Stockpile advice

The government has launched a "Be Ready" campaign asking households to keep at least three days of food and water, along with cash, bank cards and a battery-powered or wind-up FM radio. The official list also includes a fully charged power bank, a torch with spare batteries, essential medicines and prescriptions, a first aid kit and a written list of key phone numbers. Bottled water should amount to around three litres per person. The campaign website, beready.campaign.gov.uk, replaces the earlier "Prepare" wording and asks visitors whether they are emergency ready. Officials say it is the first time official guidance tells Britons to stockpile these supplies for three days, bringing the UK into line with France, Ireland and the Netherlands.

The cyber incident behind the warning

Thirty-two government services were taken offline after criminal hackers tried to exploit a critical security flaw in PHP, a programming language used by numerous websites. Downing Street said on Thursday, 22 October, that no important public-facing critical infrastructure had been affected, although 32 government sites had become temporarily inaccessible while the problems were investigated. The National Cyber Security Centre is working with OpenAI, whose technology was used to identify the vulnerabilities, and with international partners to limit possible risks. Websites worldwide went dark on Wednesday, 21 October, as companies and governments raced to deploy patches, and Cloudflare reported that hacking attempts surged into the millions.

Streeting's warning

Speaking at the official opening of the Gun Hall tank gun barrel factory in Telford, Shropshire, on Thursday, 22 October, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting warned that Britons should prepare for food shortages if "state-sponsored terrorism" disrupts everyday life. He pointed to hostile state actors or terrorists, cyber attacks on businesses and supply chain disruption, while also naming flooding and wildfires as natural risks. He asked whether households and businesses were prepared for the consequences of increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks.

“How would we cope if the payment systems of the supermarkets went down?”

Streeting said these were the sorts of everyday challenges the country could well face, and that it was right to ask the public to be ready and do their bit. On Wednesday, 21 October, he told LBC that the UK remained involved in Ukraine talks despite US-led efforts to bring Moscow and Kyiv together.

Reaction and what comes next

Former Foreign Secretary David Miliband told LBC from New York that Streeting was right to tell households the message is not just rhetoric. He said that daily threats to British infrastructure must be taken seriously.

“Every day there are threats to British infrastructure, and I think it's very, very important that we take it seriously.”

Miliband also said the drums of war were beating louder and warned of a return of forever wars. Security Minister Dan Jarvis MP said the advice would help emergency services prioritise people who need more support during crises. The Be Ready website is the first stage of a three-year campaign, and the government consulted more than 500 organisations and members of the public on clearer emergency communications. Households that need extra help during a power cut or water outage are being told to sign up to the Priority Services Register, which utilities use to reach vulnerable people first.