Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Crisis and Risk Management from Visor Consultants

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The Visor Team

Members of the Visor team have won four prestigious Business Continuity awards and are as follows:

Peter Power

PETER POWER, Managing Director

BA FIRM FBCI FCMI FEPS

Peter Power has been Managing Director since 1995. He regularly helps organisations to plan and deliver highly successful scenario based exercises as well as workshops, leadership courses and motivation sessions and is one of the most requested speakers on Resilience/Crisis and Business Continuity (BC) management who often appears on TV and radio in the UK and other countries. He is specifically quoted on the BBC web site in relation to his role at the scene of several previous major incidents in the UK.

Peter has considerable front-line experience of many real crises and is very well known as an authoritative and entertaining presenter and writer. His research on crisis decision making is quoted in the UK Government (Cabinet Office) Guide on Integrated Emergency Management and he is the author of many advice guidebooks including the original UK Govt. (DTI) booklet ‘Preventing Chaos in a Crisis' and the British Bankers Association guide on Crisis Management within their Business Continuity advice booklet. He is a founder member of the UK judging panel for BC Awards and sits on the British Standards Institute/Cabinet Office working party on Crisis Management. He was also a member of the IPPR Resilience subgroup within the UK Security Review Commission.

He is a Special Advisor to a number of key organisations including the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness and BC Institute London Forum. Peter is also listed in the UK Register of Expert Witnesses and occasionally lectures at Reading and Southampton Universities. He was a previous award winner for BC ‘Personality of the Year’ 2000 and ‘Lifetime Achievement’ 2006 (members of the Visor Consultants team have so far won 4 separate BC awards).

In his previous career Peter was responsible for setting up the multi agency operational management structure at the London Kings Cross underground station fire 1987. He was also seconded to the Anti Terrorist Branch and was the deputy forward control coordinator at the Libyan People Bureau siege, as well as leading the team behind the existing police street philosophy for dealing with terrorist bombs. He is also the primary author / promulgator of the present UK emergency services methodology Gold, Silver & Bronze which is now used extensively across many organisations in the public and private sectors. It has become the most commonly applied operational command system used by the majority of businesses as well as the emergency services.

Peter Power at the 2006 Business Continuity AwardsPeter is a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute, Fellow of the Emergency Planning Society, Fellow of the Business Continuity Institute and Fellow of the institute of Risk Management. He is also as a member of the Guild of Freemen of the City of London. In 2009 he won the BCM ‘Best Contribution to the Profession’ (London) award.

Above: Peter Power (middle) at the 2006 Business Continuity Awards.

Links to some of Peter's publications / media appearances:

David Bawtree

DAVID BAWTREE, Technical Director

CB Ceng DL

David Bawtree has been the Technical Director of Visor Consultants for the past nine years. He was previously the Civil Emergencies Adviser to the Home Office, retiring from this post in October 1997. His task at the Home Office was to learn from the misfortunes from others so that the planning for and response to disasters in the UK would be the more effective. He travelled widely at home and overseas, attending and learning from such incidents as the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo underground, the Estonia ferry disaster, the Mull of Kintyre and Dunkeswick air crashes, flood incidents at Towyn and Chichester, London, Manchester and Northern Ireland terrorist incidents, the Southall rail crash and the Dunblane shootings.

During his time in the Home Office David's advice to Ministers resulted in significant improvements to local and national civil protection arrangements and protocols. He was the author of three widely recognised publications, "Dealing with Disaster", "How resilient is your business to disaster" and "Why exercise your disaster response". He attended and spoke at a wide range of civil protection seminars, at home and overseas, and was involved with the planning for and assessment of all forms of exercise, from table top to major international events.

Prior to his appointment at the Home Office David spent 38 years in the Royal Navy, retiring in the rank of Rear Admiral. In 2001 he retired from the appointment of Chairman of Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust, one of the largest acute hospitals in the country, and presently combines his work of occasional advice to government, industry, local authorities and the emergency services with leading a team to build the largest square-rigged adventure training and research sailing ship in the world. David is Chairman of HMS Warrior (1860) and of the Portsmouth Grammar School Governors.

