Community Emergency Planning

Community Resilience Plans

The purpose of creating Community Resilience Plans (CRP) is to increase the resilience within local communities to be able to support their residents during an emergency.

In nearly all cases, emergencies are dealt with by the emergency services with local authorities and key agencies such as Environment Agency or utility companies. However, there may be circumstances, such as extensive flooding, heavy snow or severe storm damage where the arrival of the emergency services could be delayed or stretched to capacity, or when essential utilities and highways access may be compromised. When this happens, communities can really benefit from some local planning to help themselves in the early stages of an emergency whilst waiting for the local authority to provide support.

To help parish councils and community groups understand what they need to do, there is a Kent based template to complete. At Ashford Borough Council, we have made a bespoke Ashford template for our local parishes and communities to use. This includes guidance notes to help you understand what is included in the plan and what areas you need to complete. There are two plans:

1) A full template for parishes that require a flood plan

2) A simplified template for smaller parishes or those that have no known flood risk areas

You can download these documents to create your plan:

Community Risks

Part of completing your plans is to understand the risks that may affect your area. The Ashford Community Risk Register [pdf] 238KB can be downloaded to help you think about what risks we have across our borough and define which of these may need to be considered for your local community. For example, is your community in a high flood risk area?

Further help and training

These templates along with further help and guidance can be found by visiting Kent Prepared - Building Community Resilience.

Local communities and Parish Councils may also sign up to free virtual training dates supported by Kent Prepared to help them complete plans. This is run by Communities Prepared.

If your area is in a known flood risk area, you may wish to sign up to be a flood warden. If interested, please visit Environment Agency at Environment Agency Flood Wardens for more information and available training dates.

Working Together

It is so important to us as a Local Authority to work closely with all our local communities, especially when an emergency situation occurs.

Please ensure you send a copy of your completed plan to us. This ensures effective communication with you during a response.

If you are involved in a parish or town council and would like help getting started with completing a Community Resilience plan or require further details to add to your plan, please contact our Emergency Planning Team on 01233 331111 or email us directly at emergency.planning@ashford.gov.uk

Is your community emergency ready?

The 5 Step Community Resilience campaign aims to get parishes and local communities to encourage their local residents to be self prepared if impacted by an emergency, such as severe weather, flooding or a power outage. These can be done by taking 5 simple actions: