The Defence Secretary has moved to reassure the public following the launch of a Government campaign advising households to stock up with three days of essentials in case of a crisis. Wes Streeting said the intention behind the 'Be Ready' campaign is to make people 'alert not alarmed'.
The new initiative encourages households to keep key supplies, including food and water, at hand in case everyday services are temporarily disrupted. Mr Streeting said there has been no specific crisis in mind.
What the checklist includes
The stock checklist issued includes three days' worth of bottled water and non-perishable food, a battery or wind-up FM radio to receive updates during outages, and cash in case there are problems with electronic payments or cash machines. It also includes items such as a torch, essential medication, baby formula and important documents.
Mr Streeting also said that cyber incidents, such as the critical security flaw in the PHP programming language used by most websites that left organisations around the world scrambling for a fix, will happen "more and more", reports Press Association.
Warnings on cyber threats
Speaking at an event in Telford on Thursday, Mr Streeting warned of the need to be ready in case businesses were hit by cyber attacks which could knock out supply chains of essentials. He said households and businesses need to ask if they know how they would respond to possible challenges and said: "But we'll also need to take the country a step further and ask them are they prepared for increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks on our businesses, are they prepared for the eventuality that there may be disruption to essential supply chains caused by hostile state actors or terrorists?"
"How would we cope if the payment systems at the local supermarket went down?" He later told BBC One's Question Time that there was not a "specific thing" in mind when it comes to potential emergency incidents but that the advice might help during the likes of power cuts or if a local shop is subject to a cyber attack. He called it a matter of "everyday national resilience".
Political reactions
When an audience member suggested the message could be "scaremongering" and create pandemic-style panic-buying, he said: "We did have this debate, though just to reassure - because we want people to be alert but not alarmed - and the truth is we looked around the rest of Europe, 'what are our friends doing across the continent'?" He added: "They are way ahead of us on some of this stuff."
Shadow foreign secretary Tom Tugendhat has said having provisions in place for several days is "a perfectly reasonable thing to ask people". His Conservative colleague shadow national security minister Alicia Kearns however criticised the move as "lecturing the public", reports PA. She said: "Preparing for emergencies is important. But the Government should get its own house in order before lecturing the public. It isn't families that are failing to fund our defence or secure reliable energy - it's Labour. With rising threats to our national security, we must all be ready to face all eventualities. We each have a role to play but the Government must lead by example."
Expert and official guidance
Professor Harry Pitts, from the University of Exeter's centre for the public understanding of defence and security, said: "It is encouraging that ministers are foregrounding security threats posed by our adversaries as part of this new Government push to get the public to consider their preparedness for the risks we face as a country." He added however that its work suggests that there is still much to do to kickstart a long-promised national conversation on defence and security and "this really has to be led from Downing Street downwards".
The Be Ready campaign launched amid a global fight to fix the PIP security flaw, which according to a Government minister saw 32 Government services go offline and four made partially unavailable while work took place to address potential cybersecurity issues. Mr Streeting suggested this sort of thing will happen more and that the threat is not just from foreign states engaged in espionage or sabotage but also from organised criminals. He said that while the world of AI brings opportunities, it also "present threats if people are innovating and pushing against conventional defences, conventional cyber defences". Organisations have been urged by the National Cyber Security Centre to update to a new, fixed version of the PHP software or to consider taking their websites offline if they cannot be upgraded immediately.