Kathryn Halloway

KATHRYN HOLLOWAY, Media Skills Consultant

BA (Hons)

Kathryn Holloway has worked as a broadcaster and journalist since 1983. In 2005 she joined Visor as our Media Skills Consultant.As a television reporter she covered stories for news services such as ITN, TV-am, Sky News and Tyne Tees Television, reporting from crisis scenes including the Lockerbie explosion, Piper Alpha oil platform blaze and the Zeebrugge disaster.

As a presenter, she has anchored live national news, breakfast and daytime television, terrestrially and on satellite, as well as radio news discussion shows for both LBC and Talk Radio. She continues to write national news features, principally for The Daily and Sunday Express.As an advisor in the release of public information and a media trainer she has previously run courses at the UK Government Emergency Planning College, MOD, Department of Trade and Industry and City of London Police.

She recreates the key external pressure of the media in Business Continuity exercises including the Army's national civil emergency simulations. Kathryn can also provide direct highly effective Crisis Communications Media Plans.

Brian Hiscutt

BRIAN HISCUTT, Business Continuity Consultant

MBCI M.InstIS

Brian is a former Vice President of the Institute of Information Security and has over 25 years Business Continuity (BC) experience. He is a skilled auditor/reviewer of processes and operations, implementer of key processes and procedures to comply with Business Continuity (especially FSA) guidance.

He has been at the forefront of many pioneering Business Continuity projects. For example, where the task was to recover an Internet Bank within 34 minutes of a disaster and without Data Loss.

Other recent responsibilities included Audit & Compliance, Risk Management, Asset Management, and Health & Safety. Using his own Business Continuity software tool 'Strategy' he developed rigid plans across the organisation focusing on the individual departments requirements and rehearsing these with the recovery of the IT services.

In 2002 Brian was involved in the Information Security compliance of the London Congestion Scheme. He Project Managed the Gap Analysis on the available documentation proceeded to up date new procedures where necessary, installed a Badge Access system together with the training and awareness sessions and helped to install a CCTV system following extensive researching of various options.

Prior to joining Visor Consultants Brian worked on several international projects, including the development of Business Continuity Plans for a department of the Irish Government involving multiple Business Impact Analysis and Risk Assessments. Most recently he worked very closely with the Continuity Management Team at Royal & Sun Alliance in London in a major contract role.

Dr Anne Eyre

DR. ANNE EYRE, Specialist Consultant

BA Ph.D

Dr Anne Eyre is a sociologist specialising in stress, trauma and disaster management. She provides lecturing, training and consultancy services for various organisations planning for and responding to incidents, including those involving sudden, traumatic and mass death. This has included coordinating the Tsunami Support Network established by the British Red Cross Society after the Boxing Day Disaster 2004.

Anne has provided consultancy to the Humanitarian Assistance Unit within the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and produced two research reports – a literature review on the needs of people in emergencies (2006) and a survey of capability in humanitarian assistance across the UK (2007). In 2006 Anne was awarded a Travelling Fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and spent time in New York and New Jersey examining community support strategies after the terrorist attacks in September 2001.

Anne belongs to a number of national and international research and practitioner organisations specialising in trauma, crisis and disaster management. She has served on the Executive Committee of the Institute of Emergency Management and is joint Vice-Chair of Disaster Action. Anne is the founder and convenor of the Disasters Study Group which has been established through the British Sociological Association. She has published widely in both academic and practitioner journals.

Tom Pine

TOM PINE, Associate Consultant

BSc (Hons). MIEM. MIMCE

Tom Pine is a senior lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire and an EU short-term technical expert for the various accession programmes, and an occasional media advisor and expert witness in legal proceedings.

A graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, he is also the Secretary of the Institute of Emergency Management and a council member of the European Academy for Crisis Management and Research.

Tom brings expertise from many years experience in contingency planning for extreme events and the consequence management of widespread emergencies, much of it gained during his long career as a specialist officer at Scotland Yard. Whilst in the police he played a significant part in the design and implementation of the high-profile contingency plans that protect London from the terrorist threat and was responsible for many other national and pan-London emergency arrangements.

Tom has published and delivered papers to conferences in the USA, Canada, The Netherlands, Italy, the Czech Republic and the UK (e.g. Cranfield University), and has also taught coastguards at the police college of the United Arab Emirates. The latter opportunity arose from his expertise in public safety and marine security gathered when he was responsible for policing the River Thames and Port of London in the lead up to the Millennium celebrations.

© Visor Consultants 2008