1. Have done quite a few interviews and ethnographies on those on the front line of preparedness (council officers, emergency planners) in my time and they have also been victims of austerity and cuts for years. Some tales from the field...

2. 9/11 and 7/7 brought a lot of money into emergency planning and resilience but this didn’t last long. Flash, operations rooms in City Councils were repurposed to leave (literally in one case) one guy in a cupboard with road cones as the “emergency planning officer”

3. Attended a training session for the Police on public health preparedness and the person presenting from the NHS talked about how privatisation and contracting out meant that they would be devastated in a major crisis “Let’s hope we don’t have a pandemic”’he said to laughter.

4. Quite senior people working in this area are moved around or even made redundant as no one really cares about disasters (even when they happen) so there is no accumulated knowledge.

5. These tales are scattered around my research which generally looks at the market, state and the public rather than organisations (meso) but might return to this at some point...

6. Note in all of these settings I was a researcher and I do not advocate for any of the organisations concerned except the NHS because I’m an old lefty.