The UK Government has launched a new "be ready" campaign urging households to keep three days' worth of essential supplies at home in case everyday services are temporarily disrupted. Defence secretary Wes Streeting defended the campaign after his comments were criticised as scaremongering, saying he wanted people to be "alert but not alarmed".
What the checklist advises
The checklist released as part of the campaign advises stocking up with 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 electronic payments or cash machines are disrupted.
Mr Streeting said cyber incidents such as the critical security flaw in the PHP programming language used by the majority of websites, which has left organisations around the world scrambling for a fix, will happen "more and more". He warned of the need to be ready in case businesses were hit by cyber attacks that could knock out supply chains of essentials.
Questions for households and businesses
Mr Streeting said households and businesses need to ask if they know how they would respond to possible "everyday challenges" that might manifest themselves. "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?" he said. "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 said the advice might help during power cuts or if a local shop is subject to a cyber attack and was a matter of "everyday national resilience".
Reactions to the campaign
Put to him by an audience member that it could be "scaremongering" and push people towards panic buying like during the Covid-19 pandemic, 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?'. They are way ahead of us on some of this stuff."
Shadow foreign secretary Tom Tugendhat said it was "a perfectly reasonable thing to ask people" to have provisions in place for several days. But his Conservative colleague shadow national security minister Alicia Kearns criticised the move as "lecturing the public".
Expert view on leadership
A defence expert said plans for defence and resilience should be "led from Downing Street downwards". 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. However, our work … suggests that there is still much to do to kickstart the long-promised national conversation on defence and security recommended in the Strategic Defence Review 2025. This really has to be led from Downing Street downwards, with readiness and resilience providing the opportunity for a broader project of national renewal fully in keeping with the Prime Minister's commitment to a place-based approach to empowering and reindustrialising Britain's communities. It is an opportunity that must not be missed."
