Keep ‘back-up batteries’! Stock up on ‘tinned meat’! Print off a ‘household emergency plan’!
This is the Prepare campaign, a single webpage that will magically prep Brits for wildfires, floods or nuclear war. A webpage riddled with mixed messaging, hypocrisy and information gaps.
The Food Dilemma
As the Prepare page states, a mainstay of prepping for an emergency is to stockpile water and non-perishable food items. When you think of such foods, some staples immediately come to mind: baked beans, cans of macaroni and spaghetti loops, packet soups, sacks of rice. These were the go-to items that flew off the shelves during the COVID pandemic, and would likely become scarce once more should catastrophe strike. But most of these foods still require cooking equipment, like a kettle or hob, to make them edible — cooking equipment that could become inoperable during a real emergency.
Unless you are a nutritionist, it’s difficult to know what foods to stockpile. A person can hardly survive Armageddon on a packet of crisps and a can of pineapple chunks. Telling people to stock up on tinned items is all well and good, but if you’re prepping all the wrong kinds of food, then what’s the point? Plus, without warning, supermarkets will never meet public demand for these so-called survival foods.
The Prepare Campaign also comes across as trite and tone-deaf when you consider the sorry state of our food sector. Currently, 1 in 8 households in the UK are plagued by food insecurity. This amounts to over 12 per cent of households that cannot meet basic nutritional needs, let alone be in a position to stockpile food for some future disaster. But even those who can afford to feed themselves adequately are feeling the squeeze. A survey from the Food Foundation found that 1 in 3 UK households (39 per cent) have noticed that food is less affordable now than it was a year ago. In short, prepping will hardly be at the forefront of their minds.
The affordability of food is a major issue, but so too is accessibility. Rural Britain is increasingly becoming a food desert, as many households lack a nearby supermarket or local corner shop that they can reach via public transport, let alone one that is within walking distance. And what about those who produce our food? Farming is one of the most insecure professions in the country. With extreme heat driving droughts and decimating crop yields, and ag-flation (the cost of fuel, feed and fertiliser) skyrocketing to 7.8 per cent largely as a result of ongoing blockades in the Strait of Hormuz, more British farms are going bust.
The ability to produce our own food is a pillar of self-sufficiency. Yet our performance in ten out of the eleven key commodities has plummeted since the nineties. Increasing reliance on imports, particularly for fresh produce like fruits and vegetables, is just one concern. The real issue is that ongoing disruptions to trade and rising inflation are forcing us to question whether our old ways are sustainable. Investment is required in farming as much as in defence. Indeed, the former is arguably a more pressing and immediate concern. Why? Because without significant government intervention, our food sector will only get worse. And if we cannot afford to feed ourselves, we can hardly hope to defend ourselves.
The Water Dilemma
Another major pitfall of the Prepare campaign is its vague advice on water consumption. ‘There is no standard figure for this as emergencies can vary in duration and people use different amounts,’ it reads.
Very helpful …
Most nations agree that it is standard prepping procedure to stockpile enough supplies to be self-sufficient for at least 72 hours. The UN advises that a person requires a minimum of 50 to 100 litres of water per day to meet all basic needs. Considering that the average household in the UK has 2.4 residents, that’s a lot of water bottles to store. Realistically, most of us don’t have the space to stockpile so much water. Should the taps run dry, a family of three would need to keep approximately 150 to 300 litres of water in storage just to see themselves through one day! Even if we assume that water could be rationed by half, that’s still a minimum of 75 litres of water per day for three people.
The government also advises that we should generally aim to reduce pressure on our water supplies by making simple lifestyle changes. Swapping baths for showers or turning off the tap when we brush our teeth helps reduce those cubic litres. But what hasn’t been mentioned is the mounting pressure from thirsty AI data centres. These centres, standing at almost 500 in the UK and with plans for a hundred more, consume an average of 6.6 million litres of drinking and abstracted water per day. That’s equivalent to the water usage of 20,000 average UK homes. That figure is set to rise to 19.8m litres (or the water usage of 60,000 homes) by 2030.
So, while citizens are told to stockpile drinking water and use their taps less following a summer of severe drought, the government approves the expansion of data centres that guzzle our water supplies. Data centres that, according to experts, do not have enough water to run. Yes, our investment in AI development is vital to the economy. But humans cannot survive without water for more than three to five days. So I ask, what’s the point of economic growth if we are not around to enjoy its benefits?
What Comes After?
This brings me to my final point: Resilience. Stockpiling is not a survival skill. Having an emergency grab bag by the door is the first step to increasing one’s preparedness. But we should also understand what comes after. Do people know how to evacuate from their homes calmly? Are citizens aware of the location of their nearest shelter? These information gaps could sow panic and cost lives. The most we get from the Prepare Campaign is, ‘Decide on a meeting point for situations where you might not be able to return home — this could be a community hub if you have one nearby.’ Such ambiguity hardly inspires confidence, particularly when you look at the responses of Nordic nations.
Sweden, for example, reissued its 32-page pamphlet, In Case of Crisis or War, back in 2024. Essential information is not on some obscure page of the government’s website but in a physical booklet sent out to five million homes, with a step-by-step guide to surviving a week without government infrastructure (up from the original 72 hours). This includes information on alert systems and how Swedes should respond when they hear one, details on the kinds of supplies they would require and instructions on how to tune into the public broadcaster. Meanwhile, Finland and Norway are revamping their Cold War shelters.
Many Brits are taking the Government’s warning seriously. The day after the official release of the Prepare Campaign, wind-up radios and torches sold out across the UK, while visitor numbers on Start Prepping UK rose twentyfold. But citizens require clear and practical advice from the government. And at the moment, we’re not getting it. When compared with other European nations, the UK Government’s piddly and ambiguous warning to ‘prepare’ is an embarrassing case of too little, too late.
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