Local emergency management special issue: a foreword by Dr Barry Quirk CBE

This special issue of Local Government Studies focuses on the challenges involved in preparing for, and responding to, disasters and crises. The collection of insights, evidence and best practice set out in this issue deserves the closest of attention by all public servants, practitioners and students of public service generally. For it is when disaster strikes that government and public servants are tested in real time.

For some three decades, the workings of government, at national, regional and local level, have been seen through the prism of new public management (NPM). The emphasis has been on the apparent weakness of the government in achieving its intended goals and thereby on the potential of new methods of organisation and management to improve cost-effective service outcomes.

More recently, this NPM prism has broadened to incorporate organisational approaches that seek better outcomes based on service co-design with users as well as on more creative collaboration between public agencies in solving social problems. But even by 2019, for better or worse, public agencies and public management are still narrowly viewed as an instrument for delivering public infrastructure, achieving better service outcomes and allocating public goods. By contrast, far too little attention has been placed on the foundational role of the state in minimising public ‘bads’ and public risks (Quirk 2011).

The basis of our understanding of the modern relationship between citizens and the state begins with Thomas Hobbes. The essence of his argument is that we covenant to subject ourselves to a city or body politic as citizens in exchange for the state providing us with security (Skinner 2008). In the mid-seventeenth century, this was viewed by Hobbes as providing citizens with security from the brutal instincts of others; with the unfolding of modernity, this is now more usually viewed as security from excessive risk and chronic uncertainty.

From this Hobbesian perspective, it is clear that many of the disasters that beset communities across the world can undercut the very covenant between citizens and the state. That is why it is not the disaster which is the focus of public attention but the apparent failure of the state: failure to foresee the consequence of embedded system weaknesses (Clearfield and Tilcsik 2018); failure to prepare for potential catastrophic events; and failure to ‘build back better’ through effective recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction (United Nations 2015).

This special issue is, therefore, an extremely useful corrective. It shows how the state at national, regional and local level needs to work collaboratively in disaster preparedness and response. And it illustrates the importance of organisational agility and adaptability while acknowledging the importance of community resilience and preparedness.

Working with communities that are in the midst of a disaster requires a disciplined approach to the detail of getting things right. But it also requires a compassionate professionalism that works with communities at a personal level. Disaster management requires a focus on solving the immediate consequences of the disaster. These consequences are for individuals, for families and for communities. And very soon after any disaster, commentators will understandably look forward to the consequences of the consequences: the policies that ought to change; the resources that ought to be reallocated and so on. But those who are the most acute victims of any disaster will also want to understand the cause of the disaster to which they were subject, and in short order, commentators will also understandably look backward to the causes of the cause. In this way, every disaster has both a functional focus and a political focus. And this is so whether the disaster arises from a ‘natural hazard’ occasioned through extreme climatic events or a man-made disaster occasioned through error or system failure.

Close personal and professional experience of working in the context of disaster leads me to suggest a fourfold summary of advice to practitioners. First, use foresight intelligently to prepare for possible disasters, but above all prepare to improvise. Second, respond instantly and collaboratively. Third, help professionals develop their empathy while working with a trauma-informed approach to response and recovery. Fourth, recognise the limitation of conventional approaches to fairness when it comes to working in disaster and crisis situations.

Be prepared

In the UK, the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act sets the framework for locally and regionally based preparations for disasters and crises (Cabinet Office 2004; 2013). The creation of regional ‘resilience forums’ has ensured that authorities are better prepared to work collaboratively in the event of a disaster. Nonetheless, at the regional level, it is likely that capacity (staffing, resources and materials) will vary significantly from authority to authority. And thus while there are effective networks of mutual support across authorities within any one region, it remains critical for each region to have an extremely detailed picture of the scale and scope of resource availability across its area (London Resilience 2016).

Disaster preparedness exercises are extremely useful for honing communication and prototyping the sorts of operational judgements that are likely to occur. However, the truth is that whatever happens will not be what was planned for. Planning produces discipline from foresight. It does not produce the future. And so a degree of preparation has to go into how to best to improvise. The disaster incident will happen at the most inopportune time; the key response managers identified in advance will be away on holiday; and all planned communications will be disrupted by utterly compelling first-hand social media accounts of what is happening in real time. So prepare thoroughly, but prepare to improvise.

Respond instantly and collaboratively

There is no question that swiftness of response is critical in disaster events. This is well known in respect of tackling crime, but it is also important when responding to disaster incidents. The swiftest response will be from those people most affected: the survivors and their immediate neighbours, friends and family. Community-based responses that are highly local to the disaster incident will be next followed by so-called ‘first responders’ (such as fire and rescue, ambulance services and police).

