If you want some grisly reading for a Friday afternoon, I’d recommend the National Risk Register, released by the Cabinet Office today. It outlines the “range of emergencies that might have a major impact on all, or significant parts of, the UK”. A welcome act of transparency – I’ve always thought it would be a good idea to know what our government’s worrying about, and – by extension – what we should be worried about.
Not that we should worry too much, mind. The aim of the document is to make us more informed, rather than paranoid. And, for that reason, it avoids providing a straighforward ranking of threats – a terror top-ten, so to speak. Instead there’s a graph on page 5, with one axis labelled “relative impact”, and the the other “relative likelihood”. Threats are plotted against these axes; the outcome being that “attacks on transport” come out as the most likely, with “pandemic influenza” having the greatest impact (a potential 50,000-750,000 deaths, apparently). On the balance of liklihood vs impact, it’s the ‘flu that we should probably worry about the most.
So what do CoffeeHousers make of it? One thing that might be worth thinking about is the fact that terrorism seems to have been sub-divided into several threats – “attacks on transport”, “electronic attacks”, “attacks on critical infrastructure” etc. But a cursory glance at the graph, and it looks like if you rolled those threats together into one category – i.e. “terrorism” – then it could well top pandemic influenza in terms of both likelihood and impact. I’m sure the Cabinet Office have their reasons for the sub-division – indeed, it may not even make sense to conjoin the categories. But would you like to see it done differently by the time the next risk register is released next year?
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