Many business continuity plans focus on the resources of the organisation concerned but neglect the outside world.

But the outside world contains many other organisations, which can either help or hinder your incident management or recovery efforts.

The emergency services are the obvious ones, but there are several other agencies that may have a bearing on whether or not you’ll be getting back to work in the near future. These include (but are not limited to) : 

• The Health and Safety Executive

• The Environment Agency

• The Local Authority

• Your particular regulatory body (Financial Services Authority, Food Standards Agency, etc, etc)

The specific external agencies that you might come up against will differ from incident to incident and from organisation to organisation.

To avoid any nasty surprises, it’s a good idea, as part of the planning process, to list the external agencies that might impact on your recovery capability and make contact with them before the event.