Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Crisis and Risk Management from Visor Consultants

Visor Business Continuity

212 Piccadilly
London
W1J 9HF
0207 917 6026
Email

The Visor Team

Members of the Visor team have won four prestigious Business Continuity awards and are as follows:

Peter Power

PETER POWER, Managing Director

BA FIRM FBCI FCMI FEPS

Peter is Visor Consultants' Managing Director and regularly helps organisations plan and deliver highly successful scenario based exercises as well as Crisis Management & Business Continuity workshops, corporate resilience courses and motivation sessions. He often appears on BBC, CNN, Sky ITN and other international News broadcasts and documentaries discussing numerous crises, especially the impact of terrorism and similar risks.

He has considerable real time experience gained at the front line of events such as terrorist sieges, bomb scenes, disasters, reputational crises, product recalls and other corporate dramas. His knowledge of crisis decision making is quoted in the UK Government (Cabinet Office) Guide on Integrated Emergency Management and he is the author of many other advice guidebooks including the original UK Govt. (DTI) booklet 'Preventing Chaos in a Crisis'.

He is a Special Advisor to a number of key organisations including the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness and the Business Continuity (BC) Institute London Forum. He is in addition, a Special Advisor to the editorial board of Continuity Professional Magazine in the USA and is listed in the UK Register of Expert Witnesses. Peter is the primary author of the ubiquitous Gold, Silver & Bronze command structure, a Fellow of numerous industry associations and member of the Guild of Freemen of the City of London.

Peter Power at the 2006 Business Continuity Awards

Peter is a popular after dinner speaker who draws on many years of direct experience to combine humour with valuable advice. He was a previous award winner for Business Continuity 'Personality of the Year' and 'Lifetime Achievement' and is the most requested public speaker/chairman in the UK on the topics of Crisis and Business Continuity Management.

Above: Peter Power (middle) at the 2006 Business Continuity Awards.

Links to some of Peter's publications / media appearances:

David Bawtree

DAVID BAWTREE, Technical Director

CB Ceng DL

David Bawtree has been the Technical Director of Visor Consultants for the past nine years. He was previously the Civil Emergencies Adviser to the Home Office, retiring from this post in October 1997. His task at the Home Office was to learn from the misfortunes from others so that the planning for and response to disasters in the UK would be the more effective. He travelled widely at home and overseas, attending and learning from such incidents as the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo underground, the Estonia ferry disaster, the Mull of Kintyre and Dunkeswick air crashes, flood incidents at Towyn and Chichester, London, Manchester and Northern Ireland terrorist incidents, the Southall rail crash and the Dunblane shootings.

During his time in the Home Office David's advice to Ministers resulted in significant improvements to local and national civil protection arrangements and protocols. He was the author of three widely recognised publications, "Dealing with Disaster", "How resilient is your business to disaster" and "Why exercise your disaster response". He attended and spoke at a wide range of civil protection seminars, at home and overseas, and was involved with the planning for and assessment of all forms of exercise, from table top to major international events.

Prior to his appointment at the Home Office David spent 38 years in the Royal Navy, retiring in the rank of Rear Admiral. In 2001 he retired from the appointment of Chairman of Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust, one of the largest acute hospitals in the country, and presently combines his work of occasional advice to government, industry, local authorities and the emergency services with leading a team to build the largest square-rigged adventure training and research sailing ship in the world. David is Chairman of HMS Warrior (1860) and of the Portsmouth Grammar School Governors.

Kathryn Halloway

KATHRYN HOLLOWAY, Media Skills Consultant

BA (Hons)

Kathryn Holloway has worked as a broadcaster and journalist since 1983. In 2005 she joined Visor as our Media Skills Consultant.

As a television reporter she covered stories for news services such as ITN, TV-am, Sky News and Tyne Tees Television, reporting from crisis scenes including the Lockerbie explosion, Piper Alpha oil platform blaze and the Zeebrugge disaster. As a presenter, she has anchored live national news, breakfast and daytime television, terrestrially and on satellite, as well as radio news discussion shows for both LBC and Talk Radio. She continues to write national news features, principally for The Daily and Sunday Express.

