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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?

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?

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 exposed. The priority services register can work well only if it is accurate, so what more can the Minister do to ensure that it is kept up to date? Can he say specifically what co-ordination is in place with the utility companies, so that information can be shared about their lists of vulnerable customers? It is not just weather or climate change that we need to be prepared for; the number of nationally significant cyber-threats has doubled in the last year. The Liberal Democrats have called for a digital sovereignty strategy to ensure that critical national functions are powered by technology that the UK can control. Can the Minister update us on any progress being made on digital sovereignty?

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.

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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 is not updated when people move out and it ends up with so many people on it that delivery becomes unsustainable. Will the Minister look at those issues?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, pursuant to the Answer of 23 October 2026 to Question 35233 on Road Works: Utilities, what estimate her Department has made of the number of occasions on which the same section of highway has been excavated by

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment her Department has made of the need for a child health workforce strategy, in the context of the recommendations in the Health and Social Care Committee’s Fifth Report of Session 20

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what steps her Department has taken to monitor compliance by executive agencies and arm's-length bodies with the rules on purchasing Government-branded merchandise; and whether her Department holds information o

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the care and discharge planning provided to Mr Ravi Mehta by NHS South East London Integrated Care Board; and what steps they are taking to ensure that, since September 2025, individuals wh

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what amount proportion of the increase in the National Insurance bill in 2025 was due to (a) increases in Civil Service salaries and (b) increases in the rate of National Insurance for employers.

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what post-incident review framework is triggered when an incident impacts multiple critical national infrastructure sectors simultaneously.

I am grateful to the Foreign Secretary for those remarks, but with Russian-linked interference operations continuing to target democratic elections across Europe, does he feel that the current arrangements are sufficient? He will know that the European democracy shield is developing new structures to co-ordinate action against foreign interference and disinformation, so what discussions has he had with our European partners about ensuring that the UK is fully involved in those efforts, including the proposed European centre for democratic resilience, so that we can better identify and respond to Russian attempts to undermine democratic elections across Europe?