Brits warned to prepare to fend for themselves during major emergencies

Brits need to get used to the idea that during a major national emergency they may have to look after themselves for a period of time, with electricity, communications, water, payments and other services potentially unavailable, one of the country’s leading resilience experts has warned.

Lord Harris, chairman of the National Preparedness Commission, told LBC that Britain needs to build a culture in which households understand they cannot always assume that somebody will immediately arrive to fix things when a serious crisis hits.

His warning comes amid growing concern about the resilience of the UK to everything from extreme weather and prolonged power failures to cyberattacks, sabotage and hostile state activity, with Lord Harris warning that although Britain’s preparedness has improved, the threats facing the country are developing at an extraordinary pace.

For ordinary households, however, the message is considerably simpler. People need to become more comfortable with the possibility that the services they normally rely upon may disappear temporarily, and be sufficiently prepared that they can cope when they do.

“There tends to be a situation that ‘they’, unspecified who they are, will sort it out,” Lord Harris told LBC.

“And if it’s taking more than about 15 minutes, people get really irate and worked up about it.”

But in a genuinely serious emergency, the reality could be very different. Lord Harris warned that a widespread electricity failure, for example, would not simply leave homes without lights.

Mobile communications could begin failing as backup batteries at phone masts ran down, water supplies could be affected because pumps require electricity, wastewater and sewage systems could experience problems, and electronic payments and other parts of the financial system could stop working normally.

“All of the things that we just take for granted would fail,” he said.

“We all need to be prepared for those circumstances when the things we just take for granted are no longer available.”

His warning is not that Britain is about to descend into a survivalist nightmare, but that households need enough resilience to cope with disruption without immediately becoming dependent on already stretched emergency services.

“We’re not talking about necessarily six-month supplies in your basements and enough guns to deal with an invading army,” Lord Harris said.

Instead, he said people should be “more prepared for a disruption so you’re not completely thrown if you can’t boil water or you can’t do whatever else it might be.”

Lord Harris said Britain needs to adopt what resilience experts describe as a “whole of society” approach, where preparing for emergencies is not considered something done solely by government departments, councils, the military or the emergency services.

“It is a whole of society premise,” he said. “So it’s every level of government, it’s every organisation big and small, it’s every community, it’s every household, it’s every individual just sees it as part of that, something they do.”

That could mean households having basic supplies available, knowing how they would communicate with family members if mobile networks were unavailable and thinking beforehand about what they would do if electricity, water or electronic payments stopped working.

More importantly, Lord Harris argues, preparedness needs to become normal.

He said officials had historically been nervous about encouraging households to prepare because of fears that the public would either mock the advice or assume the Government knew that some catastrophe was imminent.

“There’s a nervousness,” he said. Civil servants, he recalled, had worried that “the public will be cynical and they’ll laugh at us”, partly because of memories of Cold War-era civil defence campaigns.

There was also concern that if people were suddenly told to stock supplies or prepare their homes, they might conclude that ministers knew “something’s about to happen and we’ve not told them”.

Lord Harris said the answer was not to avoid talking about preparedness, but to make it so ordinary that it no longer caused alarm. “The only answer to that is you have to start just normalising it,” he said.

Britain has already experienced the kinds of disruption that could provide that starting point, he told LBC, pointing to wildfires, extreme heat, storms and power failures.

“These are practical things that you can draw to people’s attention,” he said.

“This is why, you know, power lines might go out because of bad storms. This is why you need to prepare. This is not something new, you just need to get ready for it.”

The warning comes as the Government prepares a much wider effort to encourage the public to become more resilient.

Its latest Resilience Action Plan implementation report says new household advice will be backed by a multi-year public campaign later this year, aimed at explaining simple steps people can take to prepare for emergencies.

The Government says it wants to have a “national conversation” about the threats facing the UK and argues that individuals, households, businesses and communities all have a role to play in strengthening the country’s resilience.

There is evidence that the message has not yet reached much of the country.

Analysis published by the National Preparedness Commission last year highlighted a Government survey which found three quarters of respondents said they had not seen or heard advice about emergency preparedness during the previous 12 months.

The Commission has argued that simply putting information on a Government website is not enough. In evidence submitted to the House of Lords National Resilience Committee this year, it called for preparedness messages to be repeated through household information, broadcast and social media, public spaces and schools.

Lord Harris told LBC that the existing government Prepare website contains useful information, but said preparedness needs to become visible throughout everyday life rather than relying on people deliberately seeking out emergency advice.

He even suggested supermarkets could help normalise the idea, imagining shops offering basic three-day emergency packs alongside ordinary household shopping.

“If all of that is happening, then people begin to take it more seriously and it normalises it,” he said.

That cultural change could become increasingly important as the pressures facing Britain grow.

Lord Harris warned that climate change, cyber threats and a deteriorating international security environment mean the UK increasingly has to consider not simply whether it can handle one emergency, but whether it could continue functioning if several happened at once.

During this summer’s extreme heat, he said, the fire service had at points been so heavily stretched that there were concerns about what would happen if another major incident occurred.

That creates another vulnerability: a hostile state does not have to launch an attack at a convenient moment.

“If you’re a malign external actor, you can see the country struggling with a climate emergency,” Lord Harris said.

“This is a really good moment to activate your cyberattack plan and disrupt the electricity supply or disrupt the communications system or the water supply.”

It is precisely because government and the emergency services could themselves be dealing with enormous pressure that household resilience matters.

Being prepared does not mean assuming society is going to collapse but it does mean understanding that during the first hours or days of a sufficiently serious crisis, the people and organisations normally relied upon for help may have more urgent priorities elsewhere.

With the threats facing Britain growing and becoming more complicated, Lord Harris said households need to be prepared to cope without essential services during a major emergency, when help may not be immediately available.