Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms

Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR)

Released in 2010 under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this is the only publicly available photo of the classified COBR facility.
Location	Cabinet Office, 70 Whitehall, London, England
Country	United Kingdom
Purpose	Crisis management centre

Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms (COBR, often referred to as COBRA) are the locations for a type of crisis response committee set up to co-ordinate the actions of bodies within the Government of the United Kingdom in response to instances of national or regional crisis, or during events abroad with major implications for the UK. The composition of a COBR meeting depends on the nature of the incident but it is usually chaired by the Prime Minister or another senior minister, with other key ministers as appropriate, city mayors and representatives of relevant external organisations such as the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Local Government Association.

COBR meetings are generally held in one of the Cabinet Office buildings in Whitehall, London. Each is held in a secure room fitted with video and audio links to display intelligence information.

The term COBRA (or Cobra) often used by news media is the acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, as the meetings were usually held in Conference Room A at the Cabinet Office main building at 70 Whitehall, London. This abbreviation is no longer used within the Cabinet Office. Official papers bear a logo based on that of the Cabinet Office with the addition of the words "Briefing Rooms".

In 2009, former senior police officer Andy Hayman, who sat on the committee after the 7 July 2005 London bombings and at other intervals from 2005 to 2007, was highly critical of its workings in his book The Terrorist Hunters.

A single photo of COBR was released in 2010 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The first COBR meeting took place in the 1970s to oversee the government's response to the 1972 miners' strike. Other events that have led to meetings being convened include the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege, fuel protests, the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak, the 11 September 2001 attacks, the 7 July 2005 London bombings, the murder of Lee Rigby (in 2013), the 2015 Sousse attacks, the refugee crisis in Calais, the 2015 Paris attacks, Storm Eva, the 2016 Brussels bombings, the 2017 Westminster attack, the 2017 Manchester Arena explosion, and the June 2017 attacks in Central London.