Bristol council's lack of emergency planning staff 'terrifying'

A Labour councillor said the lack of staff was "absolutely terrifying"

An audit committee has described a lack of emergency planning staff at a city council as "absolutely terrifying".

Bristol councillors told a meeting on Monday that the city is vulnerable to major emergencies and catastrophes.

Five people plan for anything from energy blackouts to rapid inflation.

The council's emergency planning has been repeatedly tested with the pandemic, several water outages, fires in two tower blocks, severe weather and major protests.

The team has also had to deal with a fatal explosion in Avonmouth, and a bomb scare in Bedminster.

Bristol City Council's audit committee explored the growing threats to the city and the risk of the council "failing to deliver effective emergency planning".

'Extremely challenging'

Jim Gillman, city operational planning and response manager, said: "The winter is going to be extremely challenging.

"The delivery of the Bristol City Council emergency management system depends on a small but skilled Civil Protection Unit, and the team has worked incredibly long hours over the last three years.

"It's the team that activates the council's emergency responses, whether that's setting up rest centres, calling out emergency carpenters, closing roads, whatever the appropriate response might be.

"We're just about maintaining volunteer levels but it's becoming increasingly difficult and many of our volunteers aren't in a position to get up at 3am and respond to a call because we've had a fire in a high rise.

"The challenge of getting a large response out in a timely fashion is significant."

However, in a report prepared ahead of the meeting, he said despite the uncertain times and small team "the internal controls in place to mitigate [risk] are strong".

Ecclestone House in Bristol is one of two city council-owned tower blocks to have had a fire in the last year.

Labour councillor Fabian Breckels said the staffing levels were "terrifying" and asked whether tower block residents could be warned of the risk of lighting open flames, potentially through social media.

He said: "Given the cladding issues in some of our flats - that will take years to resolve and there's even shortages of things like scaffolding - what can we do to encourage people not to use naked flames and put themselves and their neighbours at risk? Could we do a new social media campaign?"

Mr Gillman replied: "We don't have anything planned, and it's not clear what benefit or return you get from the effort you put in.

"The people likely to use naked flames, who are driven to it because they can't afford their energy bills, probably aren't that susceptible to a social media campaign."

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