The Cabinet Office published its national household emergency guidance on Thursday afternoon as a website update.
No minister was scheduled to launch it. No press conference was called. The department published Be Ready, a three-year campaign to prepare the public for floods, wildfires, power cuts, cyber attacks and, at the outer edge, war, and said nothing further.
The campaign was confirmed instead by the Defence Secretary, at a factory opening in Telford, in answer to a question he had not been expecting. Wes Streeting was there to announce the return of tank gun barrel production to Britain. He did not mention the resilience launch in his speech, even though the website was due to go live a couple of hours later. It was only when Deborah Haynes of Sky News asked him when ministers intended to start talking frankly about preparing citizens for the possibility of war that the campaign became public. As she reported, without that exchange “the whole national resilience big reveal would have unfolded in silence”.
Great British PAC’s position is that sensible household preparedness is a public good and should be encouraged, not mocked. A country whose citizens know how to cope with three days without power, water or card payments is a country that recovers faster and asks less of its emergency services.
But the same standard must apply to the Government. A campaign that asks households to plan for disruption, published in the week that 32 government services went offline, cannot itself be launched without a responsible minister, without a published explanation of the risks it addresses, and without any publicly disclosed budget. Preparedness is not a leaflet. It is a promise that the state has done its own work first.
Great British PAC: Preparedness Requires Leadership
Households deserve practical, calm and usable guidance. The Be Ready checklist is largely that. It is short, it is specific and it is affordable, and the Government is right to say that most of it can be assembled gradually through ordinary shopping.
What households also deserve is honesty about why they are being asked. National resilience rests on three things that no checklist can supply: infrastructure that does not fail at the first shock, emergency planning that has been tested rather than written, and political leadership willing to explain the threat in public and answer for the response.
On each of those tests, Labour’s record this autumn is thin. The National Audit Office has found that the department responsible for food supply has done too little to prepare for catastrophic disruption and lacks the legal powers it may need in a crisis. The campaign, first promised in July, reached launch only in late October, following reported delays. The Prime Minister has not spoken publicly about it. The responsible minister has not faced a single question on it.
Great British PAC’s concern is not that the public is being told to keep bottled water. It is that the public is being asked to compensate for a government that has not shown its own workings. Prepared citizens are an asset to a resilient nation. They are not a substitute for one.
A campaign nobody was sent to launch
The substance of the advice is deliberately modest, and the Government says so. Households are asked to hold three days of bottled water at three litres per person per day, with more for cooking and washing. They are asked for non-perishable food that needs no refrigeration or cooking, such as tinned meat, fish and vegetables, dried fruit and nuts. The published checklist adds a torch with spare batteries, blankets, sleeping bags and warm clothing, a first aid kit, essential medication, nappies and ready-to-feed baby formula, pet food, a battery or wind-up FM radio, a charged power bank, printed copies of identity documents and insurance details, written-down emergency contacts and medication doses, and “cash (mix of coins and notes) and cards” in case electronic payments or cash machines are disrupted.
That is close to the standard published by France, Ireland and the Netherlands, and the Government says as much. The language is cautious throughout: build supplies “gradually”, “pick up missing items when you can during your regular shopping trips to help spread the cost”, check expiry dates every six months. More than 500 organisations have signed up to distribute the material.
The comparison with allies is worth stating plainly. This is one of the more substantial updates to official household emergency guidance in Britain in recent years, but it is not a wartime instruction sheet. It is a routine resilience document, published by countries across Europe, and it should be read as one. Nothing in the guidance, and nothing said by ministers, indicates that an emergency is judged imminent.
The cash recommendation has nonetheless been read in some quarters as a warning that the banking system is about to fail. The published advice supports no such conclusion. It suggests keeping enough cash for “essentials” and states that the amount “depends on your family’s specific needs”. Streeting was explicit that there was no “specific thing we’ve got in mind” behind the list, and asked the public to be “alert but not alarmed”. Treating a standard resilience measure as a signal of imminent collapse is not scrutiny. It is the vacuum left by a government that declined to explain itself.
The audit office got there first
If the advice is modest, the gap it addresses is not. Seven weeks before the launch, on 4 September, the National Audit Office reported that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs “has done too little in recent years to encourage businesses, households and communities to strengthen resilience and prepare for potential food shortages”. Its findings are both the strongest argument for the campaign and the strongest indictment of how it has been handled.
The Government’s own 2025 survey, cited in the report, found that 51 per cent of respondents described their household as slightly or not at all prepared for an emergency. Seventy-five per cent had not seen or heard any emergency preparedness advice in the previous year. A third, 34 per cent, did not hold three days of non-perishable food, despite guidance having been published in various forms since 2024. The Cabinet Office’s own comparison of UK and European surveys concluded that British households are less prepared than those in several comparable countries and that government messaging here is less prominent.
The NAO also found that the last national exercise testing Defra’s readiness for a catastrophic food disruption took place in 2023, that food businesses had limited input into the government’s response playbook, and that Defra lacks the legal powers it may need to direct businesses during a severe shortage. That is the machinery standing behind the checklist. It is not in good order, and nobody was sent out to explain it.
A launch that nearly happened in silence
The campaign was promised in a written ministerial statement on 14 July, in the final days of Sir Keir Starmer’s government. That statement set out the scale of the risk landscape: 95 risks in the National Risk Register, defence spending rising to almost £80 billion a year by 2029, an updated War Book, and the largest home defence exercise in several decades scheduled for 2027.
It then committed the Government to a public awareness campaign “later this year”. Sky News has reported that the launch was expected in September, then last week, then the start of this week, and that the department was contacted about the delays on the Tuesday before publication. The launch came on Thursday.
