Recommendation 13

The Cabinet Office explained that it is difficult to have a single risk appetite across government because risks themselves vary and each risk will have different appetites. For example, society has a higher tolerance for deaths in road traffic accidents in a year than for deaths in a single terrorist event.24 Instead, the Cabinet Office focuses on common consequences of risks and the ability to respond via generic capabilities, informed by a number of sources, including the Assessment, capabilities assessments, assessments of the resilience and interdependencies of critical national infrastructure sectors and lessons from the National Exercising Programme. It told us that it can provide information on how well prepared the UK is for a risk, what actions could be taken to mitigate it, the costs and the trade-offs and then it is a case-by-case decision to be taken by Ministers.25