Thread by @Usherwood

Off the back of a useful discussion on no-deal yesterday (thanks to @NCVO for having me), some thoughts about contingency planning:

1/

The most obvious one remains that organisations and individuals need to be putting time and effort into contingencies right now

2/

Even with five months until the UK leaves the EU, the range of critical processes that might be affected means work can't be done overnight

3/

That's exacerbated by the uncertainty of how no-deal would work

4/

Your working assumption has to be that you can't rely on any other party (be that the EU, UK gvt or any other official body) to sort stuff out

5/

As various ppl at the @NCVO talk discussed, that means taking a worst-case approach and assuming all of everything that can go wrong will go wrong

6/

In some cases, that might be an inconvenience, but in others it might be a critical blow to what you do

7/

It's also worth stressing that even if you don't see direct effects, there may well be indirect effects. You might not employ EU citizens or have cross-border activity, but your suppliers/customers might

8/

One of the things that makes this harder is the knowledge that you're going to be sinking costs somewhere

9/

A no-deal remains less than probably an outcome, so why waste resource on preparing for something that's probably not happening?
Or no-deal planning obviates the need for generic post-EU planning you're doing

10/

Worse still, no-one can answer these Qs but you.

At the very least, you need to have a sense of what no-deal might mean for you, even if you don't take more active steps to prepare for that

11/

Lots of ppl and businesses have plans for contingency plans, but far fewer have them in operation. That might be based on a rational calculation of worst-cases, but it might also be a crossing of fingers

Your call

12/

tl;dr trusting to luck is almost certainly not the right call on this one

/end