Emergency Planning & Risk Officer Ref: 58-24

Job summary

Description of duties

• Take an active role in helping to ensure that Breckland Council are legally compliant with Health and Safety Legislation.
• Working with Service managers to ensure compliance with statutory requirements and good practice.
• To ensure the continued development of the Health and Safety strategy, including the production, monitoring and auditing of a robust health and safety management framework, ensuring compliance in all areas.
• To support the risk assessment process, ensuring suitable and sufficient risk assessments are carried out by, and in place by, service areas.
• To assist the Corporate Safety & Emergency Planning Team Leader in building and maintaining relationships with key partners, both within the council and a variety of partner organisations, including the emergency services, voluntary and faith groups, the military, other central and local government departments, the public and private sector to enhance coordination on emergency planning and business continuity.
• Support the development and maintenance of Breckland Emergency Management arrangements (e.g. Emergency Response alert and activation plans, and Rest Centre Plans).
• Support the development and maintenance of Breckland Business Continuity Management arrangements.
• Support and maintain arrangements to enhance community resilience and confidence.
• Support arrangements for Emergency Planning / Business Continuity training and exercises for council staff and partners as required.
• Assist with the promotion of business continuity management arrangements to business and voluntary organisations and provide advice and assistance when requested.
• Contribute to the activities of the Norfolk Resilience Forum (NRF) and the Norfolk Local Authority Resilience Partnership (NLARP).
• Help positive promotion of the service and ensure all external, internal partners and stakeholders have high levels of confidence in the services provided.
• Embrace and Support other areas of work within the Environmental Health & Licensing Service as required on an occasional / business need basis.
• Ensure compliance to all policies, procedures, standard operating practices, with recommendations for action and continuous improvement.

Primary Line/Performance Management Objectives of the Role

• To provide support to the Corporate Safety & Emergency Planning Team Leader and Service Manager to ensure that Breckland Council is compliant with health, safety and welfare provisions.
• To ensure that the Council has up to date emergency and business continuity procedures and that we are adequately prepared and resilient.
• Ensure regular testing of procedures and 'exercising'
• Ensure all relevant staff have received appropriate levels of training
• Ensure the duty officers are coordinated to provide 24/7 cover
• Maintenance of all essential documents on resilience direct
• Maintenance of the Councils emergency contact list

Responsibilities for:

People: The post holder will be responsible for their own day to day management of their workload. They will be responsible for ensuring the coordination of the duty officers and arrange cover where appropriate as well as coordination of standby allowances. They will be responsible for checking all services BC plans and working with partner agencies to ensure all council plans are fit for purpose.

Decision making: The post holder will have some decision-making responsibility in terms of day to day support and advice on corporate health and safety, emergency planning and business continuity matters. Higher level decisions will need to be made with the post holders line manager/senior manager/'Silver' and 'Gold command'.

Communications: The post holder will be expected to communicate with a wide range of audiences and stakeholders from individual residents, community groups/organisations, senior managers and elected members in the council to Blue light services and partners ( including Voluntary Sector). The individual will be expected to effectively communicate actions as well as respond to requests from partner agencies as well as recording decisions and communications.

This job description is not exhaustive.

The job description outlines the current position and will be subject to review in the light of development within the service. This will be in consultation with the post holder, as detailed in your Contract of Employment.