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The head of Britain's Action2000 has called representatives of major public services to meet to draw up contingency plans for 2000.
This indicates that someone in Great Britain has a sense of what lies ahead -- other than lies.
This appeared in COMPUTERWEEKLY NEWS (March 3).
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Action 2000 chairman Don Cruickshank is summoning date change experts from the public infrastructure services next month to draw up national contingency plans. "Our objective is that the Government should be able to say that there will be no material disruption to public services," said Cruickshank.
There will be representatives from the telecommunications, transport, energy and water industries, as well as from the social services, local authorities, and health and emergency services. The workshop will focus on what each organisation is doing about its own contingency planning, and how they can prevent mutual dependencies from compromising those plans.
This will be essential because although individual organisations such as the NHS may be skilled in major incident planning, they will not allow for multiple simultaneous breakdown in other areas such as power and transport. National contingency planning is the second item on Action 2000's remit, after focusing on helping the small and medium enterprise sector get started.
"This work should begin to tail off by the autumn, and we'll ramp up contingency planning all the way through 1999," said Cruickshank. He will also look at the international level of contingency planning that affects the UK directly, such as ensuring supply of critical imports, like food and drugs, and the international dimension of year 2000 on the UK.
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