5th October 2026
Britain is being encouraged to prepare for emergencies.
The advice is sensible. Keep some essential supplies at home. Have a torch, batteries, some water and food that does not depend on electricity or refrigeration.
But there is a question that perhaps deserves much more attention.
What if people simply cannot afford to keep extra food in the house?
The Government's own 2026 survey of more than 10,000 people provides an important clue.
Nearly three in ten people, 29%, said that not having enough money prevented them from taking further steps to prepare for an emergency. A further 18% said they did not have enough space to store supplies.
That is rather different from the image sometimes presented of emergency preparation being simply a matter of buying a few extra tins and putting them in a cupboard.
For many households, there may not be a cupboard with spare capacity.
The three-day cupboard
The Government survey found that 60% of respondents said they had non-perishable food that did not require cooking which would last their household approximately three days.
That sounds reasonably reassuring until you look at the other side of the figure.
It means four in ten households did not say they had that amount of readily usable food.
And the distinction between food that can be stored and food that can actually be eaten during an emergency matters.
A bag of dried pasta might last for months, but if the electricity is off and the cooker cannot be used, it is not much use unless you have another way of cooking it.
The same applies to rice, dried beans and many other apparently suitable emergency foods.
The Government's own emergency advice recognises this problem. During a prolonged power cut, people are advised to take stock of the food they already have, eat refrigerated and frozen food first and preserve longer-life cupboard food for later.
Food security starts with being able to buy food
There is another issue here.
For a household living from one weekly or monthly pay packet to the next, buying extra food means spending money today on something that might not be needed for weeks or months.
That is not necessarily possible.
It is very different for someone who has enough income to buy several months' worth of tins, flour, coffee, toilet rolls and other essentials when prices are favourable.
For someone on a tight budget, the calculation may be much simpler:
If I have £20 left until payday, I cannot spend £20 building an emergency cupboard.
This is why preparedness advice needs to be realistic about household finances.
Telling people to keep more supplies at home is reasonable.
But it should not become another situation where those who can afford to prepare are considered responsible citizens while those who cannot are somehow failing to prepare properly.
The Government's figures are revealing
The 2026 survey found that half of respondents felt their household was only slightly prepared or not prepared at all for an emergency.
More importantly, when asked to consider a power cut affecting gas and water as well, 25% thought they could meet their basic needs for only one day or less. Another 41% thought they could manage for two or three days. Only 12% thought they could manage for six days or more.
That tells us something important.
Britain may have considerably more resilience at the national level than many individual households have at home.
If supermarkets are operating, electricity is available and deliveries continue, most of us do not need large food reserves.
But if there is a major disruption to electricity, transport, communications or payments, the household cupboard suddenly becomes much more important.
Perhaps we should stop thinking about "stockpiling"
The word stockpiling can make emergency preparation sound rather dramatic.
For most households, it does not need to mean filling a garage with food.
A better approach might simply be to build a small rotating reserve.
Buy things that the household already eats and use them normally, replacing them when they are consumed.
A couple of tins of soup, baked beans, tomatoes, vegetables or fish can gradually become a useful reserve without creating a large additional bill.
Packets of porridge oats, cereal, crackers, long-life milk and other foods that do not require refrigeration can serve the same purpose.
The important thing is that the food should be something the household would eat anyway.
There is little point spending money on emergency food that eventually ends up in the bin.
Interestingly, 25% of people in the Government survey said they were reluctant to prepare because they did not want products to go out of date and have to be thrown away.
That is another reason why rotation rather than stockpiling makes sense.
And water may be an even bigger problem
Food is only part of the equation.
The Government's survey found that 35% of respondents had less than one litre of bottled drinking water at home. Based on an allowance of three litres per person per day, 82% were estimated to have less than one day's supply of bottled water for their household.
That is a striking figure.
Of course, bottled water is not the only possible source of emergency drinking water. Most households normally have water coming directly from the mains.
But a widespread power or infrastructure failure could affect pumping and water treatment, which is why emergency planning considers water alongside food.
This is not an argument for panic buying
There is an important distinction between being prepared and being frightened.
Nobody needs to rush out and empty supermarket shelves.
Indeed, panic buying could make a difficult situation worse.
The sensible approach is much less dramatic.
Keep some food that can be eaten without cooking.
Keep a little extra water where practical.
Have a torch and spare batteries or another reliable light source.
Keep essential medicines supplied.
Think about how you would manage if your electricity, water, internet and card payments were unavailable for a few days.
And gradually build up supplies as part of normal shopping rather than treating preparedness as a special shopping expedition.
But there is a bigger question for government
If 29% of people say lack of money prevents them from preparing, then household preparedness cannot be treated entirely as an individual responsibility.
There is a national resilience issue here.
A country is not particularly resilient if some households can comfortably store weeks of supplies while others have to decide whether they can afford enough food to get through to payday.
That does not mean government should start handing out emergency food boxes to every household.
It does mean that emergency planning needs to recognise the financial reality facing millions of people.
The resilience of Britain's food system depends on supermarkets, transport networks, fuel supplies, electricity, water, communications and payments continuing to work.
But ultimately that system reaches its final point at the kitchen cupboard.
Perhaps the best emergency reserve is simply a normal well-managed cupboard
There is a lesson here that does not require people to become "preppers".
If you normally buy food that keeps well, use it and replace it, you gradually create a small buffer without necessarily spending much more.
It might only amount to a few extra meals.
But if the shops closed for several days, the electricity went off or deliveries were disrupted, those few meals could suddenly become rather valuable.
And for households that genuinely cannot afford even that, the answer cannot simply be: "You should have prepared better."
Emergency resilience is partly about what individuals can do.
But it is also about whether the country has built systems capable of supporting people when normal life temporarily stops working.
That is perhaps the more important question Britain should be asking.