The Royal United Services Institute has published a paper which examines the UK's approach to supply-chain resilience in four key sectors: food; water; pharmaceuticals; and energy. It argues that the UK government is trying to follow a partnership model between the public and private sectors to manage what it sees as an increasingly risk-prone security environment for various strategic goods and services.
Over the past twenty years, the UK has progressively adopted a risk-management approach to security, in which the priority for investment in resilience to all kinds of threat and hazard is informed by an assessment of the likelihood of harm or disruption to key British interests, and the seriousness of the likely impacts. Supply-chain resilience is for the most part regarded as a matter for the (now largely private-sector) owners and operators of essential service providers in the national infrastructure sectors; but the UK government has tempered this market-based approach with moves towards a partnership model to manage what it sees as an increasingly risk-prone security environment for energy, food and some other strategic goods and services, in the medium- to long-term future.
This paper was commissioned by the Crisis Management Research and Training (CRISMART) centre at the Swedish Defence University on behalf of Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap (MSB), the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. It constitutes the UK country-report chapter of a larger study on how countries are planning to deal with disruptions in the security of supply chains, in particular: food and drinking water; energy resources (oil, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind); and pharmaceuticals.