In every local area, there are diverse community organisations that serve to cement civil associations into the fabric of locality. Often it is people from these locally based community groups that are first to the scene delivering direct support and help to those in need of assistance. But on very many occasions, disasters will engender energies from people in local communities that are not members of formal community groups. In this way, new and emerging community associations are forged in response to disasters. For this reason, it is important that public authorities are not blinkered to the full range of community responses that are energised.

Organisational life is conventionally predicated upon vertical accountability. And in disaster situations, it is a common place to hear management leaders fall back to command and control styles of leadership to achieve adequate responses. And the need for the swiftness of response may require changes to operational control arrangements. However, it has become accepted that breaking down silo working through more decentralised and collaborative working is essential for heightened effectiveness in an uncertain world. Indeed, retired US Army General, Stanley McChrystal chronicled his efforts to reorganise the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq and showed that a decentralised model can be effective even in a traditionally hierarchical institution like the US military (McChrystal et al. 2015).

The key point is that in disaster circumstances, the speed of response needs to be harnessed to more creative and operational approaches to collaboration than is usual. Collaboration is often described in strategic, commissioning or policy terms. In disaster situations, it needs to be part of the operational ethic of organisational response. Indeed, in a recent review of the international literature of effective disaster response, collaboration between agencies, whether formal or informal, was the key cornerstone success factor (Nohrstedt et al. 2018).

Be good to do good

It is only feasible for professionals and front-line responders to do good if they are genuinely and thoroughly good at doing what they are supposed to do. The problem of disaster response is that doing what is supposed to be done becomes so much more difficult. This then becomes both a professional and a personal challenge to public servants, whether they are elected or they are appointed.

The challenge for elected politicians to exercise effective community leadership is complex when circumstances are ‘normal’. In conditions of heightened public stress that accompanies disasters, this challenge multiplies considerably. Moreover, the challenge to professionals also multiplies. The limits of their professional expertise may be laid bare as communities may begin to question the authenticity of their compassion.

To put it simply, in disaster situations, people care less what you know; they want to know that you care. Of course, being competent is critical, but compassion and empathy are essential (Bishop James Jones 2017). This can be really challenging for organisations and the people within them. It requires a radical revision to accepted notions of public service professionalism, one that places renewed emphasis on empathy, kindness and compassion (British Red Cross 2018).

The specificity of fairness

Finally, disasters create new injustices or reveal old ones. Responding ‘fairly’ to those affected by any disaster, therefore, requires a nuanced and subtle understanding of the total range of people who are affected. This requires a detailed situational awareness of the disaster, the scale and scope of its impact and the ripple effect it has on adjacent, neighbouring or linked communities. Indeed, some community impacts could be as international as they are local.

In local government and public service generally, proper regard has to be paid to the equalities impact of public actions (including, say, priority response and resource allocation) in the context of a disaster. This is critical from day 1, but it is also vital for subsequent considerations thereafter. However, there is a more general challenge to public agencies with respect to guaranteeing fairness in response.

In the delivery of public services and the allocation of public goods, there are two main types of approaches to operationalising the concept of fairness (Quirk, 2019). The first is a rules-based normative approach which is predicated on establishing norms and thresholds and assessing individuals and families against these norms and thresholds. In local government, this operates principally in adult and children’s social care. By contrast, the second approach is based on an appraisal of the likely consequences of alternative policies or practices. This approach tends to be operationalised through options analysis and/or discounted cost–benefit analyses: this approach is most usually found in planning, housing and regeneration.

The point is that neither approach is useful for dealing with those fairness issues that arise in the immediacy of a disaster. Questions of norms and thresholds, and the comparable flows of costs and benefits, are of little value in arriving at solutions that are fair and equitable to those most affected by the disaster.

This observation is compounded by a final point, which is that, in disasters, time appears to change its character. The rhythm and pulse of daily activity for everyone (those who are bereaved, those who have survived and those who are working to respond) changes dramatically. Helping those affected, including professional and frontline staff, cope satisfactorily with the changing character of this time compression is just one of the leadership challenges for those public authorities involved in stewarding the response and recovery to humanitarian disasters.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Barry Quirk

Barry Quirk is the Chief Executive of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. He had been the Chief Executive of the London Borough of Lewisham for 20 years when the UK Government and the Local Government Association jointly drafted him in to lead the response to the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy in central London in June 2017. Subsequently, he was permanently appointed to the role by the Kensington and Chelsea Council in January 2018. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Local Government Studies.