Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what the responsibilities are of the National Situation Centre.

The National Situation Centre – established in 2021 – provides situational awareness for crisis response and national resilience. It is regarded internationally as a benchmark for Government use of data in crisis. The National Situation Centre is part of COBR.

The National Situation Centre ensures that ministers and officials have access to relevant and timely data for decision making. More than 700 anonymised and aggregated data sets have been mapped or ingested and, at short notice, analysis can be produced for almost 90% of risks identified in the National Risk Register. Dashboards are hosted on a dedicated secure platform, built by the National Situation Centre, and are shared across government and with the devolved governments. A number of bespoke reporting tools have either been created or are under development to provide insight into the most serious risks.

The National Situation Centre has also developed a “digital National Risk Register” platform to interrogate the impacts of a risk, or a number of risks. It allows users to see the impacts which the materialisation of a risk may cause and immediately determine which of those impacts are compounded if multiple risks were to occur concurrently. If a new pandemic were to emerge, we would be able to consider complex, concurrent scenarios in minutes.

The National Situation Centre is also responsible for sending Emergency Alerts to mobile phones, as part of the COBR process.