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Strengthening Community Resilience

27 October 2026 · Hansard transcript

Questions

• NOT A QUESTION Esther McVey

  Dyb, dyb, dyb!

• NOT A QUESTION Mark Pritchard

  Be prepared.

• AWAITING REVIEW Charlie Dewhirst

  I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement, and join him in sending my condolences to the families of the two men who lost their lives in the storms over the weekend. We welcome measures to address the resilience gap—a process that started under the previous Government, as the Minister said. I am a little surprised that the Housing Secretary’s suggestion of stockpiling sauvignon blanc has not been taken on board by the Minister, but it is absolutely right that the Government tell people to be prepared for adversity. However, I have a number of questions that I hope he will be able to address this afternoon. First, the Government’s Be Ready campaign website lists 18 hazards, ranging from terrorism and adverse weather to animal and plant health and fires in the home. Which of those 18 hazards do the Government consider to be the highest risk, and have there been any recent changes to risk assessments that led to the launch of this campaign? Secondly, how do the Government plan to reach people who are digitally excluded, and will they be distributing printed resources? Not only are such resources vital for those who are digitally excluded, they…

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• AMBER (66/100) Matt Western

  I commend my right hon. Friend and the Government for starting this national conversation. Given the extreme heat during the summer, the storms that have ravaged our communities in recent days and the issues involving rogue states attacking our infrastructure, there was clearly a real need for that conversation to start. As my right hon. Friend will know, my Committee’s inquiry on societal resilience is under way. Along with, I am sure, all other Members, I welcomed what my right hon. Friend said about the three-year programme, but will he commit to giving the House regular updates on the roles of local resilience forums, individuals and businesses in ensuring wider societal resilience?

• AMBER (38/100) DEFERRED Lisa Smart

  I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement. Let me place on record our thanks to the emergency services, volunteers and communities who respond to civil emergencies, be they storms, floods or wildfires. I welcome the announcement of the Be Ready campaign, and agree that every household that can be ready to look after itself should be ready to do so, for at least three days. During the first covid lockdown, I raised an eyebrow when my other half stockpiled enough bottled water to keep us going for weeks, but today he has been proved right, and I fear that I will never hear the end of it. The Security Minister rightly mentioned the importance of volunteers. I wonder if he has spoken to our Finnish allies, for example, to learn from their experience of establishing a formal civil volunteer reserve. Its members would receive non-military training, and could be called on in an emergency, just as community first responders can attend medical emergencies. As the Minister said, not everyone can stock up for three days. People relying on food banks, older people and people with mobility difficulties are often the least able to prepare and the most…

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• RED (23/100) Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi

  I thank the Security Minister for his statement on this vital topic, and welcome the much-delayed start to the national conversation. It is widely acknowledged that, in the event of conflict, military effectiveness is reliant on civilian systems being able to function under attack, be it physical or cyber-attack, and that relies on us taking a whole-of-society approach. Why is the forthcoming national exercise, Albiston Shadow, classified, thereby excluding those from outside Government? If we accept that resilience is a whole-of-society endeavour, why are the Government not engaging more widely with industry, councils, civil society and Members of this House, so that we can properly stress-test the planning? What information-sharing mechanisms have been established to ensure that key individuals without the necessary security clearance are included in the event of crisis or conflict?

• AMBER (57/100) Sir Edward Leigh

  In the early 1980s, along with other enthusiasts, I set up the National Council for Civil Defence, and worked with Willie Whitelaw. We achieved a major milestone in the form of the Civil Protection in Peacetime Act 1986. The NCCD was taken over by the local government office as a serious organisation. When the cold war ended, the whole civil defence effort atrophied, because there was considered to be no threat. We now live in a very different world, so will the Minister make an attempt to improve our entire civil defence structure? There was a leaflet issued by the then Conservative Government called “Protect and Survive”. I know a war is very unlikely, but it is best to be prepared.

