Across the UK we increasingly talk about resilience as a whole-of-society endeavour. The UK Government’s Resilience Framework is explicit; resilience cannot be delivered by emergency responders alone, it depends on communities, businesses, voluntary organisations and citizens being enabled to play a meaningful role. 

But there’s a practical problem sitting right in the middle of this ambition. We don’t systematically know what capabilities already exist inside our communities, where they are, who can mobilise them, and how confident we are that they will be available, safe and effective during a crisis.

England has Community Risk Registers (CRRs) published by Local Resilience Forums (LRFs). These are valuable documents, but they are primarily about hazards and threats, their likelihood, and their impacts. They are not a “capability map” of the assets we can mobilise locally. 

If we genuinely want to harness a whole-of-society approach, we need a complementary tool: A Community Capability & Asset Register. A structured, governed, assured understanding of the resources and assets within communities that can support prevention, response and recovery.

Scotland offers an important clue: assets are part of resilience planning, not an afterthought

Scotland’s public-facing Community Risk Registers serve a similar “risk communication” purpose to England’s CRRs. 

What is particularly instructive, however, is how Scottish community resilience guidance explicitly pushes communities and responders to think about assets, skills, equipment, facilities and networks, not just risks.

For example, Ready Scotland’s Community Resilience Checklist prompts groups to ask: “What assets are available in your community?” including buildings that could act as hubs, local enterprises, and people with specialist skills or equipment. 

Moreover, Ready Scotland provides practical templates for a “local skills and resources assessment” and for identifying key locations that could be used as places of safety. 

In other words: Scotland’s resilience ecosystem (through its guidance and tooling) makes the case that capability visibility is a foundational part of community resilience.

England can and should do the same.

The gap in England: we know the risks, but we don’t know the capability picture

England’s local resilience architecture is strong in many respects. LRFs bring partners together to assess risks and plan for response. The national framework (National Risk Register → local risk assessment → Community Risk Register) is built to support coherence, yet, when incidents occur, there remain many urgent questions in real time:

• Which community buildings can open as hubs, warming centres, rest centres, distribution points?

• Where are the generators, portable lighting, 4x4 support, chainsaws, welfare vehicles, accessible transport?

• Who has trained first aiders, interpreters, safeguarding capability, mental health support, voluntary sector coordination capacity?

• Which local businesses can provide cold storage, logistics, fuel, catering, temporary accommodation, specialist equipment?

• Which community groups are credible, organised, insured, and able to operate safely as part of a coordinated response?

  
  

These capabilities exist in abundance but they are often informal, fragmented, and not consistently assured and utilised. As a result, in the moment we either underuse community capability, or we use it in a way that carries avoidable risk (safety, safeguarding, misinformation, duplication, inequity, poor tasking).

A Community Capability & Asset Register is how we turn goodwill and local capacity into coordinated, reliable resilience.

What a Community Capability & Asset Register would actually be

This is not a rebrand of an existing CRR. It is a distinct but complementary register that answers a different question.

• CRR (today): What could happen to us?

• Capability & Asset Register (proposed): What do we have (and can we count on it) when it happens?

  
  

At minimum, the register would capture:

1) People and skills

Community responders, voluntary sector leads, welfare and humanitarian support, first aiders, translators, faith/community leaders, local SMEs with specialist expertise, community emergency groups.

2) Places

Community centres, places of worship, sports facilities, schools, libraries, commercial premises with capacity, storage, showers, kitchens, accessible toilets, “hubs” and “spokes”.

3) Equipment and physical assets

Generators, fuel access arrangements, heating/cooling equipment, comms equipment, transport (including accessible vehicles), PPE caches, signage, flood kit, lighting, shelters, off-road support.

4) Services and supply chains

Food distribution, logistics, cold chain, emergency repairs, debris clearance, temporary accommodation, specialist contractors.

5) Networks and coordination structures

Existing community resilience groups, voluntary sector coordination arrangements, local business networks, mutual aid arrangements, and the named contacts who can mobilise these networks quickly.

Crucially, it would also include confidence information: last-verified dates, mobilising authority, limitations, safety considerations, and any prerequisites (access keys, trained operators, insurance, safeguarding protocols).

Assurance is the point: “registering” is not enough

The user requirement here is not a list. It is assurance.

England already has legal duties and established norms around cooperation and information sharing between responder organisations. 

We must remember that  community capability introduces additional complexities: personal data, safety, safeguarding, and the reality that some assets can’t be publicly advertised.

A good register therefore needs:

• Tiered access: a public-facing directory of what communities can expect locally, and a restricted responder layer with sensitive operational detail.

• Verification and audit cycle: periodic validation so partners aren’t relying on stale assumptions, which is crucial for learning and improvement.

• Minimum standards for mobilisation: clear trigger points, tasking pathways, safety rules, and integration with LRF structures.

• Safeguarding and data governance: lawful basis (such as the UK GDPR), proportionality, retention rules, and clarity about what is and isn’t shared.

• Training/exercising linkage: assets in the register should be exercised where appropriate, even if only via tabletop.

• Learning loop: incidents and near misses update the register and its assurance ratings.

Why now: “whole of society” needs infrastructure, not slogans

The UK Government’s stated direction of travel is clear: resilience must be delivered at whole-system and whole-of-society scale. 

But communities cannot contribute effectively if there isn’t the enabling infrastructure to:

1. Make capabilities visible

2. Coordinate them

3. Assure them

4. Learn and improve

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A Community Capability & Asset Register becomes a practical mechanism for turning national intent into local delivery.

Closing thought

England’s Community Risk Registers tell us what might happen. That matters.

But the next stage of resilience maturity is being able to say, with confidence:

That is how we coordinate and unlock the vast assets already present in our communities and how we make a whole-of-society approach genuinely deliverable.