The UK government is initiating a national resilience conversation to help households prepare for potential supply chain disruptions triggered by sophisticated cyber attacks, hostile state threats, or severe weather events. Speaking on Thursday at the UK Gun Hall Plant in Telford, Shropshire, where it was announced that tank gun barrel production will return to the UK, Minister Streeting cautioned that the public must be ready for everyday operational challenges that could disrupt essential services.
Streeting pointed to recent environmental and infrastructure vulnerabilities, highlighting wildfires that burned over the summer alongside winter flooding risks. He warned that hostility from state actors or terrorists, as well as increasingly complex cyber attacks targeting businesses, could severely impact daily routines. "How would we cope if the payment systems at the local supermarket went down?" Streeting asked, stressing that such scenarios represent realistic threats facing the nation and emphasizing that it is right to ask the country to be ready and for everyone to do their bit.
Under the "Be Ready" campaign, the government hopes to improve the UK's preparedness for emergencies, such as those caused by increasingly likely severe weather events and cyber-attacks by hostile states. Such incidents could leave the public without access to everyday services such as mains water, sewage, phones and the internet. Households are being encouraged to keep three days worth of emergency items on hand. Recommended supplies include non-perishable food, bottled water, a torch, sleeping bags, and first aid equipment. The campaign also advises families to keep an FM radio with battery power for official updates during outages, along with a written record of news station frequencies for national and local broadcasting.
Security Minister Dan Jarvis MP stated that broad public preparation will ensure emergency responders can prioritize people who need more support during crises, ultimately improving resilience as a nation. Jarvis noted that similar preparedness guidance is already a normal part of everyday life in European nations such as France, Ireland, and the Netherlands.
The campaign comes in the wake of warnings issued last month by Environment Secretary Dame Angela Eagle, who cautioned that the powerful El Niño climate phenomenon developing in the Pacific Ocean will cause more extreme storms across the UK, making household food reserves essential. Her statements aligned with a critical report from the National Audit Office (NAO), which warned that Britain's food supply network remains highly vulnerable to plant and human disease outbreaks, cyber attacks, and extreme weather events. The NAO noted that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has not done enough in recent years to improve supply chain resilience, leaving UK households significantly less prepared for major emergencies than those in countries like Finland and Sweden.
These measures build upon the government's national security strategy published last year, which warned that Britain must actively prepare for the possibility of coming under direct threat, potentially in a wartime scenario. That strategy highlighted an era in which the country faces confrontation with security threats, explicitly citing Russia's war against Ukraine and Iranian hostile activity on British soil. According to government officials, building national resilience requires reducing reliance on external sources to ensure that British supply chains and energy security can be maintained even in times of crisis.
