For a school or a parish building, the realistic risk from a strain on the national grid, the water network or the phone lines is not being singled out for attack. It is being caught in the disruption when something upstream fails. This checklist tests one narrow but important thing: whether the security and safety systems you rely on keep working when the power or the broadband goes down. Print it, walk your site, and mark what you find.
The government is scaling up its public preparedness messaging, and more of it is coming, covering power cuts, water interruptions, phone and broadband outages, and hostile threats. Most of that agenda belongs to GOV.UK Prepare and your Local Resilience Forum, and this page does not try to replace them. It covers the one layer they leave to you: the physical security and life-safety kit on your own site, and whether it survives an outage.
If you run a parish or town council, note that you have no statutory duty to write an emergency plan. That responsibility sits with the district emergency planning officer and the Local Resilience Forum, and template community plans already exist. Your job is narrower and more practical: make sure the equipment on your site actually works when the plan needs it to.
Everything below runs on one of three things: the mains, a battery that recharges from the mains, or a generator. Knowing which, and for how long, is most of the exercise.
The cameras and the recorder that stores their footage both draw mains power. Without a battery backup, both stop the moment the power does, and nothing is recorded during the outage. A cloud-based system also stops uploading the instant the broadband drops.
A monitored intruder alarm has a standby battery in its control panel, typically sized for at least twelve hours, though yours may differ. The bigger weakness is usually the signalling path to the monitoring centre, which normally runs over the same broadband that fails first.
This is where safety and security can pull in opposite directions. A fail-safe lock releases when power is lost, which keeps escape routes open but leaves doors unsecured. A fail-secure lock stays locked, which holds security but can trap people if there is no manual way out. You need to know, door by door, which you have.
A powered gate has a defined position it takes when power is lost, and a manual release for when it does not. If nobody knows where the release key is, the gate becomes a barrier to your own people as much as to anyone else.
The fire alarm is the one system that standards already require to keep working through a power cut. A compliant system under BS 5839 has a standby supply designed to run it for a set period, commonly twenty-four hours, and still raise the alarm after that. It is the model to aim for everywhere else.
Two different systems are easy to confuse. Security lighting deters and reveals, and it goes out with the mains unless it is backed up or solar. Emergency lighting is a life-safety system that must come on when the power fails, typically for at least three hours, so people can leave safely. One is not a substitute for the other.
The broadband router is often the first thing to fail, because it rarely has its own battery. The moment it stops, anything that leans on it stops too: cloud CCTV, IP alarm signalling, internet phones, and some access control. In a wide outage the mobile network can also be congested or lose power at the mast.
A procedure that depends on an electronic lock, a public address system, or a staff messaging app is only as reliable as the power and the network behind it. Test each step against one plain question: would this still work in the dark, with no signal?
If you remember nothing else from this page, remember the four questions. For every system that keeps your site secure or your people safe, ask whether it fails safe or fails open, how long the backup lasts, whether there is a fallback when the broadband goes, and whether the procedure still works without power. A system that cannot answer all four is where your next hour of attention should go.
This is the security and continuity layer. It sits underneath the wider emergency planning that others own, and it points you to them rather than replacing them.
A free Fyrfly site survey walks your security and safety systems the way this checklist does, and tells you honestly what survives an outage, what runs on borrowed time, and what stops at once. No pressure and no fear-selling, just a clear picture and practical fixes.
Request a Free Survey →