A more sceptical read of the government’s new resilience campaign than the headlines gave it
The instinct behind the government’s new Be Ready campaign is sound. A poll cited when the Deputy Prime Minister launched the underlying programme found only 15% of people have any kind of emergency kit, and more than 40% couldn’t manage three days without a shop. Household-level complacency about disruption is real, and a government encouraging people to think about it at all is not, in itself, a bad thing.
But look at the campaign closely rather than skimming the headline, and the execution raises more questions than it answers — about tone, about who’s actually in charge of this conversation, and about what the government is and isn’t willing to say plainly.
The nanny-state problem is a messaging problem, not just a tone problem
Alongside advice on power cuts, flooding and “prepare for things like power cuts, flooding or cyber attacks“, the site’s guidance on driving in winter reads: “Pack a few essential items in your car boot to make sure you’re ready in case of getting stuck in wintry weather” — followed by a list that includes jump leads and a snow shovel.
That’s not wrong advice. It’s advice your dad gives you, or the RAC puts in a November email. It is not national civil resilience planning, and putting it in the same document as guidance for cyberattacks and grid failure does the serious material no favours. If the state is going to ask people to seriously engage with the idea that power, water or digital infrastructure could fail at a national scale, bundling that in with “carry a shovel” risks teaching the public to read the whole thing as the same category of mild, slightly patronising admin — which is precisely the “nanny state” reaction a lot of people are having to it. A campaign can be taken seriously, or it can tell adults to pack jump leads. Doing both in the same breath undermines the first in service of the second.
Three days, at least three different front doors
The campaign’s own page on UK resilience is admirably honest about the structure underneath it: most emergencies are handled locally by emergency services, local authorities and utility companies; Local Resilience Forums bring local responders together and produce their own Community Risk Registers; central government steps in for larger or more complex emergencies. All true, and all sensible as a matter of civil contingencies design.
What the page doesn’t do is explain how a member of the public is supposed to navigate that structure. A resident could reasonably encounter broadly similar — but not identical — preparedness advice from their council’s emergency planning pages, their Local Resilience Forum, and this new national campaign, each produced separately, none of them signposting the others, none of them explaining which is the authoritative version if the details differ. For an organisation whose entire discipline is about having one clear chain of command in a crisis, a national resilience campaign that can’t tell the public which of three overlapping sources to trust is a genuinely odd place to end up.
What is “three days” actually telling us?
Here’s the question the campaign never quite answers: is three days a target, or an admission?
In the Deputy Prime Minister’s original 2024 speech, “three days” was simply a statistic — the proportion of people who couldn’t manage that long without shopping — and 72 hours was mentioned only as Finland’s approach, cited as an interesting international example, not adopted as UK policy. Somewhere between that speech and this year’s campaign, three days stopped being a stat about other people’s preparedness and became the campaign’s own organising principle: “Being ready for 3 days helps you manage while support reaches those in need.”
That phrasing implies something specific — that three days is roughly how long the government itself expects organised support to take to reach people in a serious, widescale disruption. If that’s the working assumption behind the figure, it’s a far more newsworthy statement than a shopping checklist, and it’s never actually said out loud. The campaign doesn’t explain where the number comes from, whether it varies by type of emergency, or what it’s actually an estimate of. That matters, because the number is contested: a prepping expert quoted in the trade press called the 72-hour rule “fundamentally insufficient” for prolonged grid or infrastructure failure, while Ireland’s equivalent scheme went the other way entirely and dropped its 72-hour framing after concerns it was making people anxious. Two governments, the same underlying number, two opposite conclusions about whether to even say it — and the UK campaign states it as fact without explaining its reasoning either way.
And still nothing for anyone responsible for a group of people
All of which is before you get to the gap I’d flagged initially: the entire checklist is written for one shape of household — a family, in a house, with their own cupboard. There’s no mention of shared or multi-occupancy accommodation, care settings, or schools. Scale the government’s own water figure (3 litres per person per day, and I am still trying to work out where on earth I would store 36l water, and that does not include toilet flushing in the calculation) up from a family of four to a boarding house of fifty or sixty, and you’re over 1,500 litres, with nobody named as responsible for working that out. Care homes, supported living and halls of residence fare no better — the closest the guidance comes is advising people to “talk to neighbours,” which rather assumes everyone has their own front door to begin with.
A genuinely useful version of this campaign is possible — it isn’t this one, yet
None of this means household resilience is a bad idea, or that the Cabinet Office shouldn’t be running public information campaigns. It means this particular campaign hasn’t decided what register it’s speaking in. A credible version would separate the serious, infrastructure-level asks from the routine seasonal admin instead of blending them; name one authoritative source and explicitly route the others into it rather than letting three tiers of government say similar-but-different things with no signposting between them; explain, in plain terms, what its headline number is actually an estimate of; and sit alongside, not instead of, a scaled-up framework for the organisations that hold the real duty of care — schools, care providers, housing operators — who currently have nothing official to work from at all.
Until then, the most useful thing most organisations can do with this campaign is treat it as a prompt, not a plan: a reason to ask who actually owns resilience planning for the people in your care, and whether anyone’s done the sums properly — rather than a reason to assume the sums have already been done for you.