• AMBER (40/100) John Slinger 33% vibes

  I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. Will he join me in praising Ben Brook, the chief fire officer in Warwickshire, and his firefighting and administrative teams for their brave efforts this summer? In July, there were 771 incidents, which is the highest number on record—double the rate in July 2021. Can my right hon. Friend confirm that the Government will do all they can to provide the fire service in Warwickshire with the resources it needs, and will offer help with reaching out to the public about the parts of his statement to do with their involvement in resilience?

• AMBER (38/100) Sir Julian Lewis

  If rule No. 1, as far as resilience is concerned, is “be prepared”, does the Minister agree that rule No. 2 should be “have a reliable back-up system”? In that connection, does he share my concern that both in the field of telephony and in the field of banking, back-up systems do not seem to exist? In particular, were the Government consulted before British Telecom decided not only to move to an internet-based telephone system, but to dismantle the copper wire system, which could have given us useful resilience in an emergency?

• AMBER (57/100) Dame Nia Griffith

  Tinned food is key to being prepared for an emergency, as it can be eaten when there is no power to cook it. Does the Minister recognise that Tata’s Trostre steelworks, in my constituency of Llanelli, which makes the tin plate used by big-name manufacturers to can their products, is of strategic importance to our national resilience? Will he stress to his ministerial colleagues the absolute necessity of ensuring that conditions, such as energy prices, are competitive, so that we can secure a viable future for tin-plate production in Llanelli?

• RED (12/100) DEFERRED Ben Obese-Jecty

  Our subsea infrastructure is incredibly important; we know from recent reports that the Russians have been sniffing around it in their GUGI submarines, and that Russian trawlers have been investigating our undersea infrastructure. I am very concerned that we have only one UK-based and UK-flagged repair ship, the CS Sovereign, which is due to go out of service in 2030. Six months ago, I asked the former Department for Science, Innovation and Technology what it was doing to investigate replacing that capability. Could the Minister give us assurance about the Government’s plans to ensure that we have UK-based and UK-flagged repair capability for our subsea infrastructure?

• AMBER (35/100) Rachel Taylor

  Storms can strike anywhere at any time, as I found out last week. In many of our communities, neighbours and volunteers step in at critical times. In North Warwickshire and Bedworth, groups such as the Fillongley Flood Group step in to keep homes safe. What more can the Government do to ensure that community groups can help make sure that all vulnerable people are ready?

• AMBER (30/100) Freddie van Mierlo

  In my constituency of Henley and Thame, Greener Henley has already sprung into action and is seeking community champions to organise street by street. What action will the Government take to support community organisations to improve resilience not just on a household basis, but at street level?

• AMBER (27/100) Mary Creagh

  Madam Deputy Speaker, you and I spent many hours in meetings managing the disastrous fallout from South East Water’s outages in Tunbridge Wells and its surroundings. I would like to put on record my thanks to you for your role—and to those around the House for their role—as a trusted message bearer to the people caught up in those outages. One of the lessons I took from that was the need for people at the start of their life or at the end of their life to be properly looked after. What can my right hon. and gallant Friend do to make sure that local authorities, water companies and energy companies are working with local nurseries and, critically, acute NHS services so that they know who has just left hospital, who is at the end of life and who is under five in order to put them proactively on the priority services register?

• AMBER (32/100) Sir Gavin Williamson

  We all know that at points of emergency, such as power outages and so many other things, mobile networks are incredibly important. The villages of Huntington and Hatherton have virtually no signal at all. With the withdrawal of the shared rural network, which provides funding for rural communities to get better mobile services, what should such villages do to ensure that they have access to the mobile networks that are so important at critical times?

• RED (5/100) Mark Sewards

  I welcome the Minister’s statement. He will know very well that the “Protecting What Matters” strategy, which was announced to the House earlier this year, had some excellent proposals to strengthen community resilience. Will he update the House about progress on that strategy, and say exactly which proposals we have made progress on to date?

