The American Situation Room, located in the basement of the West Wing, is a 5,543 sq ft conference room run by security officials that monitors and deals with domestic and overseas crises. Secure, advanced communications equipment allows on-the-ground information to flow directly to the president. It is where video feeds have streamed military operations in which US forces have killed terrorists Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Britain’s version sits within the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) and monitors 130 identified risks to the nation, including how these discrete threats intersect with each other.
Roger Hargreaves, CCS director, explained that the establishment of the SitCen is “part of our wider efforts to modernise our work around crisis management and reflecting the lessons from recent emergencies including the pandemic, including our work on Brexit”.
The pandemic exposed areas where the Government needed to improve, including its ability to mobilise cross-Whitehall responses, its ability to engage the whole of society, and to make better use of ever-more sophisticated and comprehensive datasets.
“Having a really powerful ability to handle and process data is at the heart of the effectiveness of our modernised crisis response – and the Situation Centre is intended to be at the heart of that,” Mr Hargreaves said.
The unit monitors and analyses vast quantities of data in order to build up as complete and coherent a picture of the world as possible.
It means that when an emergency occurs, only a small portion of extra “top up” information is needed to help decision-makers understand what is happening on the ground.
The data collated spans open source information, official Government datasets and classified intelligence. The Centre’s analysts and experts only deal with large clusters of data; they do not examine information about individuals.
When floods struck in the North East in October, the unit was able to provide invaluable support to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.
