Extracted from the UK resilience website

About this Guidance

This guidance consolidates, reaffirms and updates what should be considered and taken into account when developing plans for dealing with fatalities in emergencies.

Dealing with fatalities is a diverse and complex area, requiring many organisations and personnel to interact and pull together to deliver an effective response.

We need to be clear about our expectations of planning at local, regional and national levels in order to reflect challenges that responders may face. These can be summarised as follows:

• Local emergency planning officers should continue to plan on how to respond to fatalities in emergency situations - whatever their cause may be. This guidance does not represent a step change in expectation but existing plans will need to be revisited and updated. It is only through this work that we can establish capacity for a local response and start to explore nationally ways of filling any emerging gaps in provision.
• Many Regional Resilience Forums are already considering the need for plans outlining how to deal with an emergency that overwhelms a local response. This may look at how to build on the mutual aid agreements that are already in place between local authorities and develop these into sub-regional or regional arrangement. Regional Resilience Teams will help to facilitate this process.
• A programme of work has begun to identify what capacity there is across the country to deal with fatalities in emergencies. The Home Office will be working with regional and local government, and those involved in responding to such emergencies, to develop a framework for a national response. The Government is committed to ensuring that local authorities are adequately funded for the work they do in the resilience area, and if this identifies new burdens on local authorities then funding will be considered.

home_office_mass_fatalities_guidence.pdf