As an advisor in the release of public information and a media trainer, she is part of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat and delivers media solutions for the Cabinet Office, MOD, Department of Trade and Industry and City of London Police. She recreates the key external pressure of the media in Business Continuity exercises including the Army's national civil emergency simulations. Kathryn can also provide direct highly effective Crisis Communications Media Plans.

Brian Hiscutt

BRIAN HISCUTT, Business Continuity Consultant

MBCI M.InstIS

Brian is a former Vice President of the Institute of Information Security and has over 25 years Business Continuity (BC) experience. He is a skilled auditor/reviewer of processes and operations, implementer of key processes and procedures to comply with Business Continuity (especially FSA) guidance.

He has been at the forefront of many pioneering Business Continuity projects. For example, where the task was to recover an Internet Bank within 34 minutes of a disaster and without Data Loss.

Other recent responsibilities included Audit & Compliance, Risk Management, Asset Management, and Health & Safety. Using his own Business Continuity software tool 'Strategy' he developed rigid plans across the organisation focusing on the individual departments requirements and rehearsing these with the recovery of the IT services.

In 2002 Brian was involved in the Information Security compliance of the London Congestion Scheme. He Project Managed the Gap Analysis on the available documentation proceeded to up date new procedures where necessary, installed a Badge Access system together with the training and awareness sessions and helped to install a CCTV system following extensive researching of various options.

Prior to joining Visor Consultants Brian worked on several international projects, including the development of Business Continuity Plans for a department of the Irish Government involving multiple Business Impact Analysis and Risk Assessments. Most recently he worked very closely with the Continuity Management Team at Royal & Sun Alliance in London in a major contract role.

Dr Anne Eyre

DR. ANNE EYRE, Specialist Consultant

BA Ph.D

Dr Anne Eyre is a sociologist specialising in stress, trauma and disaster management. She provides lecturing, training and consultancy services for various organisations planning for and responding to incidents, including those involving sudden, traumatic and mass death. This has included coordinating the Tsunami Support Network established by the British Red Cross Society after the Boxing Day Disaster 2004.

Anne has provided consultancy to the Humanitarian Assistance Unit within the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and produced two research reports – a literature review on the needs of people in emergencies (2006) and a survey of capability in humanitarian assistance across the UK (2007). In 2006 Anne was awarded a Travelling Fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and spent time in New York and New Jersey examining community support strategies after the terrorist attacks in September 2001.

Anne belongs to a number of national and international research and practitioner organisations specialising in trauma, crisis and disaster management. She has served on the Executive Committee of the Institute of Emergency Management and is joint Vice-Chair of Disaster Action. Anne is the founder and convenor of the Disasters Study Group which has been established through the British Sociological Association. She has published widely in both academic and practitioner journals.

Tom Pine

TOM PINE, Associate Consultant

BSc (Hons). MIEM. MIMCE

Tom Pine is a senior lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire and an EU short-term technical expert for the various accession programmes, and an occasional media advisor and expert witness in legal proceedings.

A graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, he is also the Secretary of the Institute of Emergency Management and a council member of the European Academy for Crisis Management and Research.

Tom brings expertise from many years experience in contingency planning for extreme events and the consequence management of widespread emergencies, much of it gained during his long career as a specialist officer at Scotland Yard. Whilst in the police he played a significant part in the design and implementation of the high-profile contingency plans that protect London from the terrorist threat and was responsible for many other national and pan-London emergency arrangements.

Tom has published and delivered papers to conferences in the USA, Canada, The Netherlands, Italy, the Czech Republic and the UK (e.g. Cranfield University), and has also taught coastguards at the police college of the United Arab Emirates. The latter opportunity arose from his expertise in public safety and marine security gathered when he was responsible for policing the River Thames and Port of London in the lead up to the Millennium celebrations.

© Visor Consultants 2008