Strengthening multi-agency preparedness through the Scenario Informed Resilience Assessment (SIRA)
Case study: North Yorkshire Local Resilience Forum
Overview
The North Yorkshire Local Resilience Forum (NYLRF), covering North Yorkshire and the City of York, partnered with The Workforce Development Trust to pilot the Scenario Informed Resilience Assessment (SIRA). This brought together organisations from across the Local Resilience Forum to explore how they would respond as a coordinated partnership to a developing disruption under pressure, providing a system-wide view of preparedness in line with the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.
The challenge
NYLRF had already made strong progress in engaging strategic leaders in understanding risk, including running sessions focused on key threats such as utilities disruption. However, there was an aspiration to take this further, to understand how that strategic awareness translated into operational response.
In particular, the LRF wanted to bring together operational practitioners and business continuity leads to explore how organisations would respond in practice, how information would be accessed and shared, and how effectively partners could coordinate during disruption. There was also a need to better understand variation in preparedness across organisations, and to identify where common challenges existed.
Our solution
SIRA was designed to bridge this gap by combining an assessment of preparedness with an immersive, facilitated scenario exercise. The approach brings together three core elements:
- A pre-assessment to establish a baseline of perceived readiness across organisations.
- A staged, scenario-based exercise, using rich media and evolving events to simulate a developing disruption and test how plans and processes operate in practice.
- A post-session report providing a system-level view of resilience, alongside clear, prioritised actions.
Delivery was led by a multidisciplinary facilitation team from The Workforce Development Trust and the Resilience Advisors Network combining workforce expertise with emergency response and multi-agency resilience expertise. This ensured the exercise reflected both organisational realities and system-wide coordination.
The scenario focused on a large-scale power outage, reflecting a realistic and high-impact risk for the LRF partners and built on previous work done with strategic leaders to explore utilities disruption at the end of 2025.
External facilitation enabled LRF coordinators to step back and fully participate, creating a more open and effective learning environment.
Following the scenario, the post-session report brought together insights from both the assessment and workshop to highlight strengths, gaps, and variation in confidence across areas such as workforce resilience, governance, single and multi-agency coordination, and information sharing.
It also included targeted recommendations to support ongoing improvements and provided a shared evidence base to support partner discussions and align priorities across the LRF.
The impact
The SIRA approach enabled the LRF to explore how organisations would respond in practice to an evolving scenario – both individually and as a multi-agency response. Participants were able to challenge assumptions, test how their plans would operate under pressure, and develop a more realistic understanding of their readiness.
This resulted in a clearer, shared picture of preparedness across the LRF, highlighting variation in organisational maturity and surfacing common strengths and shared gaps. This included how organisations would prioritise critical activities, maintain core services, manage missed activity, and respond to staff welfare needs and prioritise vulnerable people, as well as how communication systems would function where power or connectivity is lost.
Participants gained a deeper understanding of interdependencies across the partnership, including the role of community organisations, differences in resilience across rural and urban areas, and how support may need to extend beyond geographical boundaries.
The exercise also created immediate momentum for action. As a result, organisations are now:
- Reviewing the accessibility and usability of business continuity and emergency response plans
- Strengthening workforce planning and mobilisation, particularly around redeployment, surge capacity, and access to essential skills
- Improving access to critical information, including staff contact details and key operational data
- Enhancing communication arrangements, including familiarity with fallback systems such as Airwave Radio within the Strategic and Tactical Coordination Centre
- Using the outputs as a shared evidence base to support more open, honest partner discussions to align priorities
- Embedding findings into continuous improvement processes, using the LRF’s lessons management approach to identify trends, prioritise recurring issues, and support compliance with the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.