The Safety Regions Act must be completely changed. This is the opinion of an evaluation committee that has examined the ten-year-old law. According to the committee, the Netherlands is not well prepared for major crisis situations.
The committee finds the law too complicated, sometimes incomplete or too detailed and partly because of this unsuitable for the future.
The safety regions work well at the regional level, when there is, for example, a fire or an accident. “That is about 95 percent of the crisis situations our country has to deal with,” said committee chairman Erwin Muller. “And that works well, the 25 regions we now have are well prepared for that.”
Big impact
But the other disasters that the Netherlands may have to deal with have a much greater impact, says Muller. “These are often more radical, more extensive, cross-border and more diverse in nature. In addition to fires and explosions, there are also larger and complex crises such as cyber attacks, large-scale protests, terrorism or pandemics.”
That is why more cooperation is needed. Not only between the security regions, but also with crisis partners, such as water boards or IT organizations and the national government. That must be regulated in a new law. “The big difference with the way things are now is that it will then be possible to think carefully about how future disasters can be tackled,” says Muller.
Since disasters are often cross-border, the regional boundaries set by the government can be confusing. The committee refers to the major KPN outage of June last year in which the 112 exchange was inaccessible as an example of how things went wrong.
“You saw very well that the disaster was too great for a region and that different regions communicated in different ways,” says Muller. “This created a chaotic situation in which several security regions shared their own, sometimes contradictory, communication messages.”
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