• RED (12/100) DEFERRED Mr Alistair Carmichael

  Laying in three days’ supplies in the Northern Isles is what we do if we are confident that we are having a mild winter. Just four years ago, parts of Shetland were without electricity for six days, so resilience looks different in different parts of the country. To take the Minister back to his answer to the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty), the Government recently launched a consultation on critical undersea infrastructure, security and resilience, in which they seemed to see the answer as one of regulation and legislation. As the hon. Gentleman told the Minister, we need the capacity to effect repairs to undersea cables, and to do so without long delays, as currently occur. Will he take away that need and the experience of my constituents in recent years, who have suffered a number of digital outages as a consequence?

• AMBER (35/100) Helena Dollimore

  I want to raise the issue of water outages, which I know you have also been working on in Sussex, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have previously lobbied the Minister about upgrading how we see the risk of a water outage in the national risk register, and I was pleased to see it upgraded from the lowest form to the highest form of risk in the most recent register. However, I want to flag some issues, particularly with the priority services register, that we have encountered during outages in Hastings. The first issue relates to blocks of flats with multiple residents but one bill payer, such as a management company, which is particularly common in sheltered accommodation. Southern Water has told me: “Across the water industry…arrangements are designed around identified account holders and bill-paying customers. In centrally billed or bulk-metered properties, such as some blocks of flats, water companies typically have no direct relationship with individual residents and do not hold information about…personal circumstances. This creates a recognised industry challenge”. We really need to look at that in relation to resilience. Secondly, I am aware that the risk register is not updated in line with the electoral register, so the register…

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• RED (22/100) Mark Pritchard

  The Security Minister and Cabinet Office Minister knows that I have a huge amount of time for him, but I want to slightly break the consensus that has mostly held in the Chamber today. I think the Government’s communications—mass public communications—are confused on this issue. We are being asked by senior Ministers to stock up on corned beef, water and whatever, because of storms. Well—breaking news—there have been many storms over the last 80 years in Shropshire, and indeed across the country, and we have never been given this advice before. If this is about war preparedness and being on a war footing, as the Defence Secretary has suggested we should all be, I think the Government should just come clean and treat the British public with a little bit more respect. At the beginning of the Ukrainian war, defence intelligence was signed off by the excellent then Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, and shared with the British public, so that they came along with the Ministry of Defence and the Government. I think that the Security Minister needs to look at that as a good example.

• AMBER (42/100) Graeme Downie

  Just a few weeks ago, I hosted an event in Parliament with ambassadors from Denmark, Norway, Estonia and Finland on this exact topic. There were two common themes in the plans they are implementing. One was building public trust, and hopefully what we are seeing today in the national conversation is part of that. The second was the need to engage with businesses—and, indeed, the benefits of doing so—to inform employees and potentially use them as a resource, and to say that they could be the targets of something like a cyber-attack but also part of the response. Will the Minister confirm that he will speak to those allies specifically about the importance of engaging businesses, and that that point will be considered?

• RED (5/100) Pete Wishart

  The area I represent has the biggest river system in the UK and some of the most inclement weather in the UK, so my constituents and I are fully familiar with being prepared and being ready for what could possibly come. What I struggle with a little bit is the other stuff in the statement. I am baffled by the lumping together of storm readiness and other undefined threats that cannot be properly outlined in name. Does the Minister not agree that storms and weather events are critical known stand-alone threats, and that there should be distinct and separate strategies for them? Lumping them together with national security, subsea cables and cyber-threats is confusing and perhaps even unhelpful to people who just want to be prepared.

• AMBER (62/100) Cat Eccles 50% vibes

  I thank the Minister for his statement and I welcome the Be Ready announcement. I have friends in Valencia who were impacted by the devastating flash floods in 2024. Spain and many other countries have long provided resilience and emergency preparedness advice to their citizens. Thankfully, my friends Eva and Pablo only lost their cars in the floods, but that culture of resilience meant that they had essentials at hand, and could help neighbours and vulnerable people as part of the community effort alongside the emergency services and regional authorities. With extreme weather threats now a reality here in the UK—as we saw this weekend—does he agree that it is right for us to adopt that approach to resilience, and that it is about everyone playing an active part in preparedness and in their communities?

