Steelhenge has been supporting the Food Standard’s Agency (FSA) with their exercise programme since 2008. This has included running a small technical exercise to rehearse the organisation’s activation arrangements as well as two major internal FSA command post exercises following the revision of the Agency’s Incident Response Protocol.
The Food Standards Agency is an independent Government department set up by an Act of Parliament in 2000 to protect the public's health and consumer interests in relation to food. The FSA provides advice and information to the public and Government on food safety from farm to fork. It also protects consumers through effective food enforcement and monitoring.
The aim of the command post exercises is to rehearse the Agency’s Incident Response Protocol in its entirety. This requires a full simulation of a high level food safety incident including rehearsing external communication channels, EU linkages, and communications with the wider public and industry. As part of the exercise, the organisation’s media response is also rehearsed. This is achieved through Steelhenge’s in-house media capability conducting pre-recorded and live media inputs and drawing upon some of our highly experienced journalists as well as using the Steelhenge simulated news website to report real time new stories.
To develop a credible and strategic scenario, Steelhenge is required to develop a substantial ‘back story’ containing some very specific technical detail relating to food safety within the food supply chain in order to trigger an appropriate response. In order to achieve this, Steelhenge draws upon its own sector and scientific expertise as well as wider subject matter experts from the FSA, industry, local authorities and trade associations. This is a good example of Steelhenge’s ability to work effectively with stakeholders at a highly technical level to develop an appropriate and tailored scenario designed to achieve the specific aims and objectives of each exercise.
The exercises have enabled the Agency to fully rehearse their Incident Response Protocol, building confidence and capability within the response teams. Issues and developmental opportunities have been captured by a team of observers and fed into a post-exercise report along with player feedback and distilled into a set of recommendations to support continuous improvement.
