Households told to keep three days of food and water in case of emergency

Every household in Britain is being urged to keep enough bottled water and food to last three days, in new government advice designed to help people cope with a storm, cyber-attack or other serious emergency.

The Be Ready campaign asks people to store supplies for 72 hours, amid growing concern in government about the effects of the climate crisis, the country's dependence on technology and threats from hostile states.

What to keep at home

The guidance says people should store three litres of drinking water per person per day, meaning nine litres each for three days, with more needed for cooking and washing. Households are also advised to keep blankets, some cash, a first aid kit, a torch with spare batteries and a wind-up FM radio.

Three days is considered a realistic and practical amount, and brings the UK into line with advice in France, Ireland and the Netherlands.

The security minister, Dan Jarvis, said that "those who can follow this advice should follow this advice". He described the measures as "simple steps to be ready for everyday emergencies" and part of a wider, community-based effort "to improve our resilience as a nation".

"State-sponsored terrorism"

The defence secretary, Wes Streeting, said Britain also needed to prepare for what he called "state-sponsored terrorism" by Russia or other hostile powers targeting everyday infrastructure.

"Terms like 'hybrid warfare' and 'grey zone threats' do not accurately capture or convey to the general public what I prefer to describe as state-sponsored terrorism," he said. "In the face of those threats, which are not hypothetical but real, and not somewhere else but increasingly here, we have to step up and take seriously our national resilience as well as our national defence."

He said people should think about how they would cope with cyber-attacks that could knock out payment systems or cause supply chains to collapse. Mr Streeting was speaking at a new tank gun barrel factory in Telford, owned by the German manufacturer Rheinmetall.

Storms and outages

Ministers timed the campaign to launch before the winter storm season, after a run of severe storms in recent years. Tens of thousands of homes in the Midlands, the south-west and Wales lost power after Storm Goretti struck in January, with winds of nearly 100mph. There is also concern that a "super El Niño" could make 2027 the hottest year on record, disrupting weather patterns, food supplies and energy systems.

The advice came on the day that 32 UK government websites were taken offline as a precaution after the discovery of a security flaw in the PHP programming language, and the National Cyber Security Centre sent out 50,000 alerts to affected organisations.

Britain has rarely run public information campaigns of this kind, with governments of both parties wary of being accused of scaremongering. The best known, Protect and Survive in 1980, advised people how to build a fallout shelter at home and keep enough food for 14 days in the event of a nuclear war.

The new advice arrived the day before Storm Austen was due to reach the UK, bringing gusts of up to 70mph to the south-west and warnings of power cuts across a wide area, including Birmingham.