On Friday, the government told the country to start putting food aside. Environment Secretary Dame Angela Eagle said the UK is heading into what could be the largest El Niño event since records began in the nineteenth century, with sea temperatures in the Pacific running more than three degrees above average. The practical translation for the UK, in her words, is drier summers, wetter winters and more extreme storms, starting this autumn.
We’ve Read This Script Before
Regular readers will recognise the shape of this. We picked apart the government’s Get Prepared for Emergencies campaign a while back, and found a familiar pattern: well-meaning advice that falls apart under any real scrutiny. Ten litres of water per person per day is not a figure anyone is actually storing and rotating in a two-bed flat. Battery radios get recommended with no reference to the DAB and FM switch-off. Local sirens go unmentioned, along with any account of what someone is supposed to do when they hear one. This new advice risks the same fate: a headline about tinned goods, a brief flurry of concern, and nothing that changes how prepared anyone actually is by December.
The Report With More Teeth Than the Headline
The stockpiling advice landed on the same day as something with rather more substance: a National Audit Office report on the resilience of the UK’s food supply chain. It is worth reading past the ministerial soundbite, because it says, in an auditor’s careful language, roughly what we said in rather less measured terms: Defra has not done enough. The report found that food supply held up reasonably well through the pandemic and the disruption that followed the invasion of Ukraine, largely because private businesses did the work of keeping it going, often with limited direction from government. Engagement with food supply businesses has fallen since the pandemic. Those businesses had minimal input into Defra’s own playbook for handling a food supply disruption. The most recent exercise testing the response to a genuinely catastrophic scenario ran in 2023, and largely excluded the businesses that would actually be managing one. Defra itself admitted last year to having “very little confidence” that resilience work across government departments was properly joined up, and the NAO notes it still lacks clear legal powers to direct business action in a true emergency.
Households don’t come out of the numbers much better. Just over half describe themselves as slightly or not at all prepared for an emergency. Two thirds have roughly three days’ worth of food in the cupboard. Three quarters say they have seen no preparedness advice at all in the past year. Put plainly, the government is asking households to buy tins while its own watchdog says it hasn’t worked out how to talk properly to the businesses that put the tins on the shelf, and hasn’t tested the plan since 2023.
Redundancy That Wasn’t
None of this is abstract for anyone running a business continuity programme. A manufacturing client of ours once ran two separate suppliers for a key raw material, confident that gave genuine redundancy. It later emerged that both suppliers sourced the same chemical from the same underlying producer. The diversity existed on paper. It had never been tested in practice, and nobody found that out until someone went looking. That is the same kind of gap the NAO is describing at a national scale: arrangements that look reasonable in a policy document and have not been tested against anything real since 2023, if at all.
What Businesses Should Actually Do This Autumn
The stockpiling advice is aimed at households, and it will fade from the news cycle within a fortnight regardless of how large this El Niño turns out to be. The more useful prompt, for anyone responsible for organisational resilience, is what the NAO report puts in writing: government coordination on this is patchy, the legal framework for a genuine crisis is unclear, and the last full test of the system predates most people’s current job title. Waiting for Defra to close those gaps before checking your own exposure is not a plan. A wetter, stormier final quarter of the year is a specific and near-term reason to look again at where your supply chain actually depends on a single source dressed up as two, whether your local resilience forum knows who you are, and whether your continuity plan has been tested against something closer to reality than a tabletop exercise from a few years ago.
Summary
The tins will get bought, or they won’t. What matters more is the report most people won’t read to the end: an official confirmation that the system underneath the headline hasn’t been properly tested in three years, and that the businesses expected to keep the country fed were largely left out of the room while that was being decided. If your organisation’s resilience planning wouldn’t survive the same scrutiny the NAO has just given Defra, this is as good a prompt as any to find out before the weather does it for you.
