From KableNet

The Society of IT Management has warned that local authorities do not fully understand the expectations of the Civil Contingencies Act

It has expressed the concerns in a report, Be Prepared: Lessons from experiences in business discontinuity, released on 25 January 2007.

It says that councils are missing opportunities to establish up to date disaster recovery plans for ICT services, and that there is often a lack of communication between key emergency personnel.
The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 has placed new responsibilities on public sector organisations to identify and make plans to mitigate against business continuity risks. Socitm says there are compelling arguments for these to include ICT, such as the growth in online transactional services, but that heads of ICT departments often find it difficult to win the appropriate resources.

How serious is this? It could range from council IT failures being like those public-servant strikes when life in the UK just carries on oblivious, to something more like the winter of discontent when chronic local service failure brings down the government.

Like anyone else, the local-government IT managers group Socitm tends to make the case for more resources for its own members. But they’re a hard-headed lot, close to front-end service delivery and well coached in the school of hard knocks. Their collective experience of what might go wrong is pretty weighty.