Public eye

The best laid plans

If, this winter, the balloon goes up - as they used to say in those second world war films - government is better prepared than ever to cope. At least on paper. If the Department of Health was caught short over ordinary flu vaccine, it has put huge amounts of preparatory effort into coping with a flu pandemic, as have local authority emergency planners and the Whitehall apparatus, Cobra and all. The state looks a lot more resilient than in September 2000, when hundreds of beefy men protesting about fuel were allowed to threaten the entire economy, or when burning pyres of sheep and cattle gave the impression that Armageddon had come to Ambridge.

Resilience is a key word in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which has just been fully implemented. When nuclear attack threatened, the stated aim of civil defence was mere survival; now we can bounce back. Add together the stocks of decontamination suits, joint exercises by police and fire and the emergency powers now held in reserve by central and local government and you've got "a new protective state", says Peter Hennessy, of Queen Mary's University of London, co-author of the standard text on emergencies in the cold war era. "It's extraordinary how it's grown up without anyone noticing."

Proportionate to such threats as flu, flooding, even a terrorist dirty bomb, the apparatus is potentially better than in the days when civil defence workers in tin helmets appeared to have a kind of military effectiveness - which was a fantasy, given conditions if a dozen 10-megaton bombs had hit British cities. But the proof of the pudding is what would happen if a new strain of flu arrived, or the lights went off, or a big freeze began.

Privately, chief constables and chief fire officers are staggered by the discretionary powers they now have: to shoot on sight escapees from cordoned off contaminated areas, for example. Against that, however, has to be balanced tight budgets, technology problems and lack of coordination within, as much as between, police and other services.

There is also reason to wonder about the capacity of government to cope which goes to the heart of the fashion for commissioning and "pluralisation". Lord Wilson of Dinton, who as Sir Richard Wilson, was cabinet secretary at the time of the fuel protests, says the Cabinet Office discovered something. The problem wasn't just the protesters outside, nor the realisation that ours is now a "just in time economy" - Wilson cites the bubble-packed sterile syringes used in hospital, now delivered on a 24-hour cycle (the latest plans are said to have taken care of this problem). An unexpected discovery lay inside the oil depots and refineries. It was hard to find out who was in charge. This or that job had been contracted out; there no longer was a coherent chain of command.

The state's "hollowing out" is shown in energy. Once the state itself owned the generators; now ownership is dispersed. In fact, to avoid the lights going out, there is an elaborate schedule now in place which amounts to temporary renationalisation, what David Porter, of the Association of Electricity Producers, called "graceful descent into command and control".

Talk to local emergency planners and they have their doubts. John Asquith, who works for Worcestershire and is chair of the emergency planners' society, worries that councils' emergency powers might be open to legal challenge. Practically, he says, he has no power to move people out of their homes, even if parts of the Severn valley looked like downtown New Orleans after Katrina. The Human Rights Act would not be suspended if states of emergency were invoked and, after the event, people would sue.

The London public's reaction to the terror attacks this summer convinced some observers that upper lips would still stiffen in an emergency. Others look at the queues outside garages and the response of some parents to a media-concocted scare over the combined MMR vaccine for young children, and conclude that individualism rules OK. In an emergency, the devil take the hindmost.

Such a response would certainly chime with New Labour's redefinition of the public as a consumer, operating in quasi markets. The idea of authority flies out of the window. But when disaster strikes, the firm exercise of authority could well be a precondition for the restoration of normality.

· David Walker is the editor of the Guardian's Public magazine. His Analysis programme, Planning against Panic, is on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow (8.30pm) and December 11 (9.30pm).

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