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What Could Hit You

Risk Register

The UK Government's National Risk Register, laid out as a board. Roll to see which risk lands on your business, and what it does to the lights.

The Board
About the Register

Each dot is one risk from the register, placed by how likely the government judges its reasonable worst case (left to right) and how bad that worst case would be (bottom to top). Tap a dot for the detail. Filter by theme, or roll the dice and let likelihood pick.

Risk matrix: likelihood against impact A five by five grid. Each dot is one risk from the National Risk Register, positioned by likelihood band and impact level. A table of the same data follows.
Risk on the registerHas an exercise you can playDarker cell = likelier and worse
Weighted by likelihood: the likelier the risk, the more often it comes up.
Table view of every risk on the board
RiskThemeLIWhat it does to the business
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About the Register

The National Risk Register is the public version of the UK Government's National Security Risk Assessment. It lists the acute risks the government plans against — cyber attacks, loss of power, severe weather, pandemics, terrorism, accidents and more — and for each one describes a reasonable worst-case scenario, an estimate of how likely that scenario is, and how severe its impact would be.

How the scales work

Likelihood is the chance of the reasonable worst case happening within the assessment period, in five bands from less than 0.2 per cent to more than 25 per cent.

Impact is scored on five levels from minor to catastrophic, drawing on fatalities and casualties, economic cost, disruption to essential services and wider effects on society.

Why it belongs in a business exercise

A continuity plan built only around the risks a team has already lived through is a plan for last time. The register is an authoritative, citable menu of what the country as a whole is preparing for, with the government's own worst-case framing — so it is a fair test of whether your plan covers the things that could actually happen.

The board on the other tab maps each national risk onto this exercise's fictional company and shows which of its services would go down and for how long. Where an exercise scenario already exists for a risk, the roll takes you into it.

Source

National Risk Register, HM Government, Cabinet Office — the current edition is published on gov.uk. The mapping of each risk onto the fictional company is this exercise's own, not the government's.

© 2026 Ben Phipps. All rights reserved.