Our regular #LRFPeople feature looks at people around the county who are key to keeping our communities as safe as possible.
This latest story focuses on one of the longest-serving people fulfilling that role locally with Kev Topping, an Emergency Planning Manager with Lancashire County Council (LCC), who is marking 20 years in the profession this year.
A self-confessed “IT geek’’ he has returned to his roots. After starting his career in Lancashire he moved to London and Southampton in associated roles, before returning to the county following a short spell in Greater Manchester and being “back where he belongs.’’
Talking about his career he said: “It all started for me in 2006 when I applied for an Information Systems Officer job looking after IT in what was then known as the Emergency Planning Service. That was just after the Civil Contingencies Act came out in 2004 and everyone was trying to understand what that meant in reality. It did mean that within a few months my role started to morph into getting more involved in emergency exercises with my first major one being a nuclear exercise that year.
“The role then started getting more and more focused on emergency planning, always with the IT element in mind. I did that for several years before moving to London for five years to work on the development of Resilience Direct. I then worked for Ordnance Survey in Southampton, leading on civil contingencies, before making my way back to Lancashire into my current role after a stint in Greater Manchester.
“I enjoyed the London job as I was setting national policy but at the same time I wasn’t working at ground level and seeing it being utilised and wasn't seeing the interesting aspects of it. During the floods of 2015 I was back in Lancashire supporting the county as well as Cumbria’s response to what was happening and that reignited my passion for working at a local level. My move to Manchester met that need, but Lancashire was always my home and there is a really different feeling when you do this job in your own area.’’
Looking at his job now he said: “My day-to-day role covers ensuring the generic plans for emergency response and recovery, for both Lancashire County Council and the Local Resilience Forum, are fit for purpose, as well as responding to unplanned incidents as an Emergency Duty Officer.
“In the background I also look at the overall data management and IT systems for emergency planners and advise on how we can use technology to its best advantage at a time of need.
“For an example of this I helped introduce a system called Blackberry AtHoc which significantly speeds up the way we contact responders at a time of need, along with the ESRI ArcGIS Online mapping system, which helps gain detailed knowledge about the areas affected in an incident and provides partners with what we call situational awareness. This helps responders understand the specific risks in seconds electronically where in the past they would have had to manually obtain and look over maps and documents for details.
“AtHoc is a great development and came out of the Manchester Arena Inquiry Recommendations. In an emergency there could be 30 plus partners involved and previously we would ring all those partners individually. AtHoc means that by submitting a simple form, we can contact all partners across multiple devices simultaneously, making sure the responders are informed and involved as soon as possible while also saving a couple of hours of someone’s time making those calls.’’
Asked about the changes he had seen in his 20 years he said: “The biggest benefit has been the expansion of the Lancashire Resilience Forum (LRF) team. We have always had a Secretariat function, which provided some support for emergency planners, but the increased professionalism of the LRF, enabled by funding from central government, has helped support the initiatives such as AtHoc and the mapping system which would have been unlikely otherwise, as well as more training and exercising.
“We now need to utilise the technology more and more to make sure our emergency responders can make the best possible informed decisions as quickly as possible. For example, we need to look at how artificial intelligence can support us. One way to do this would be to generate meeting notes in an emergency situation which would allow the person who would previously have done those notes time to focus on vital time-sensitive response activities.’’
Kev is always keen to stress the importance of partnership working, something he feels has always been a strength in Lancashire.
He said: “Partnership working is a massive part of the job. Theoretically you could deliver all your statutory duties as a single organisation, but you wouldn’t do it very well. If we didn’t have the LRF and the partners coming together, the work just wouldn’t get done to the same level as it does now.
“Equally, when you have to respond to an incident you already know the majority of the people involved because you work with them on a day-to-day basis and you know what skills they bring to the table. Without that knowledge the response would be significantly poorer.’’
Asked about what he enjoyed about the job he said: “The best part for me is putting structure into the chaos. You don’t normally get any notice when there is an incident so understanding the immediate pressures of what’s happened, what could happen and what’s the plan to see us through to the other end is really interesting.
“I also like to gather learning from every incident in terms of recording what went well and what we could do better next time. We are never going to have a response where we can say that everything we did was perfect and there has always got to be something that can be improved next time.’’
