Advocacy & Evidence

Tapping Frog's resilience advocacy extends beyond client engagements into the policy environment where the frameworks governing resilience are made. The most significant piece of published evidence to date is the submission to the House of Lords Select Committee on National Resilience, published April 2026.

Written Evidence — Published April 2026

Proposed Office of National Resilience

Written evidence submitted by Simon Boor CBCI to the House of Lords Select Committee on National Resilience. Published by the Committee as reference NLR0007. The submission addresses all ten areas of the Committee's call for evidence and makes seven recommendations centred on the establishment of a Cabinet-level Office of National Resilience.

The Seven Recommendations

The submission made seven specific recommendations to the Committee, each addressing a structural gap in the UK's current national resilience architecture.

01

Establish an Office of National Resilience

A Cabinet-level cross-government body with a dedicated budget, statutory mandate, and accountability to Parliament — capable of coordinating resilience across the departmental and jurisdictional boundaries that currently fragment the UK's approach.

02

Integrate the Overseas Territories into the national resilience framework

The Civil Contingencies Act does not apply to the Overseas Territories. An ONR with an explicit OT mandate would be the first formal mechanism for bringing British communities in the Caribbean, Atlantic, and beyond within the national resilience architecture.

03

Mandate impact-based planning across all critical sectors

Scenario-based planning prepares organisations for the scenarios they imagined. Impact-based planning prepares them for what matters — regardless of cause. The distinction is fundamental to operational resilience under the current regulatory framework.

04

Address the workforce diversity gap in resilience planning

The homogeneity of most BC teams creates systemic blind spots. Diverse resilience teams identify more threats, design more robust responses, and communicate more effectively across the communities they serve.

05

Establish national cloud infrastructure resilience standards

The concentration of critical national infrastructure in a small number of hyperscale providers creates systemic risk that individual firm-level continuity planning cannot address. A national standard for cloud resilience and provider dependency is overdue.

06

Reform the National Risk Register to reflect geopolitical threats

The current NRR treats geopolitical threats inconsistently and does not adequately reflect the compound risk environment now facing the UK. The Register should be integrated with intelligence assessments and updated on a rolling basis.

07

Invest in resilience as infrastructure

The cost of inadequate prior resilience investment consistently exceeds the cost of adequate investment. Resilience should be treated as national infrastructure — with a dedicated capital budget and long-term accountability, not discretionary departmental spending.

A thirty-year advocacy history

The House of Lords submission draws on a documented history of resilience advocacy that predates the Civil Contingencies Act by more than a decade. The argument for a coordinated national resilience function was first made formally in the early 1990s and has been advanced consistently since.

Early 1990s

Emergency Coordination Unit proposal — water industry

A formal proposal for coordinated emergency response capability submitted to the water industry, anticipating the resilience governance arguments that would later inform the Civil Contingencies Act.

1998–2004

CNI network management systems — Northern Ireland Water & Northern Ireland Electricity

Working at Ewans, Simon led the development of network management systems for two critical national infrastructure operators in Northern Ireland. Both systems were designed in part to provide accurate, real-time field data during incident response — embedding resilience and operational visibility into infrastructure that had no equivalent capability before. This work predated the Civil Contingencies Act by up to six years and grounded Simon's resilience thinking in direct CNI operational system development rather than policy commentary.

2008–2024

Operational resilience practice — Cayman Islands

Fifteen years of hands-on BC programme design and delivery in the Cayman Islands financial services sector, including the development of pre-genesis meteorological monitoring, the STORM communications module, and joint BCP activation authority with a maintained 4-hour RTO.

2024–2025

Public commentary — cloud resilience and workforce diversity

Articles published on the systemic risks of cloud dependency and the resilience implications of workforce homogeneity in BC teams. Both pieces were distributed through the Tapping Frog network and shared with sector contacts.

February 2026

Written evidence submitted to the House of Lords

Submission reference XVY067790, subsequently published as NLR0007. Addressed to the Select Committee on National Resilience, proposing the establishment of an Office of National Resilience with seven specific recommendations.

April 2026

Evidence published by the Committee

Reference NLR0007 published on Parliament.uk as part of the Committee's written evidence record for its inquiry into national resilience.

May 2026

Resilience at the Margins — four-part series on the Overseas Territories

A series of long-form articles on the resilience gap facing the UK Overseas Territories: structural exclusion from the CCA framework, climate and geopolitical threats in the Caribbean, and the case for treating the territories as a distributed national resilience asset.

May 2026

Resilience in the National Curriculum — article and policy position statement

Co-authored with Annarie Boor and published on the Tapping Frog Education site: a long-form article making the case for resilience as a cross-curricular capability, and a detailed policy position statement providing a framework for embedding resilience education from Key Stage 1 to higher education — including specific implementation guidance for SEN contexts. Both pieces develop the ONR proposal's recommendation on resilience education into a substantive policy argument.

Further reading

Resilience at the Margins — four-part series

The UK Overseas Territories: structural exclusion, Caribbean vulnerability, US geopolitical pressure, and the distributed resilience asset Britain is not using.

Read Part 1 →

Your Cloud Provider Is Not Your Resilience Strategy

On the unexamined assumptions embedded in most organisations' cloud resilience posture — and what a proper risk assessment looks like.

Read the article →

Sovereign Capability and Ethical Autonomy

On the relationship between national resilience, sovereign capability, and the UK's obligations toward its citizens — and why the current trajectory is insufficient.

Read the article →

Tapping Frog Education

Resilience Belongs in the Curriculum

Co-authored with Annarie Boor. The case for embedding resilience as a cross-curricular capability — including specific consideration of SEN learners, for whom predictable responses to unpredictable events matter most.

Read the article →

Tapping Frog Education

Policy Position Statement: Embedding Resilience in the UK Education System

Co-authored with Annarie Boor. A full policy framework for cross-curricular resilience education from primary through to higher education — with SEN-specific implementation guidance absent from current policy discussions.

Read the position statement →