Britainupdated 51m ago2 min read
United Kingdom Relaunches Be Ready Campaign, Urging Households To Stockpile Three Days Supplies
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Be Ready campaign asks households to keep three days of at-home supplies. Guidance urges nine litres of bottled water and three days’ food.
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Be Ready kit rollout
The United Kingdom government urged households to prepare for a national emergency by stockpiling supplies for three days as it relaunched its “Be Ready” campaign in the face of severe storms and possible disruption to essential services. Dan Jarvis said, “The storms of last winter and the wildfires of this summer have shown how extreme weather events can disrupt our daily lives and affect the services we rely on, such as telephone, electricity, water, and the Internet,” in a written statement to Parliament.
Wes Streeting said he wanted people to be “alert but not alarmed” while he questioned how the country would cope if supermarket payment systems failed. The government guidance advised Britons to stock bottled water and non-perishable food for three days, and it also recommended hand sanitizer, a flashlight and batteries, and a radio.
Threats and cyber disruption
The Be Ready campaign tied its emergency planning to cyber and infrastructure risks, with Dan Jarvis warning that extreme weather can disrupt services such as telephone, electricity, water, and the Internet. Wes Streeting framed the threat as cyberattacks and hostile-state pressure on everyday systems, asking, “How would we cope if the payment systems at the local supermarket went down?”
The government also pointed to a PHP software computer outage, saying the importance of the campaign was underscored after this week’s disruption forced some services to be interrupted. The Guardian reported that Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre sent out 50,000 alerts to affected organisations after the discovery of a security vulnerability in the PHP programming language used by millions of websites around the world.
What households are told
The Be Ready checklist urged households to keep enough bottled water for three days, with the guidance specifying “three litres of water per person per day for drinking.” The checklist also told households to store enough non-perishable food for three days, including items “tinned meat, fish or vegetables, dried fruit and nuts.”
The guidance advised families to keep cash on hand and copies of important documents, including passports, and it also urged people to ensure an adequate supply of medicines and drugs. The Guardian said the campaign would be followed up with an advertising campaign on social media and radio, and it described the Be Ready guidance as aiming to help households survive “72 hours” of serious disruption.