First posted on Instagram
The British government has launched a new “Be Ready” preparedness campaign urging households to keep enough essential supplies to survive independently for at least three days during an emergency. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting unveiled the campaign on Thursday, October 22, telling every household it should be ready to manage temporarily if everyday services stop working.
The guidance recommends roughly three litres of drinking water per person per day, non-perishable food with a long shelf life that does not need refrigeration or cooking, essential medication, a first-aid kit, a torch with spare batteries, a battery-powered or wind-up FM radio with station frequencies written down, a charged power bank for mobile phones, blankets and warm clothing, hand sanitiser, and some cash in notes and coins in case electronic payments or cash machines go down. Families with babies are told to keep ready-to-feed formula and nappies.
Streeting said households and businesses need to ask how they would respond to what he called everyday challenges and threats: “increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks on our businesses” and the possibility of “disruption to essential supply chains caused by hostile state actors or terrorists.” His sharpest example was the checkout: “How would we cope if the payment systems at the local supermarket went down?” He pointed to a critical security flaw in the PHP programming language, used by most websites, which he said had taken dozens of government services offline while it was fixed, and warned incidents like that would happen “more and more.” Severe weather is part of the case too — wildfires this summer, and the risk of freezing pipes and flooding this winter.
The message, Streeting insisted, is “alert but not alarmed.” The advice is to build the kit up gradually — a few tins at a time — keep it in one spot where it can be found with the lights out, and treat it as routine preparation rather than panic buying.
Not everyone is convinced. Tory shadow national security minister Alicia Kearns said the government should “get its own house in order before lecturing the public,” arguing that “it isn’t families that are failing to fund our defence or secure reliable energy – it’s Labour.” Reform UK MP Danny Kruger said ministers should “be doing their job not telling families how to do theirs,” and that ordinary people need help with the cost of living, not “bossy lectures about bottled water.” On BBC One’s Question Time, an audience member challenged Streeting directly that the warning was scaremongering that would trigger panic buying — citing the toilet-roll shortages of the Covid pandemic — and drive prices up.
Streeting said Britain looked at what its neighbours are doing and found Europe “way ahead of us.” Germany’s Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance advises households to be able to provide for themselves for up to ten days — twenty litres of drinking water per person, non-perishable food, medication and a first-aid kit — with three days described as “very valuable” as a starting point. Germany’s revised emergency guide, released last October, states that “even a war no longer seems as unlikely as it did a few years ago.” France tells citizens to keep a 72-hour emergency kit, Ireland runs a ‘Be Emergency Ready’ campaign, and the European Commission has urged citizens to maintain at least 72 hours of essential supplies. A National Audit Office warning issued alongside the campaign said Britain’s food supply chain is vulnerable to disease outbreaks, cyberattacks and extreme weather, and that British households are less prepared for emergencies than those in Finland and Sweden.