Civil Contingencies

Do you like disaster movies?  I do.  Love them. Love the Walking Dead, Terminator, 28 Days later, love them all. Have you ever thought about what happened when the brown sticky stuff hits the fan?  Well here is the thing, if you read enough history on the cold war, you will notice that there was such a thing as “Civil Defence” and that was to  look after people in the case of a nuclear explosion.  Its pretty cool looking at it (Find out more from  here) , but  one of the cool things that came from it was Civil Contingencies.  

Civil Contingencies planning looks after you and your family when there is an emergency.  It establishes who is responsible in the case of an emergency and what government departments have to to do before hand.  It is a way of making sure that the people who run our country have a plan for most problems.  

So why am I interested in this?  Again I am a huge geek, and the thought of the nuclear apocalypse is one that is quite interesting (look out for a blog on the cold war that I am going to write). The thought that our government have a plan in their hands is again, something that is really interesting.  So being me, I sent a request to the ALL councils in wales and asked them how much they spend on civil contingencies.

The reasons I asked them is again linked back to the question of “Follow the money”.  How much money someone is willing to spend on something, DIRECTLY shows how much someone takes an interest in something.  BY finding out how much councils put into planning shows how much they wants to look after us.  

So I asked. And here are the results:

Name	Total Amount	people working there in total
Bleaunau	£964,531.00
Bridgend	333445
Caerphilly	863031 – since 2010	5
Cardiff	1853621	4
Camarthenshire	1380490	3
Ceredigion
Conway
Denbighshire	96081
Flintshire	£118,937.00
Gwynedd
Anglesey	98710
Merthyr Tydfil	96380	2
Monmouth	664073 since 2010	3
Neath Port Talbot
Newport	34128	2
Pembroke
Powys	Nil in Civil Contingencies (Due to budget) but 164,540 in planning	3
RCT
Swansea

Torfaen	£700,000.00
Vale Of Glamorgan	126773	2
Wrexham

This is not the end of the story, however!  As I have found out during the making of this blog, I didn't look in the right place! Due to the amazing work that the boys in North Wales Police (having talked to them, I can honestly say that they take a LOT of pride in their work and the sheer amount of information, and quality, is AMAZING.  If you need to talk about anything related to the police ask them and them alone. This links in with consistency of FoI departments - Which I will address in another blog) I found that this was the WRONG place to ask my questions.

The council is NOT the first point of contact for civil emergencies. It is something called the “Local Resilience Forum” (LRF for short).  They are the ones that coordinate the plans with each other.  The law now works so that all the organisations have to work together.  They are the ones who makes the plans.  Interesting isn't it?  

So now I have to work in the ONLY way I know how.  More FoI Request to find out about these LRF’s!  I bet the prepper community is going to go nuts over this one!  (If you don't know what a prepper is, I suggest you have a little look).