The Government Is About to Tell Every UK Household to Prepare — Here Is the Checklist, and What It Leaves Out

On 14 July 2026 the Cabinet Office published two documents that, taken together, mark a real shift in how the British state talks to its own citizens about emergencies. The first was the refreshed National Risk Register. The second was the UK Government Resilience Action Plan: 2026 Implementation Report, which commits the government to design and deliver a national resilience public engagement campaign, anchored in GOV.UK/Prepare, launching later this year. In plainer terms: sometime in the next few months, the government is going to start telling every household in the country to keep supplies at home. This article covers what was actually announced, what the official checklist says, and — more usefully — the specifics the official advice does not give you.

What Was Actually Announced

Two commitments matter. The Implementation Report says the government will publish new advice for households on preparing for disruption and emergencies, focusing on simple steps people can take to improve their resilience, supported by a multi-year campaign later this year. Note the word multi-year: this is not a single leaflet drop but a sustained programme, and it is explicitly aimed at at-risk audiences as well as the general public, with educational resources planned for schools and colleges. Everything routes through GOV.UK/Prepare, which now redirects to prepare.campaign.gov.uk. If you want to know what the campaign will say before it says it, that site is where to look — it is the anchor the whole thing is built on.

The Risk That Moved to the Top of the List

This is the part that deserves more attention than it got. The National Risk Register 2026 assesses water infrastructure failure — loss of drinking water — as one of the two most severe risks facing the United Kingdom, alongside a pandemic. Both are rated as potentially catastrophic in impact and high in likelihood. That is a striking pairing. Pandemic risk is something the country has spent six years thinking about. Losing the tap is not. Most British households have effectively zero stored water, because mains supply is one of those services that feels like a law of physics rather than a piece of infrastructure with pumps, treatment works and pressure zones that can fail. The government has now put it at the top of its own risk assessment. That is worth a Saturday afternoon of your time.

And the Risk Nobody Was Watching

The 2026 register also adds digital resilience failure as a new entry, reflecting lessons from incidents such as the CrowdStrike IT outage of July 2024, along with two new risks covering data infrastructure — one for a cyber attack, one for disruption — and a specific risk for a cyber attack on police systems. This category is worth understanding because it fails differently from a storm. Nothing is damaged, nobody is hurt, and yet card payments stop, booking systems go down, and the apps you would normally use to find out what is happening are the things that are broken. The practical implications are unglamorous: physical cash, phone numbers written on paper, and documents you can produce without logging into anything. Terrorist attacks in publicly accessible locations, meanwhile, remain in the register with the highest likelihood rating of five out of five, though a lower impact score than the infrastructure risks.

The Official Checklist: Five Free Things

Here is what the Prepare site currently tells households to do. Every item is free and none takes longer than a few minutes. One: find out if you are eligible to sign up to your gas, electricity and water supplier's Priority Services Register. Two: set a reminder in your phone or make a note on your calendar to check your smoke alarms at least once a month. Three: write down important phone numbers on paper, such as the number to report a power cut, which is 105. Four: talk to your children about emergencies and teach them how and when to call 999. Five: check your long term flood risk and sign up for flood and weather warnings. That is the government's baseline, and it is a sensible one. The Prepare site also sets out a kit list — torch, power bank, wind-up or battery radio, spare batteries, first aid kit, hand sanitiser and wet wipes, bottled water, non-perishable food, a tin opener, and baby and pet supplies where relevant.

The Priority Services Register Is the Best Thing on That List

If you do one item, do this one, because it is the highest-value and least-known entry on the government's own checklist. The Priority Services Register is a free scheme operated by energy and water suppliers and network operators for households who would be worst affected by a loss of supply: older people, households with young children, people with disabilities or chronic illness, anyone dependent on medical equipment that needs mains electricity, and anyone who would struggle to reach a bottled water station. Being on it means you get prioritised — advance notice of planned interruptions, welfare checks, and in a water outage, delivery of bottled water rather than a trip across town to collect it. You register separately with your electricity network operator, your gas supplier and your water company, and it takes about ten minutes in total. Eligibility is broader than most people assume, and it is worth doing on behalf of elderly relatives too.

Water: The Official Numbers, and the Failure Mode They Miss

Credit where it is due — this is the one place the official advice does commit to figures, and they are sound. Prepare cites the World Health Organisation minimum of 2.5 to 3 litres of drinking water per person per day for survival, and adds that 10 litres per person per day will make you more comfortable by also providing for basic cooking and hygiene needs, with more again for infant formula, medical devices and pets. Note what the lower figure is: a survival floor, not a target. For a household of two over three days the comfort figure works out at roughly 60 litres for all uses, which sounds enormous until you realise it is twelve five-litre bottles under the stairs. What the guidance does not address is the failure mode Britain actually experienced most recently. In Brixham in 2024 the taps kept running while the water was unsafe, and the boil water notice ran from 15 May to 8 July. Stored bottled water and a filter both help in that scenario, but so does simply knowing that a contamination event lasts weeks rather than days, and that boiling is the response. Water companies do have a statutory duty to provide an alternative supply, but standing up bottled water stations takes time and the queues are real.

