we will get there we've got the structures we are we need to collate as much information as we can don't start making decisions to suit don't panic don't react to things that you're seeing let's get the picture and then get to the optimum point where we can make it for decisions and it feels controlled there are occasions and I've seen a couple of incidents where because that hasn't happened quick enough that pulling together that creating a structure that we never caught up we were forever chasing real because we never got on the front foot because we weren't quick enough at bringing that information together and then as soon as we did it moved on ready and that was a really stressful situation because you were reacting to wrong information so the trick is react holding of collect all that information create those structures get the right people round you create that picture and then it will come to a point where you feel right okay we've got this we understand that we know what the implications this is what we need to do in terms of strategy tactics and operations in my experience everything Andy said applies to all the services and that's actually the whole point is that that is a fundamental principle there is going to be fog of war whatever you want to call it a little bit of chaos whatever that is inevitable that is the nature of being an emergency service you clearly when you first arrive you have zero information so you need to go from a situation from zero to some number that allows you to make smart decisions and that's going to take some period of time and in that time you're not going to have a great response because that's just the nature and I think that people with experience get get relatively good at that process of doing the best you can and getting some sort of structure and some sort of picture making those initial decisions when you think you've got roughly enough information you can stop just reacting off off what's there because of course you do have to react initially so I think you know certainly when you think about from people on the ground you know it's not as if everyone could turn up and just sort of wait for the information so there's always going to be some elements of initial reaction going on the point is that you need to have some group of people figuring out the slightly more medium term plan getting a picture and then coming in and saying right now we've got this you know here is a rough plan that's going to change every 10 minutes for the next three hours but it is at least a rough plan and these are the people that are in charge and this is how we're going to divide responsibility and everyone is now going to work for one of these people and off we go and I just think as Andy said a lot of that is experience it's people working together as you get more senior you have an opportunity to have people who have worked with each other before that's not realistic at the ground you know the met has thousands of inspectors and sergeants there's no way they can work with the hundreds of you know ambulance service managers all the time so you can only work to assist them at that level but as you get more senior you can definitely try and get people that have experience with each other that enormously helps and you go from there. Just to come on to Alex point I'm not sure we've quite emphasised it enough is that the ability to change your plan as it moves forward and I think you have to be comfortable with that that we will make decisions and as we move down the line we get information that is different and we will change it and we'll evolve it and you have to feel comfortable with that again I've seen commanders rigidly sticking to their original decisions and you're like this is now wrong we're now not having the impact that we need to have because you're sticking to it and I've made the decision yes but on reflection and the risk has now moved on so you know Covid in February this year we were we were managing in high secure facilities so highest infection control facility that this country's got and we were managing those first few cases in that way in order to reduce the spread and for us to learn more about the virus. But now we're living without home, we're living in schools, you know, it's part of our lives and we're just managing it like a normal infectious disease. If we were still wedded to high-secure, we would have fallen over months ago. So you have to evolve, you have to change your decision-making and feel comfortable in doing that. Of course alongside all of this is the idea of keeping things moving when other things are going terribly wrong, really the ability of organizations to be resilient. Now if the coronavirus pandemic has done anything it's triggered a massive move online for so many businesses around the world, even those that perhaps until now had been largely offline. But it makes me think companies are now increasingly reliant on external platforms, Zoom or Microsoft Teams for their day-to-day operations not to mention, they're already established IT infrastructure. Alex, I wonder have we become too reliant on IT? It strikes me that if for whatever reason the internet was shut down tomorrow, I think the world as we know it might fall apart overnight. Am I being over-dramatic? My personal opinion is actually rather the opposite, yes that is true, but the onset is highly unlikely to be shut down. It's one of the most resilient pieces of things humans have ever created. And I think that this year has forced certainly the organisation I work for the Met has done more digital transformation this year than it's done in the last 20 years. And that's really positive and the upside to that are enormous. Quite seriously last year it was almost impossible to not physically go to a meeting, either physically went to the meeting or you wouldn't be there. There was no real plan for the vast majority of the time. Now it's the opposite, like almost every meeting is done on teams as you would expect. And I think the advantages of that are enormous. And you can now get the right people even if they're not in the same building as you and we're not giving COVID to each other and you've got more productivity and it's easier to do stuff from seeing. So I personally am an optimist, I think that there is obviously a risk that if these platforms go down you have a problem. I don't think that's any difference to any other risk that we have to be able to manage that. In the same way if the tube system disappears we have a big problem getting our staff into work as a real problem. And if the telephone system goes down we have major problems and the airway radio system goes down as it happens recently. We have major problems. So these things are, that's just the nature of the business. I don't think the internet is fundamentally any different. It's actually in some ways it's one of the easier ones to work around because you can have an old school conference call. Microsoft Teams is great, but there is