About

Building Resilience Together in Leicester and Rutland worked with local people to develop initiatives to mitigate flooding. Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland is a very diverse and vast area of the East Midlands. Obviously, we have Leicester City which is a highly populated urban area with a hugely diverse population encompassing a number of different religions and languages spoken. At the other end of the scale, we have some very small rural communities as well as farmers and considerable areas of farmland. We also have everything in between from larger towns, villages and small hamlets. 

Leicester City and Rutland have unitary authorities whereas the rest of Leicestershire have a two-tier authority system with the County Council being responsible for areas such as Social Care, Education and Highways and the Districts and Borough Councils being responsible for areas such as Housing, Council Tax, Planning and Waste Collection. This can sometimes cause issues when residents believe that “the council” is responsible, but they are not clear whether this means the County Council or their district council. 

The challenges we face are many and varied but include the national challenges such as the cost of living crisis and the risk of violent disorder as seen throughout the country over the summer months 

The top eight risks for our region have been identified as: 

• Power loss  

• Disease outbreaks  

• Severe weather  

• Loss of telecommunications  

• Flooding  

• Major transport accident  

• Cyber-attack  

• Terrorism  

While it is difficult to engage our communities with some of these risks, there are areas who are keen to develop with Building Resilience Together in Leicester and Rutland worked with local people to develop initiatives to mitigate flooding, especially those areas where they experience regular issues such as flooding in Leicester City and along the River Soar and River Welland, as well as other rivers in the County. 

Some communities are keen to look at the risks they face and how these can be mitigated, while others are not so keen to engage as they worry more about the cost of living and other concerns. 

Growing Community Resilience

While the Community Hubs idea had some merit, we were keen to see how we could tailor it to fit our local area to add value and avoid confusion by avoiding setting up a physical space. Instead we focused more on Community Response Plans (CRPs) and Virtual Community hubs as a way of activating these plans. 

Prior to the project starting we had a total of 62 Community Response plans in place. We were aware that a number of areas had concerns about their resilience but did not have a CRP in place or if they did, it was quite old and outdated. We wanted to ensure that whatever we chose to deliver, it was available to all communities otherwise we risked alienating those who felt excluded from the offer.  

We met Alice and Katherine in person at the National Consortium of Societal Resilience Annual Conference to talk in person and we were happy that we would be able to work with the team as part of the Building Resilience Together project.

Impact

We have successfully delivered a series of 3 webinars around Community Response Plans with a number of communities getting involved to put their CRP together and understanding more about why having a plan is so important. 

Some communities have really taken this subject on board and others have stated that while they had some ideas of who could do what during an emergency, they had never thought about writing it down until now. 

The uptake appears to have been really positive so far as we’ve received a few questions about the template response plan, however there is still much work to be done with lack of engagement being an issue in some areas. 

It is our intention to follow up with some specific areas across the County, especially where they have been identified as being at high risk – especially from flooding, but don’t have a plan in place as yet. 

Our colleagues in the City will also be following up with residents and community groups who registered for the webinars as they don’t currently have Community Response Plans in the City but they are considering how best to introduce this concept and what it might look like for City residents. 

Sustainable City Resilience

Looking forward, we intend to keep highlighting the benefits of having a Community Response Plan and looking at those groups who already have one in place and how they have benefitted from having the plan – whether that’s just having peace of mind or whether it has been activated and what were the learnings from this activation. Also we’d like to look at if they didn’t activate their plan, why not and would they do anything differently next time? 

We will also be encouraging our groups to identify a list of Response kit that they might need such as hi-vis vests, pens, clip boards, head torches etc so that they can start to put together what their response kit might look like. 

We’ll be offering to fulfil some of this kit list from the supplies purchased with our BRT grant funding and any left over items will be used at the next Flood Warden Engagement event in September 2025, so none of these supplies will go to waste.