The City would endeavour to keep financial markets open in the event of an influenza pandemic, an industry-wide exercise has concluded.
Last autumn the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the Treasury and the Bank of England jointly conducted a six-week trial to test the financial industry's resilience by simulating such an outbreak.
The tripartite claims that the exercise was the largest of its kind and succeeded in its dual-objectives of providing participants with greater understanding of their planned responses' effectiveness, as well as reinforcing the industry's ability to cope with increased absences, quarantine regulations, vaccines and bereavement counselling.
According to the government, a flu pandemic is one of the "leading risks" to the UK, and feedback received from the 70 organisations and 3,500 people involved in last year's trial suggests that a pandemic's main impact is upon the "availability of personnel rather than on physical assets".
"Across the financial sector as a whole, not surprisingly, the heaviest impact of the pandemic was upon the more labour-intensive parts, notably the provision of customer-facing retail financial services," the FSA said today.
Although no overall cash shortages emerged as a result of the simulation; bottlenecks did, with staff absences forcing high street banks to close.
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