• AMBER (30/100) Stuart Anderson

  In rural South Shropshire we face flooding and power cuts every year, so I welcome this campaign. However, I do not believe it has landed as the Government intended, because the strategic defence review set out a whole-of-society approach and a national conversation about the threats we face to our resilience. We have talked about the Finnish model. The Finns clearly know the threats through proximity. I believe that to get the public on side, we have to clearly set out the threats to critical national infrastructure that could close the internet down for several weeks or lead to power outages and so on. Does the Minister agree that taking that approach will help the country to prepare better?

• RED (14/100) Ms Abena Oppong-Asare

  I welcome the statement and I support the Be Ready campaign. The Committee heard from the fire and rescue service, which is very much in support of the whole society resilience approach. A constant theme was the need for clarity on the role that the Government would like the fire and rescue service to play in this space. Essentially, when looking at the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, I urge the Minister to think about the role that the fire and rescue service could play and to make sure it is part of the process.

• RED (20/100) Adam Dance

  Flooding in Somerset is a huge issue. One of the care homes in my constituency flooded last year within seconds. Yes, the Government have given Somerset a lot more money towards tackling flooding, but that does not go far enough. What else can the Government do to support rural Somerset in being ready for flooding this year?

• RED (10/100) Jayne Kirkham

  As a Cornish MP, I can tell the House that we had 18,000 off-grid again this weekend with Storm Austen. We all worked together closely during Storm Goretti, and I want to mention Cormac, our farmers, the National Grid and our parish councils. National guidance was missing during Storm Goretti. It is really important that we now have it and that we have a locally led response, with parish emergency plans in place. Other countries have been doing this for years and I am really pleased that this Government have finally brought it in and have launched the campaign. One issue we will always have, though, is comms. We do not have copper wire any more. Perhaps internet and mobile phone providers should be category 2 responders under the Civil Contingencies Act. I wonder if the Minister could comment on that.

• RED (20/100) DEFERRED Greg Smith

  In any emergency, communication is key. In answering the question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge (Sir Gavin Williamson) earlier, the Minister talked about restoring mobile services if they had been damaged in a storm, for example. But that rather misses the point for the villages that my right hon. Friend mentioned and the villages in my constituency, such as Cuddington and Bryants Bottom, that have no mobile signal right now. Through this resilience work, what more can the right hon. Gentleman do, with other Government Departments, to speed up delivery of the shared rural network and get those rural notspots the connectivity they need and deserve?

• AMBER (27/100) Alex Ballinger

  I welcome the Government’s serious approach to civil preparedness. I want to push back slightly against some Members on the Opposition Benches who implied that there was a difference between being prepared for natural disasters and for some of the hybrid attacks we are seeing across Europe. In recent months we have seen attacks against energy infrastructure, railways and supply chains; the same preparations will help folk in the UK be prepared for both those attacks and natural disasters. I was in the Finnish embassy a few days ago to talk about that issue. As other colleagues have mentioned, in Finland they talk about businesses working together with the voluntary sector and public bodies. Will the Minister say more about how we are learning from countries such as Finland on the whole of society working together?

• AMBER (28/100) Dr Al Pinkerton

  The United Kingdom is arguably already in a state of hybrid war against our adversaries. Does the Minister anticipate a cognitive component to this strategy designed to strengthen community resilience, not least to make it resilient against the kind of active disinformation that is likely to seek to undermine it? In that spirit, how will the strategy dovetail with the national centre for information defence?

• RED (16/100) Torcuil Crichton

  I pay tribute to the men and women of Scottish and Southern Electricity, who are out there right now reconnecting the homes in the Western Isles that lost power over the weekend due to the storms. Resilience is in-built on the islands, but as other Members have pointed out, we have major problems with connectivity because of the move from analogue to digital phonelines, which means that when the power goes out, people do not have the phone or the internet—and they often do not have a mobile signal either. BT and Openreach’s response—to give powerpacks to vulnerable customers who ask for them—is simply not adequate, and mobile phone providers do not have the means to maintain their signal during storms. Will the Minister call in those companies and get them to up their digital game and ensure that there is digital resilience—not just in the places that are easy, but on the edge, where people are vulnerable, isolated from their neighbours, and where the ambulance is an hour away?

