Burnham Urges Households to Keep Three Days of Food and Water
The prime minister has encouraged people to keep tinned food and bottled water sufficient for three days of disruption, as a government preparedness campaign launched this week. He said it was “not about panic buying”. The official guidance is framed entirely on severe weather and names no other threat.
It is worth being precise about what this is, because the framing has run ahead of the document. The campaign is the first stage of a three-year programme, it rebrands advice the government has published since May 2024, much of which has not changed, and its headline step is free: signing up to the priority services register. It matches the three-day standard used in France, Ireland and the Netherlands, and more than 500 organisations have agreed to repeat the message. The security minister’s stated rationale is that households who prepare “reduce pressure on emergency services, helping them prioritise people who need more support”. Asked whether this amounted to scaremongering, the defence secretary said the government wanted people “alert but not alarmed” and that there was no “specific thing we’ve got in mind”. The Conservative leader’s objection was about priorities rather than the advice: “Families can stock up but what’s going on with defence, the cyber attacks, the hybrid warfare?” A disaster-planning academic who says she has lobbied for such a campaign for sixteen years called Britain “light years” behind Scandinavia, while suspecting the advice was hurried out ahead of the storm.