WESTMINSTER is what many tourists consider to be London. It is full of iconic sites, including Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Westminster and Trafalgar Square. The population swells by a million people a day for leisure and business.

The blend of heritage, business, tourism and retail, plus the large number of people, all within a small, consolidated area, creates a unique situation for risk management.

At the heart of it all is Westminster City Council. “Westminster has in the past been a target for terrorists of different sorts,” says John Barradell, deputy chief executive.

Barradell is responsible for contingency planning, community protection and environmental health, and played a lead role in coordinating the response to the July 7 bombings and the polonium210 scare. The poisoning of the Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko with polonium210 was a situation even London had not encountered before.

But there are two phases to any incident, be it 7/7, Litvinenko or flooding. The first phase, the incident itself and its management, is dealt with by the Gold Group, headed up by the Metropolitan Police with involvement from the NHS and the fire service.

The recovery period, the second phase, is about returning to normal, and is led by the Gold Recovery Group, which in this case was chaired by Westminster City Council. Quite often the two phases overlap.

In the Litvinenko case, Westminster’s actions were kick-started after it was contacted by the chief executive of Wandsworth Council, who was on call through an arrangement called London LA Gold. One chief executive of a London borough is on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and will be contacted if there is a major incident in London.

The Gold Recovery Group was comprised of local authorities where traces of contamination were found, the Environment Agency, Health Protection Agency, Health and Safety Executive, Department for Transport and others. It was the first time all of those agencies had come together for incident recovery.

Having these generic structures for dealing with the incident helped, but there was no national protocol for dealing with radioactive contamination.

The council’s environmental health department was responsible for coordinating everyone and making sure that individual premises were safe for the public to use.

A total of 47 sites were investigated after they were identified by the police and released as crime scenes. “Each of them had a slightly different immediate risk,” Barradell says.

The council has written what it did into a protocol that can be used in future for similar incidents. It includes the methodology for deciding whether sites pose a high or low risk to public health. Barradell says that one of the keys to the investigation’s success was that the council had worked with many of those involved before. “We’ve implemented the emergency plan in Westminster probably 15 to 20 times since last June... so doing the contingency stuff is unfortunately quite common.”

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