• AMBER (30/100) David Reed

  The Minister will know how much I want the Government’s Be Ready campaign to succeed—I have shared my views with him at length—because the threats are real and increasing. But if the Government are going to ask people to stock up on tinned food and wind-up radios, they must be honest when we are attacked. The shadow Minister raised the case of Jaguar Land Rover, and the fact that the former Armed Forces Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns), said at the weekend that the incident was state sponsored. That is incredibly serious, so can the Minister use this opportunity to tell the House which state was responsible?

• AMBER (30/100) Fred Thomas

  I welcome the Government’s Be Ready campaign, which I will champion in my patch in Plymouth. I thank the Minister for his continued endeavours, over the last several years, to knot together different bits of Government agenda and Departments to grow greater resilience. Can he assure the House that this will encompass AI and emerging technologies as well, and can he give us a sense of what new endeavours are being stood up, given the massive acceleration of the threat to our national resilience in that space?

• RED (18/100) Adrian Ramsay

  The Minister is right to highlight the growing risk of the loss of services and utilities in emergencies. Preparedness needs to be driven at a national level, but much of it needs to be delivered at a local level. Will the Minister tell us how he is ensuring that local resilience forums are adequately funded, and can he assure us that every part of the UK has got a local resilience plan in place?

• RED (20/100) Perran Moon

  The Cornish peninsula is on the frontline of our Atlantic storms—and we are getting more storms. In January, Cornwall was smashed by Storm Goretti, as the Minister knows. Cornish MPs then met Ministers and civil servants to discuss the Cornish infrastructure issues that were exposed. On Thursday, 18,000 Cornish properties were left without power after the first storm of the season. Can the Minister advise, following those discussions, specifically on what the Government changed in Cornwall’s infrastructure to improve our resilience in the nine months between 6 January and 22 October? The time for talk is over.

• GREEN (80/100) Rachel Gilmour

  The Government are right to talk about national resilience and preparedness—about where we keep our torches, among other things. I do not wish to catastrophise, but national resilience starts with something fundamental: producing food. That means supporting our farmers. Does the Minister agree that if food is not being produced, this country will quickly discover how fragile resilience really is?

• AMBER (58/100) Markus Campbell-Savours

  Echoing concerns raised by Members across the House, I ask the Minister to imagine an elderly constituent living alone in an isolated Lake district valley where copper phonelines have been replaced with fibre; a storm takes out the power to their router in the night, and by the time that they wake, the modest battery back-up has failed, as has the mobile mast. Does the Minister share my concerns that they would have no way to raise an alarm in an emergency, and agree that we need a new technological solution to protect the elderly?

• AMBER (35/100) Helen Maguire

  I very much welcome the Be Ready campaign today. This Government have been pushing for devolved responsibilities, particularly at the mayoral level, but in his statement today, the Minister made no mention of the vital role that local authorities can play. Could the Minister expand on the role of local authorities in community resilience and preparedness?

• GREEN (78/100) Peter Swallow

  The Minister will know from our many conversations my concerns around the threats we face from foreign states and terrorism. He will also be aware that Bracknell Forest, which is 33% trees, is at particular risk of forest fires; many of my constituents are also seeing power cuts at the moment because of the storms. Will the Minister confirm to the House that the Government’s Be Ready campaign is about raising awareness, not alarm, of the full range of threats that we face to our community resilience, and empowering local people to have the tools at hand to address those concerns?

• RED (22/100) Claire Young

  Millions rely on daily medication to stay alive and healthy. We know the concern shortages cause; the NHS does not allow people to stockpile prescription medicines, and some require refrigeration. Will the NHS therefore now allow people to keep a small amount of spare medicine, and how will the Government ensure access to essential medications during widespread disruption to supplies, movement of goods or power?