Andy Burnham, Prime Minister since 20 July, made no public comment on the launch. Dan Jarvis, the Security Minister who leads on resilience, issued a written statement and a social media post and did not appear before journalists. The Conservative former security minister Tom Tugendhat called the request “a perfectly reasonable thing to ask people”. His colleague Alicia Kearns, the shadow national security minister, said the Government should “get its own house in order before lecturing the public”.
The criticism from the resilience sector was quieter and more damaging. Professor Harry Pitts of the University of Exeter said the campaign was welcome but that “there is still much to do to kickstart the long-promised national conversation on defence and security” recommended by the 2025 Strategic Defence Review, and that it “really has to be led from Downing Street downwards”.
The vacuum fills with rumour
That is the cost of a launch without a minister. A government that asks households to prepare for three days of disruption, in the same week that 32 of its own services went offline, owes the public an account of what it is preparing for. It has offered a list of hazards and nothing more.
The cyber context is not hypothetical. A critical vulnerability in PHP, the programming language used by most of the world’s websites, forced organisations across the globe to patch or go dark. Thirty-two government services were taken offline and four were partially unavailable while the flaw was addressed, ministers said. Streeting told BBC Question Time that incidents of this kind would happen “more and more”, naming hostile states, organised criminals and the pressure that artificial intelligence places on conventional cyber defences.
Against that, the political signals are poor. The Strategic Defence Review and the National Security Strategy both promised a national conversation. What has been delivered is a website, radio advertising and a written statement. The Commons Library notes that legislation on defence readiness is expected later in this Parliament and that the review of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 is not due until 2027. An Ipsos poll published on 15 Octoberfound that 48 per cent of adults say there are no circumstances in which they would fight for Britain, against 36 per cent who would. A country in that condition does not need a leaflet. It needs a leader explaining why the leaflet matters.
General Sir Roly Walker, the Chief of the General Staff, told around 700 soldiers at Catterick Garrison this month that “very soon, the political leaders of this country will start to have a frank conversation with the citizens of this country about just what is going on and where the risk lies”, and that citizens would be asked to “consent to sacrifices to prioritise defence and security”. Ministers have adopted the advice and postponed the conversation.
Great British PAC Calls for Three Clear Commitments
Responsibility here is specific. The Cabinet Office owns the campaign. Dan Jarvis leads on resilience. Wes Streeting owns the defence argument that gives it urgency. Andy Burnham owns the Government that inherited a commitment made in July and delivered it in October without a minister, a publicly disclosed budget or an explanation.
Great British PAC is calling for three commitments before the campaign is treated as a serious national programme rather than a press release with a printable attachment.
1. Publish the planning assumptions. The Government should set out the basis for the three-day recommendation: which scenarios it is designed for, what level of disruption is judged plausible, and where the three-day threshold comes from. Households are being asked to spend money and change their habits. They are entitled to know what risk they are buying protection against.
2. Disclose campaign funding and measurable targets. No campaign budget has been publicly disclosed. Nor has the Government published awareness targets, reach figures or any measure by which the campaign’s success will be judged. The starting point is stark: 75 per cent of respondents to the Government’s own survey had seen no preparedness advice in the previous year. The public should be able to hold ministers to a number.
3. Ensure ministerial accountability. The minister responsible should present the campaign publicly, take questions from journalists and answer for it in Parliament. A three-year programme of this kind, launched by departments in the same week that government services failed, cannot be introduced by written statement and left to a Defence Secretary answering an unplanned question at a factory opening.
The argument inside the governing party is already moving faster than the Government’s willingness to lead it. On Friday, a Labour former Royal Marine MP who chairs a cross-party group on the Armed Forces used the Telegraph to urge Burnham to bring back national service.
The opposition parties are not exempt from scrutiny. Reform UK’s published policies commit to spending 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2035 and the party has announced tax relief for reservists, but it has said little about civil preparedness or household resilience. The Conservatives support the advice in public while arguing that Labour has failed to fund the defence that underpins it. Both positions are defensible. Neither is a substitute for the Government answering for its own campaign.
Great British PAC reaction
Great British PAC believes Britain needs prepared households and a prepared government. The organisation’s response to the launch is set out below.
Richard Thomson, National Director of Great British PAC, said:
“We pay more tax than at any time since the Second World War. Yet Labour tells us to prepare for the Blitz – stockpile three days of food, water and cash because everyday services might fail.
Essentially that is an admission of failure and that Britain is broken.
We were one of the world’s greatest nations. Look at what Labour has done. They find endless funds for illegal immigration and Net Zero, but nothing for the basics that keep Britain running.
Their “Be Ready campaign” quietly appeared, without funding, without explanation – three months late. If this is the best they can do, then they have already failed.“
His statement is a political assessment. The reporting above sets out what the Government has and has not disclosed on funding, timing and risk.
Britain’s Resilience Demands More Than a Government Checklist
The checklist is worth printing. The advice in it is sound, the cost is modest and the logic, that prepared households reduce the burden on emergency services, is correct.
But resilience is not a task the public can complete on the Government’s behalf. It requires food supply chains that can survive a shock, legal powers that can be used when they fail, infrastructure that has been tested against the risks ministers themselves have listed, and ministers prepared to stand up and explain what they are asking of the country.
Labour has published the advice without a prominent ministerial launch, without publicly disclosing the campaign’s budget and without adequately explaining the planning assumptions behind it. That is not the national conversation ministers promised. It is a missed opportunity to demonstrate the leadership that national resilience demands.
The public has been asked to prepare for three days. Labour should not need a single one of them to work out what the campaign is for.
