The government’s new “Be Ready” campaign urges every household to lay in three days’ worth of food, water and medicine. But for millions across Britain, that guidance reads less like public safety advice and more like a privilege they cannot afford. From overcrowded flats in Tower Hamlets to GP surgeries in Lancashire, the response has laid bare a stark divide: resilience, it seems, is increasingly a luxury good.
The midwife who sees the gap up close
Keira Callaghan works on the frontline of maternal health in Tower Hamlets, one of London’s most deprived boroughs. She writes not as a policymaker but as a witness. The families she visits often share a single room in a house of multiple occupancy. Nine litres of water per person — the government’s baseline recommendation — simply has nowhere to go. Neither does three days’ worth of tinned food, torch batteries, or a wind-up radio.
“When families are already struggling with the cost of food, heating and everyday necessities, buying additional emergency provisions may also be financially impossible,” she says. Her proposal is practical: local councils should establish community stockpile hubs, accessible free of charge to those who need them. Preparedness, she argues, must be a public health measure, not a consumer choice.
It is a perspective grounded in clinical reality. The social determinants of health — housing, income, food security — do not pause during a crisis. They intensify. And any emergency planning that ignores them risks becoming an exercise in exclusion.
Prescription anxiety and the medication gap
Chris Rotheram’s letter cuts to a different, quieter crisis. He lives in Thornton-Cleveleys, Lancashire, and relies on a monthly repeat prescription for life-preserving medications. The system, as he experiences it, offers no buffer. His GP surgery will not issue a new prescription until a week before he runs out. The pharmacy then takes up to a week to dispense it. The result: his medication arrives, at best, just in time.
Localised shortages and dispensing errors have left him without essential drugs before. He lives with what he calls “prescription anxiety” — a monthly countdown that the government’s new advice to stockpile medication makes feel like a cruel joke.
“When the inevitable catastrophe strikes, I will find myself without my essential medication,” he writes. “And I doubt that 75 tins of beans and a packet of Twiglets will be much consolation.”
His experience is far from isolated. The British Medical Association has long warned that just-in-time prescribing, driven by cost-containment targets, leaves patients with zero resilience. For those on complex regimens — anticoagulants, immunosuppressants, insulin — a 72-hour gap is not an inconvenience. It is a medical emergency waiting to happen.
Sanitation: the missing chapter in official guidance
Peter Slessenger, writing from Reading, raises a question the glossy pamphlets avoid entirely. If mains water fails, toilets do not flush. Three litres of drinking water per person per day is the headline figure. But what about the effluent?
“We do not all have the luxury of a garden in which we can dig a hole,” he notes. “Some of us live in a block of flats, and dealing with three days’ worth of shit is something that needs planning.”
It is a blunt intervention, but a necessary one. In high-rise social housing, in basement flats, in homes without outdoor space, sanitation failure becomes a public health hazard within hours. Cholera, dysentery, norovirus — these are not historical curiosities. They are the predictable consequence of planning that stops at the kitchen tap.
The Cabinet Office’s guidance mentions “personal hygiene” in passing. It does not address waste disposal in multi-occupancy buildings. It does not consider the elderly or disabled who cannot carry waste down flights of stairs. It does not, in short, reflect the housing stock of 21st-century Britain.
A survival kit for the political class
Not every response was sombre. Keith Flett, from Tottenham, catalogues the emerging “Labour survival kit” with dry wit: Andy Burnham’s Twiglets, John Healey’s HP Sauce — “Harold Wilson’s gravy” — and, to complete the set, a flask of tea in the tradition of Tony Benn. Jane Kilsby, in Leicestershire, asks the practical follow-up: how exactly does one heat those tins of beans when the gas and electricity are both off?
Pete Bibby, in Sheffield, offers a cynic’s take: might the whole campaign be a pre-Budget stimulus disguised as civil defence? “Call me a cynic,” he writes, “but might the government’s call to stock up on emergency supplies have been an attempt to increase economic activity before the budget?”
Caroline Westgate, in Hexham, Northumberland, reaches further back. She recalls the 1980s “Protect and Survive” pamphlets — bucket of sand for a toilet, jigsaws for the children — and notes the cold comfort of history. Where a nuclear bunker once stood for officialdom, a McDonald’s now serves the public. “So, just keep calm and carry on,” she concludes.
Why it Matters
The “Be Ready” campaign was framed as common sense. The letters page reveals it as a stress test — and one that the UK’s social infrastructure is failing. When a midwife in Tower Hamlets tells you that emergency preparedness is a class issue, when a patient in Lancashire explains that the NHS prescribing system actively prevents resilience, when a flat-dweller in Reading points out that the government has forgotten how toilets work, the message is clear. A nation’s readiness is not measured by the tins in its cupboards, but by the safety net beneath its most vulnerable. If preparedness remains a private purchase, the next crisis will not be shared equally. It will be survived unequally.
