Britons Stockpile Tinned Food and Power Banks After Government's Three-Day Emergency Advice

Dried food, bottled water, medicine stocks and charged power banks — the list sounds like preparation for a disaster movie. But in many British homes, such stockpiles are now a reality, as residents respond to official warnings about Russian 'state-sponsored terrorism' and the impact of the climate crisis.

The British government launched a campaign on Thursday advising people to set aside three days' worth of food and essential supplies to cope with a whole range of emergencies. Many had already begun preparing on their own, and the campaign has only accelerated the trend.

Lawrence Barratt, from Hythe in Hampshire, says he is adding a few extra tinned and dried foods to each weekly shop to build up a stockpile over time. His collection includes tinned beans, soups and chilli con carne, along with dried noodles, pot noodles and rice. He is choosing foods that can be cooked with bottled water, which he is also buying gradually, aiming to have enough for two people for three days.

Alongside food, Barratt has set aside a first aid kit, a battery-powered FM radio and a torch. He also keeps ready a portable power bank he has used for camping, which, he says, should provide enough electricity to charge phones, run the TV and even power a small fan heater.

Marco Camurri, from Greenwich in London, is doing much the same. He is collecting pasta, passata and stock cubes as well as tinned foods, bottled water and medicines — and toilet paper, he adds: 'We remember Covid.' The shortages of the pandemic years are clearly a formative lesson behind this generation's preparations.

Camurri says that, with relatives in continental Europe, his family could flee temporarily if the UK entered a war and there was a risk of direct attacks on London, or if extreme infrastructure failure put their jobs at risk. He has wood set aside at the back of his small garden in case they need to make a fire on the barbecue to boil water. Charged power banks, USB rechargeable flashlights, matches and lighters are also kept ready. Although petrol is expensive, the family tries to keep the car tank over half full — about 300 miles' worth.

While the government's public campaign began on Thursday, ministers have been making similar noises for several months, and that had already prompted some people to start preparing. Barratt says a combination of noticing the government stockpiling advice online and having lived through situations where it would have been useful led him to begin about a fortnight ago.

Barratt still remembers the frightening days just before and after the first lockdown in 2020, when shop shelves had been stripped of pasta, toilet rolls and tinned goods. He had put that period out of his mind, but the government's 'Be Ready' campaign website made him realise he would be completely unprepared for anything — and he decided he had better get started.

Camurri has been setting things aside for his family for much longer. They started a few months ago, when news about potential supply-chain disruption caused by El Niño began circulating. His reasoning is simple: the family eats everything they stockpile anyway, so it amounts to little more than one extra week of shopping for staples. They are now starting a spreadsheet with the expiry dates of all their 'Doomsday Stash' items, so they can eat and replace them before they go bad.

Jack Davenport, from North Shields on the River Tyne, also cites El Niño as his motivation for beginning to stockpile. But he says it is hard to judge the scale of the multiple threats facing the country — from El Niño and other climate-related disasters to Russian shadow threats and AI, as well as interest rate rises driven by energy insecurity. In his words, the country's physical and technological infrastructure is creaking and outdated.

Davenport believes the government's goal in highlighting this advice now is to reduce long-term panic by establishing that such events are a possibility — and that just because several generations in the country have not faced the hardship that was common before the war does not mean they never will.

Not everyone is convinced, however. Deirdre O'Sullivan, from Leicester, dismisses the guidance as 'daft advice' that takes her back to the 1970s, when people were instructed to hide under the table in the event of a nuclear attack. She did not have a table, she notes, but somehow made it through.

In O'Sullivan's view, in a real emergency the advice seems totally inadequate. If drinking water became dangerous, she would hope that could be anticipated more precisely, and word of an extreme food shortage would surely emerge over a much longer timeframe. The guidance, she says, looks like something devised to demonstrate that a policy exists, even if that policy is clearly useless. Despite such criticism, the growing number of residents quietly building their stockpiles suggests the preparations are not slowing down.