No formal response published by this government.

No formal response published by this government.

The government agrees that, given the UK-wide cross-cutting implications, the UK government should publish findings and lessons from all Tier 1 civil emergency exercises (except where there are justifiable reasons not to do so, such as national security concerns). Tier 1 exercises (as described in Recommendation 6) involve cross-government participation and relevant devolved government, regional and local responders.

The Academy Exercising Hub, which will form part of the UK Resilience Academy (UKRA) from its launch in April 2025, will ensure that government departments, devolved governments, local and regional tiers of government, and those in the voluntary and community sectors have access to the appropriate resources to strengthen exercising and lessons management. It will also fulfil a convening role, encouraging collaboration on exercising and lessons management across organisational silos.

As part of the vision and outputs for the UKRA the government published Lessons Management Best Practice Guidance on gov.uk in 2024. It has been designed to complement existing learning activities, be used in conjunction with established lessons’ platforms, and to support continual improvement at national and local levels.

The guidance sets best practice for the dissemination of a report summarising the findings, lessons and recommendations within three months of an exercise and advocates for the agreement of a strategic Implementation Action Plan within six months of the conclusion of an exercise. It should be recognised that for a Tier 1 exercise, the process of governance, debriefing, evaluating, disseminating and reviewing may take up to 12 months to make a report publicly available. The guidance also provides templates that can be used in the lesson management process. These include an Observation Capture Template, Cold Debrief Template and templates for a Lessons Management Register and Implementation Action Tracker which can be used for any exercise, regardless of scale.

To complement this guidance by providing context and highlighting examples of the lessons management process in practice, the UK Resilience Lessons Digest has been produced in collaboration with the Emergency Planning College. The publicly available Digest synthesises lessons learned from major exercises and emergencies, with each issue providing analysis of lessons arising from public facing reports generated after the events. It coordinates knowledge to promote continual improvement in UK resilience training, exercising, doctrine, standards and good practice.

A further established platform for capturing lessons is Joint Organisational Learning, hosted on ResilienceDirect. It is used to capture and share lessons identified from local and national multi-agency exercises and emergencies. The Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Programme team (responsible for encouraging interoperability across the emergency services and supported by a cross-government board) is actively working to encourage improved use of the platform to help minimise isolated lessons capture and limited sharing.

The government recognises that there is more to do to strengthen the systematic management of lessons from exercising. This will require a central, UK-wide online repository of information relating to civil emergency exercises, embedding the guidance on making effective recommendations in exercise reports, and a system that continues to promote a learning culture across teams, departments, organisations and multi-agency partners. The Cabinet Office is scoping and testing solutions to resolve this issue.

[IN PROGRESS] UK Resilience Academy launched April 2025 with Exercising Hub. Cross-government Lessons Management framework under development. Commitment to publish Tier 1 exercise findings within approximately 12 months unless security classified.