Not regularly but, through professional networks that some of the officers are in, we are often invited along to and asked to speak at annual conferences. We are up for a Convention of Scottish Local Authorities gold award on Thursday night in Crieff, when we hope that one of the big projects that we have put in place over the past few years will be formally recognised as good practice. That project involves a combination of national health service and social work databases that feed in live, real-time information, which means that, when we have flooding or any event that might lead to evacuation of an area, we can capture who the vulnerable people—the people at risk—are. If we have that accurate data, we can go in and offer those people the support that they need.
In 2010, following the flooding in 2009, we employed a member of staff to go and engage formally with the communities. We have more than 100 community councils. The process started slowly but, six or seven years on, we have got to a position in which 75 community council groups have resilience plans. As Professor Pender said, whether a community wants to engage is dependent on its collective memory. The areas that engaged first were the areas that have been flooded within living memory.
We have supported that work with equipment. The Scottish Government has been very good in funding 50 kits for the first 50 communities to partner with us and to develop their plans and arrangements, but we have also provided some basic templates on how to write an emergency plan and how to exercise that plan. That does not take a huge amount of involvement from local authorities, but we find that we are pushing at an open door. The communities are lapping it up, to the extent that we are having to urge a bit of caution, because they are wanting to go a bit too far. Some of our fire service colleagues are worried that some communities might take rescue into their own hands and start wading into water to get their neighbours.
The communities have a huge amount of ability to respond themselves. We are looking at not just flooding but extreme cold weather. Our winter resilience project is one of the two big initiatives that we have been very successful in deploying. We had two extended extremely cold winter periods in 2010 and 2011, when it was -15° in Dumfries and Galloway for more than three weeks. Many of the water mains pipes froze solid because they had not been buried deep enough in the ground 100 years ago, so we had communities that were living on bottled water for an extended period.
We engaged with those communities and they noted that their grit bins had been put at the extreme ends of the village, which is not much help to the people who want to spread the grit. We told them to redeploy the grit bins and said that we would buy them some more—they cost only a few hundred pounds. They looked at the village maps, and they knew the areas and the layout of the pavements. They decided to redeploy the grit bins in completely different locations that suited the community. With a little bit of extra money, we subsidised grit-spreading machines, which are little devices that people push around. As it happens, I do that for part of my village—there are three or four pavements that I spread salt or grit on. That is an example of how villages have bought into winter resilience.
On flooding, there was a craving for lots of sandbags, but the jury is out on whether sandbags work. The issue is partly psychological. Many of the older properties are several hundred years old, and the water can get in almost anywhere, not just through the front door—in most cases, it goes in straight through the walls. Nevertheless, there was a demand from the communities for us to deploy sandbags, so the council now goes out with flatbed trucks and drops off large pallets’ worth of filled sandbags. Before we knew it, a group of volunteers with wheelbarrows had got together. They take out three, four or five sandbags and put them at the front doors of all the homes that they know are in flood risk areas.
There is a lot of good work taking place at a very local level—it just requires a trigger and a bit of support during the first year or so. Communities have really bought into those schemes.
There is one point that the committee might want to consider. The Civil Contingencies Act was designed during the 1990s and came into force in 2004, and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (Contingency Planning) (Scotland) Regulations came into force in 2005. The legislation placed six duties on all category 1 responders—fire, police, local authorities and the 14 territorial health boards—but local authorities had one additional duty, which was to promote business continuity. We have a duty to engage with small and medium-sized enterprises and with the charity sector and others to encourage them to prepare business continuity plans for when there is bad weather or any other disruptive event.
However, we do not have a duty to promote community resilience—that is discretionary at present. Nonetheless, Dumfries and Galloway Council has done a huge amount in that respect. We employed a member of staff who is still working with us, and we have had great success in that area. We will continue to do that work, but some local authorities do not do it because it is discretionary. If there is any consideration in future with regard to adding a seventh extra duty that applies to local authorities, that could involve adapting the duty on business promotion to reach into the area of community resilience.