Brief overview

The session will help familiarise participants with the various sources of legal lessons and recommendations on emergency response. The lack of central direction on these means that many prevention of future death reports from coroners go unanswered, and after initial work even inquiry recommendations are easily forgotten. Horizon scanning for issues in other countries is even harder to achieve, especially when their systems may not easily map over to the UK.

The process of these systems will be explained, and the interesting absence of regulatory investigative body in Emergency Planning. Leaving it a cross-cutting theme on aspects of Health, Police and Fire. Local government itself has an incredibly complex assurance framework with multiple bodies examining discrete aspects of an authority. But despite hooks for such activity in the CCA, there is no active and publicly communicated audit and assurance of emergency planning and LRFs. In fact, their legal status is a little complicated in terms of accountability and generally it’s the Cat1 organisations on whom the responsibility sits.

The inquests and inquiries website will be introduced and how it can be used to find and source recommendation and material to help inform planning and decision making based on historic lessons and recommendations. This will include some demonstrations of the use of AI to summarise reports and documentation. All the websites and services demonstrated are free to access and use, with no advertising or charges.

The session will finish with a discussion of the use of inquest and inquiry materials to support more testing planning exercises and wargaming – so bring your challenges and ideas!

Biography

Lt Col Steve Johnson is the Policy and Assurance lead for C-CBRN in the British Army, and coordinates assurance for Armoured vehicle systems and gunnery, dismounted weapons systems and combat identification. This role is known as the Army Competent Adviser and Inspector.

Steve is also an academic and forensic scientist. Educated at Cambridge University and Cranfield University, he has received broad training across policing, emergency management and counter terrorism, with specialisation in CBRNE.

As an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, he was part of the team which set up the Masters in Emergency and Disaster Management focusing on Terrorism, CBRN, International Disaster response and Emergency and Disaster Management policy and law. At Cranfield University he was Course Director for the MSc Forensic Explosive and Explosion Investigation for 5 years before handing it over on his return to the military and still runs or lectures on courses and research on CBRN, Fire, Explosives and Intelligence. His hazardous forensics module, supported by DSTL and AWE, was the first of its kind in the UK. He is on the professorial committee of the University of Tor Vergata, on their CBRNE Protection Master of Engineering program, where he has also taught on explosives, CBRN and crisis communication.

Finally, he is a special constable with Wiltshire Police where he focuses on response policing, and recently became a director of the Emergency Planning Society.