Wes Streeting launched the Be Ready Campaign on Thursday, urging households in the UK to keep three days of supplies in case of extreme weather, cyber attacks or supply chain disruption. He said people and businesses need to think more about how they would cope with natural disasters, cyber attacks or state-sponsored terrorism.
He posed a supermarket payment-system failure to make the risk concrete: "How would we cope if the payment systems at the local supermarket went down?" The advice asks households to keep non-perishable food, bottled water, a torch, sleeping bags and first aid items, and to have an FM radio and written-down station frequencies for updates during outages.
Dan Jarvis MP and the campaign
Dan Jarvis MP said the campaign will help emergency services prioritise people who need more support during crises and will help "improve our resilience as a nation". He said similar campaigns in European countries have made preparedness advice a normal part of everyday life.
The government says severe weather can affect power, water, phones and the internet, and the campaign is meant to get households ready for that kind of disruption before it happens. Streeting tied the warning to businesses as well, saying the public need to be prepared for increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks and possible disruption from hostile state actors or terrorists.
Dame Angela Eagle on El Niño
Dame Angela Eagle said last month that people should prepare for extreme weather as the strongest El Niño event in a generation develops over the Pacific Ocean. She said El Niño will lead to "more extreme storms in this country" and that households should stock up on food to be more resilient.
The campaign lands alongside a National Audit Office warning that Britain’s food supply chain is vulnerable to plant or human disease outbreaks, cyber-attacks and extreme weather. The National Audit Office also said Defra had not done enough in recent years to improve supply chain resilience, while households in the UK are less prepared for emergencies than those in Finland and Sweden.
Households and emergency planning
The practical instruction is simple: build enough food, water and basic light and first aid supplies to last three days, then add a radio plan for power cuts and other outages. For readers, the change is not a new rule but a specific stockpile standard the government is now asking them to treat as part of normal planning.
The open question is how quickly households and businesses will change their habits after the launch, and whether the wider national resilience conversation turns the advice into routine preparation rather than a one-off warning.
