Partnership in Practice - Building Community Resilience: What We’ve Learned and Where We Go Next
Often when we talk about resilience, it’s easy to picture the infrastructure, emergency plans, and technical systems. But resilience is ultimately about people. It’s about how they prepare, respond, and recover when life is disrupted. At our recent Partnership in Practice event, we explored what the evidence tells us about community resilience and, crucially, what it feels like on the ground.
We heard from Hampshire & Isle of Wight LRF on their ‘Are You Ready?’ booklet, the Environment Agency on co-designing digital tools, and Greater Manchester Combined Authority on embedding lived experience into emergency planning. Alongside these presentations, we reflected collectively on what’s working, what’s missing, and where we go next.
We also shared our take on some of the latest insights that we've been seeing emerging from recent research, national surveys and reports that helped frame some perspective for us around how people are experiencing risk, resilience and preparedness across the UK. We felt these reflections would be useful to share more widely.
Evidence Base
We drew on three key sources for this overview:
The first UK Public Survey of Risk, Resilience, and Preparedness Perception is a government-led national snapshot of how people perceive risks and how prepared they feel for emergencies. Just a quick note on this one, the Cabinet Office has indicated that a deeper dive report into the findings of this survey will be released by the end of the year, so we're expecting that imminently at time of writing.
The second piece is EM-PREPARE, which is a research project, which has come out of Bournemouth University, in collaboration with Safe House Pro exploring what drives or blocks household preparedness with a focus on behaviour change and communication.
Thirdly, we have Water's Edge, which is a British Red Cross deep dive report into the lived experience of people affected by flooding, with a strong emphasis on inequality, trauma, and community voice.
The recently released English Indices of Deprivation 2025 offers an important context for understanding where vulnerability is concentrated, as well as where it's often overlooked.
Key Insights
Preparedness vs Concern
So, what are these reports telling us? Across these three resources, some clear things are emerging that are highly relevant to our work in resilience forums and the voluntary and community sector.
A critical finding is that preparedness is low, but concern is high. The UK public survey found that only 13% of people feel prepared for emergencies, yet 66% of people surveyed expect more emergencies to occur in the next 10 years.
Furthermore, 75% of respondents reported that they haven't seen any preparedness advice in the past year. EM-PREPARE's report indicates that most people want to be more prepared, but don't know how to go about it, or don't feel it's for them or their responsibility, and they need a little bit of help with it.
Water’s Edge highlights that even those people who have previously experienced emergencies, even recently, often don't feel more prepared the next time around, especially if they've been let down by the system.
Barriers to Household Preparedness
The barriers to preparedness are deeply unequal. As evidenced in Water Edge’s report, property tenancy, income, disability, digital exclusion and more all shape people's ability to prepare. Renters, for example, often can't make adaptations for themselves without permission, and a lot of red tape, and many people don't know how to access the support that's available to them in their wider communities.
EM-PREPARE highlights that preparedness advice often doesn't reach those who need it most and sometimes isn't trusted when it does reach them. The 2025 deprivation data reinforces this.
We are now seeing over 7.7 million income-deprived people now living outside the most deprived 20% of neighbourhoods, which means that they're more likely to be invisible to the funding and support mechanisms that rely solely on area-based deprivation targeting, despite those people being highly vulnerable to shocks.
For those people who live in rural areas, the supplementary rural report highlights how rural deprivation is often hidden due to sparse populations, poor transport links, service access, and underrepresentation in other national indices.
Community Networks Matter
We see the value of community networks, so we have looked at reports that consider trusted local relationships, neighbours, community groups, faith organisations. However, they are also showing that these networks are underutilized and under-supported, which may not be a surprise to our network.
The deprivation analysis highlights the significance of ‘left-behind neighbourhoods’, places, with high deprivation added to weak social infrastructure, which makes them less resilient to emergencies and much slower to recover as a result.
Contrasting the Findings
Whilst largely aligned on the big picture, the research differs in emphasis. These differences are worth reflecting on as we think about how we work together.