What It Leaves Out: Food, With Numbers

The official guidance mentions long-life food and a tin opener. Here is the specific version. Target three days minimum as a floor and a week as a sensible goal, at roughly 2,000 calories per adult per day. Build it from things you already eat rather than specialist survival rations: tinned beans and pulses, tinned fish, tinned tomatoes, rice, pasta, oats, peanut butter, long-life milk, crackers, dried fruit and nuts. Choose items that need no cooking or only boiling water, because the scenario where you need this food is frequently the scenario where you have no power. Add a manual tin opener, and check you own one, because a great many kitchens now do not. The correct way to build this is not a single large shop but two or three extra items a week until the shelf is full, which spreads the cost to near-invisibility and means everything rotates through your normal cooking.

What It Leaves Out: Power, Light and the Radio Point

The item list behind the campaign names a torch with spare batteries and a wind-up or battery radio. Both are right, and the radio deserves explaining because it looks like the most old-fashioned thing on the list and is actually the most quietly clever. Broadcast radio is one-way: a transmitter with backup power reaching unlimited receivers, with no possibility of the congestion that takes mobile networks down in the first hour of any incident. When the mobile network is saturated or the local cell site has exhausted its battery, radio still works, and BBC local radio is the designated emergency broadcaster carrying instructions from local authorities. A wind-up unit removes the last dependency, which is the battery you meant to replace in 2023. Pair it with a power bank so your phone survives the outage, and keep a torch per person rather than one for the household — candles are a fire risk and a poor substitute.

What It Leaves Out: The Document Problem

The Prepare kit list covers torch, radio, batteries, water, food and first aid, but does not mention your paperwork — and the recovery phase of any emergency runs on it: insurance claims, proof of address to get back into a cordoned area, prescription details to get medication from an unfamiliar pharmacy, and identity documents to access anything at all. The workable rule is three copies of each — the original secured at home, a paper photocopy in a bag you would grab on the way out, and an encrypted digital copy on both a USB drive and cloud storage. The encryption matters: an unprotected folder of passport scans, bank details and birth certificates is an identity theft kit waiting to be lost. Add a written contact sheet, because every phone in your house will eventually be flat, and keep some cash in small notes, since a shop with no power cannot take a card or make change from a till it cannot open.

Emergency Alerts: This Already Happened in January

It is easy to treat all of this as hypothetical, so it is worth noting that the system has already been used in anger this year. The Implementation Report records that the Cabinet Office issued two emergency alerts to approximately 500,000 people across the Isles of Scilly and Cornwall on Thursday 8 January 2026 during that month's storms. Emergency Alerts broadcast to all compatible handsets in a targeted area at once, which is why they get through when the network is too congested for ordinary calls. Take two minutes to check the feature is switched on for every phone in your household, including older handsets used by children or elderly relatives, and make sure everyone knows what the alert sounds like so nobody assumes their phone is broken and silences it.

What To Actually Do This Week

In order of value for time spent. Tonight: register for the Priority Services Register with your electricity, gas and water providers, write 105 and your key numbers on a card for the kitchen drawer, check your smoke alarms, and confirm Emergency Alerts are enabled on every phone. This weekend: check your long term flood risk on GOV.UK and sign up for flood and weather warnings, then buy 60 litres of water for a household of two and put it somewhere out of the way. Over the next month: add two or three long-life food items to each weekly shop until you have a week's worth, buy a wind-up radio and a torch for each person, and photograph and encrypt your key documents. That is the whole programme. It costs under a hundred pounds spread across a month and puts you comfortably ahead of what the campaign will ask of you.

Why Bother Before the Campaign Lands

There is a practical reason to do this now rather than when the adverts start, and it is not about being ahead of the curve. Preparedness advice campaigns reliably produce demand spikes for exactly the items they recommend. When the government tells sixty-odd million people to buy bottled water, a wind-up radio and a torch, the sensible time to have bought those things was before. The same pattern has played out in every European country that has issued household preparedness guidance in recent years. Nothing on this list is scarce today, and most of it is cheap. It is worth adding that none of this is about expecting catastrophe. It is about the fact that a water main failure, a storm, or a data centre outage are all ordinary events that become genuinely difficult when a household has no buffer at all — and the state has now said so in writing.