relatively easy to have an independent system that for emergencies would keep working pretty much as it is. It's much easier to work around than say airwaves or the public transport system. So I don't know, I'm an optimist. I think it's actually very positive and I'm excited, but I don't doubt whether we're going to be some bad days and we're going to have to learn from things and that's the case of every single new step forward in the history of all of our organisations. I'm going to look at Andy and think now the NHS has a famously tumultuous relationship with IT. I think it's fair to say why is it such a particular challenge for organisations as large as the National Health Service? Oh, gosh, on all sorts of levels. The difficulty is we are now so reliant, so I was from my since the National NHS incident manager for WannaCry, which was the cyber attack on the NHS, and we let so much. Because we are so reliant, X-rays aren't done on a plastic sheet anymore that goes on a white box. It's emailed and potentially to a consultant or a clinician who are many, many miles away. Blood tests are the same CT scans, so through WannaCry, one of our major trauma centres in the country came to a grinding halt because the CT scans wouldn't work and that has a significant impact. So the challenge for the NHS is these because it is so big and lots of independent individual organisations. So primary care, for example, the deep with bigger all-part unit is what they are, but they're from choices, they are their own business. So we can advise them, we can recommend, we can suggest, but we can't make them use the same software, we can't make them be more resilient. Similar to hospitals, different hospitals use different software packages, different ambulance services, that's one of my pet hates, use different CADs or computer-aided dispatch systems, so therefore two of my services are sat next to each other, they use different software packages. So if one loses their ability to take 999 calls, they don't, can't do it because they're not on the same software. So it is because it is just used, and it would be so expensive, we've had many projects over the years that have tried to consolidate the IT for the NHS and you end up looking at what the capital and then revenue would be to buy it in and then roll it out and it is just huge. We could spend it on that and then we can't do hit replacements and heart operations and it is a really, really difficult balance. How do you build resilience then? It takes a long time and I think it's cultural, you need to get it into people's sub-conscious and into an organisation's sub-conscious. I think it has to come top down, bottom up, it becomes part of the fabric of the organisation, it comes part of the day-to-day, day-to-day running. So that nothing comes as a surprise, people are informed and they can make safe, defensible decisions knowing their organisation bought them and looking at some of those if the over the years, potentially one of the eighties, one would suggest that that police commanders didn't make decisions potentially quick enough because they didn't feel their organisation would support them if they were going to make bold decisions and therefore they're paralyzed to make the right decision at the right time because what they get it wrong, I might lose my job, what's my organisation going to do if I step up and make some courageous decisions about my own need department, my police thoughts, my event. So it's cultural that people are safe to challenge, safe to make good courageous, defensible decisions. And I wonder Alex with your other work hat on as well, I imagine this is something that you also think about, I mean is it any different in the private sector? Is it easier? I joined the Matt 12 and a half years ago and it's not an exaggeration to say that all the core systems I use, none of them have changed a single bit. The system used to be a con, the system used to record crime, the system used to be used to, where they were all exactly the same, you know 12 and a half years ago. That is not true in any private sector organisation in the world, including one that is significantly bigger. And it's because everything is done in a silo and so you know they run technology as a individual project so you have team A that is purely responsible for I don't know the body can project or to you know someone is responsible for this crime system. So the whole thing happens in a silo and no one thinks about the bigger picture and it creates this impossible to manage technology infrastructure where you can't change anything because you might break something else because nobody actually thought about how you would do that. And I think it could be fixed personally and I think that things are getting slightly better there. What's happening now is because it's on relation to less, you know less systems which is still being done in a silo but at least there's less of them. That's probably the next, the next step. I'm excited about the future. I think there's huge potential. I personally think that the productivity gains that could be achieved by doing technology properly are unbelievable. If you were to show a video of what a operational police officer does, on a shift, I don't think you would believe how much time is wasted because of computer systems but it could be fixed and bigger private sector organisations have fixed these problems. They've moved off legacy systems. I think that the police problem is much easier than the NHS. The NHS problem is Andy alluded to is much much harder because you've got organisations but also because you're buying all this custom stuff. So you know you don't control your CT scanners or your ex-show machines and that is a huge technical problem. The police doesn't have that really. The police has an old school, your technology isn't part of the business, it's all outsourced and you see that on the day but I really believe that moving to teams and this year has been really positive and there are some major projects that are coming in the next couple of years that will make a big difference and I think the future is really really bright because we haven't done anything for 10 years, nothing's changed. So there's so much at low hanging fruits. What a good positive point to end on. Thank you to both of my guests today. Andy Wattling, Regional Head of EPRR for NHS England and especially Inspector Alex Davies with the Metropolitan Police and thank you to you, listen up, for coming with us on this fascinating journey through the world of event planning. This is the last in the current series of it's all in the plan, the event management podcast but standby for series two we will return in the new year so there's never been a better time to hit that subscribe button so that you can be the first to know when we return. For now though, goodbye and thanks for listening. It's all in the plan, the podcast for event management students was written and produced by Ashley Garley. [BLANK_AUDIO]