Left Outside the Framework

In July 2025, the UK Government published its Resilience Action Plan: a strategic document setting out how Britain intends to strengthen its domestic resilience against an increasingly volatile and varied risk landscape. It covers infrastructure, communities, supply chains, and institutions. It references the National Security Council sub-committee on Resilience. It commits to an all-hazards approach across the full spectrum of risks the country faces.

It does not mention the Cayman Islands. It does not mention Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, or Bermuda. It does not mention the British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos, or Anguilla. It does not mention Montserrat, the island that lost its capital to a volcanic eruption in 1997 and has never fully recovered. It does not mention any of the fourteen Overseas Territories for which the United Kingdom holds constitutional responsibility.

This is not an oversight. It is a structural feature of how British resilience is planned, legislated, and governed. The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 — the statutory foundation of UK resilience planning — does not apply to the Overseas Territories. The Local Resilience Forum framework does not extend to them. The National Risk Register does not formally integrate their specific threat profiles. They are British, but they exist outside the architecture that governs British resilience.

"They are British, but they exist outside the architecture that governs British resilience."

What the Overseas Territories Are — and Are Not

The United Kingdom has fourteen Overseas Territories: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St Helena and Dependencies, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, and Turks and Caicos Islands. They span the Caribbean, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, Pacific, and Antarctic. Their combined population is approximately 300,000 people.

They are not part of the United Kingdom. They are not represented in Parliament. They are not subject to UK domestic legislation unless that legislation explicitly extends to them. Each has its own government, its own laws, and varying degrees of self-governance. What they share is a constitutional relationship with the Crown: the UK is responsible for their defence and external affairs, and ultimately for their good governance.

That constitutional responsibility has never been matched by an equivalent operational responsibility for their resilience. The assumption, rarely stated explicitly, is that the territories are responsible for their own emergency planning within their own jurisdictions, and that the UK will respond if things go seriously wrong. What the assumption does not address is how the UK would respond, with what resources, within what timeframe, and against what standard of preparedness.

The Civil Contingencies Act and Its Limits

The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 is the foundation of resilience planning in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It establishes a statutory framework of Category 1 and Category 2 responders: the organisations with legal obligations to assess risk, maintain emergency plans, exercise those plans, and warn the public. It created Local Resilience Forums as the mechanism for multi-agency coordination. It established the duty to maintain Business Continuity Management systems across critical organisations.

None of this applies to the Overseas Territories. Each territory has its own legislative framework, or lacks one. Emergency management maturity varies enormously across the fourteen territories — from the relatively well-resourced arrangements of the Cayman Islands and Bermuda to the extraordinarily limited capacity of Pitcairn, whose entire permanent population numbers in the dozens. There is no common standard, no shared exercising framework, no mechanism for cross-territory learning, and no integration into the UK's national resilience architecture.

Hazard Management Cayman Islands, the territory's emergency management authority, was established in 2003, the year before the CCA came into force on the mainland. Its creation was driven by the direct experience of Caribbean hurricane seasons and the recognition that emergency management required dedicated institutional capacity. Not every territory has equivalent provision.

The Dependency That Cannot Be Planned Away

The territories can develop sophisticated local resilience for the threats within their control. They can maintain hurricane preparedness frameworks, exercise their emergency services, stockpile fuel and supplies, and build institutional knowledge of the specific risks their geography presents. The Cayman Islands, with its sophisticated financial services sector and experienced emergency management authority, does much of this well.

What they cannot do is plan their way out of the fundamental dependency that defines their constitutional position. Defence is a UK responsibility. External affairs — including relationships with neighbouring states, the United States, and the international community — are UK responsibilities. The threats that now matter most for the Caribbean territories in particular are precisely the ones where territorial autonomy ends and UK responsibility begins.

A hurricane is a local emergency that local institutions can prepare for. A deteriorating relationship with the United States that translates into economic pressure on a British territory's financial services sector is a foreign policy problem that requires a UK government response. A Chinese infrastructure investment in an adjacent Caribbean state that creates telecommunications security concerns for British territory communications is an intelligence and security matter that requires UK engagement. These are not threats the territories can manage on their own. There is no framework that ensures the UK manages them coherently on their behalf.

The Resilience Action Plan and What It Misses

The Government's Resilience Action Plan commits to an all-hazards approach and to strengthening the core public sector resilience system. It acknowledges that the risks facing the UK are becoming more complex and pronounced. It establishes the National Security Council sub-committee on Resilience as the mechanism for collective decision-making on strategic resilience choices.

It does not define whether the Overseas Territories fall within the scope of "the UK" for these purposes. It does not address how the sub-committee's remit extends, or fails to extend, to territories for whose defence and external affairs the UK is constitutionally responsible. It does not propose any mechanism for integrating territory resilience into the national picture.

This is not a minor gap in an otherwise comprehensive document. It is a structural absence that reflects a consistent pattern in British resilience policy: the territories are acknowledged as a constitutional responsibility but treated as a practical afterthought.

"The territories are acknowledged as a constitutional responsibility but treated as a practical afterthought."

The Case for an Integrated Approach

In March 2026, I submitted written evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on National Resilience arguing for the establishment of an Office of National Resilience — a cross-government body capable of coordinating resilience across the sectoral and jurisdictional boundaries that currently fragment the UK's approach. The Overseas Territories represent exactly the kind of boundary that falls between functions: too foreign for domestic resilience planning, too domestic for foreign policy treatment.

An ONR with an explicit Overseas Territories mandate would be the first formal mechanism for integrating territory resilience into the national picture. It would establish minimum resilience standards equivalent, in principle if not in identical form, to CCA obligations. It would create a cross-territory exercising framework. It would ensure that when the National Security Risk Assessment considers the threats facing Britain, it considers them as they apply to all British communities — not only those on the mainland.

The argument is not that the territories should be governed identically to the mainland. Their constitutional positions, their self-governance arrangements, and their specific threat profiles are too varied for a single template. The argument is that they should be within the framework, not outside it. That the UK's responsibility for their defence and external affairs should be matched by a coherent operational responsibility for their resilience. That when the next major hurricane, the next sovereignty challenge, or the next geopolitical pressure campaign arrives, there is a plan — not an improvisation.