There is differing emphasis between highlighting individual responsibility versus structural barriers. The UK Perception Public Survey, leans strongly towards personal responsibility, asking what people are doing to prepare. Water's Edge, by contrast, argues that preparedness is often not a choice, but it's shaped by housing, income, and an imbalance of power. EM-PREPARE sits somewhere in the middle of these two. It recognises barriers but still focuses strongly on nudging individual personal behaviour. Practical readiness, versus emotional recovery and other tension points.
EM-PREPARE and the UK Public Perception of Risk Survey, focus on practical steps, such as kits, plans, and alerts. Whereas Water's Edge brings in the emotional and psychological toll, the trauma, the anxiety, and the long trail of recovery. It also highlights how mental health support is often missing from emergency response.
We're also seeing variations in perceived levels of trust in institutions. The Risk Perception Survey indicates a relatively high trust in emergency services, for example, compared with lower trust in government, both local and national, and it is worth saying that trust is not universally high. It varies, quite a bit by age, income, and geography.
Water's Edge paints a slightly more critical picture, especially in communities that feel abandoned or unheard. EM-PREPARE suggests that co-production and local engagement are vital to rebuilding trust, whilst recognising that this is not automatic, and takes time and resourcing to succeed.
Now a word about digital inequality. EM-PREPARE promotes digital tools, the emergency alert system, online resources, etc. But Water's Edge, quite rightly warns that digital exclusion is still a major barrier, especially for older adults and those with limited literacy. The UK survey doesn't explore digital access to resilience information and guidance in depth, which should be seen as a gap in itself.
Recommendations for Statutory Partners & LRFs
Based on this evidence, our position is that building resilience isn't something that any one organisation can do alone. It's something that Local resilience forums, voluntary and community sector organisations, faith organisations, and wider partners need to work on together, intentionally, and with people and communities at the heart.
That means we need to be co-producing emergency plans, co-producing messaging that reflects people's realities, not just broadcasting generic governmental advice that's handed down nationally.
It means using data to understand who's most at risk, who's likely to be disproportionately impacted and making sure that people are actively engaged in preparedness, not just passively mapped, and as demonstrated in the latest deprivation data, we need to be cautious about relying too heavily on that area-based targeting of resources and finance.
The reality of deprivation is far more nuanced, and there are millions of people experiencing poverty and other indicators of vulnerability that may be missed if we only focus on the most deprived neighbourhoods. This means that recognising recovery isn't just about infrastructure, it's about mental health, social connection and ultimately, dignity. It means backing community hubs, not just as places to gather, but as anchors of our resilience, know-how, and recovery.
Finally, cost of living is a resilience issue: People can’t prioritise flood protection when they’re struggling to put food on the table. Resilience work must acknowledge these realities and collaborative means across sectors must be used to tackle them.
One partner stated: “Integration between statutory services and community action is critical, but it won’t happen without resource.”
Recommendations for VCFS
For voluntary and community sector organisations, it's about continuing to act as those trusted messengers and helping people to navigate the complex systems, helping to access grants, and helping them to feel supported when they need it.
It's about creating space and building capacity for peer support, especially when formal services are falling short due to that increased pressure, and it's about advocating for funding and planning that includes everyone, not just those who are already at the table.
In our sector we know accessibility matters: The digital divide is real. Paper-based materials and personal approaches from people and faces you know and trust remain essential. Accessibility should be standard, not aspirational. Digital tools are great, but they must complement offline solutions. Formats, translations, and trusted offline channels are key.
Final thought
We know what communities need. The challenge is not knowledge. The challenge is turning that knowledge into action.
That is why the call to action is clear: embed partnership in practice. Resilience is not something we impose. It is something we build together, intentionally and with communities at the heart. Our EP spaces exist for exactly this reason: to turn insight into action.
Join the Conversation
Do these insights resonate with your experience? Where do you see opportunities to shift the dial through communication, co-design, or partnership? And how can we ensure resilience isn’t something we impose, but something we build together? Get in touch info@vcsep.org.uk