The government has finally caught up with us on stockpiling. Almost.

Slightly Anxious

Oct 26

3 min read

A woman in a cosy British kitchen holding a mug of tea and checking her phone, with an open cupboard of stocked tins behind her and rain visible through the window

Author: Slightly Anxious Date: 26th October 2026 Time to read: 4 minutes

Slightly Anxious is here to help you turn any crisis into a manageable adventure — for you and everyone you care about.

The Cabinet Office launched its new Be Ready campaign on the twenty-second of October, encouraging every household in the country to keep three days' worth of supplies in case of an emergency. We have been saying seven for over a year. Here is why that is not a contradiction, what the campaign actually asks you to do, and why most of it costs nothing at all.

Be Ready is a checklist, not a slogan, and most of it is free

The campaign's headline ask is a simple one: three days of food, water and the basics, organised so you are not caught out by a power cut, a flood or a burst water main. It brings England, Wales and Northern Ireland into line with the three-day standard already recommended in France, Ireland and the Netherlands. The business end of it, though, is less about tins and more about admin. Signing up to your energy or water supplier's Priority Services Register takes about five minutes and means you are flagged for extra support and advance warning if your area is affected by an outage. It is free, and most people who are entitled to it have never signed up.

Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister fronting the campaign, put it in suitably measured terms: being ready is “common sense, not catastrophising.” Laura Scott of the British Red Cross, who helped shape the guidance, made a similar point: this is about ordinary resilience, not bunker-building.

Three days, seven days, and why we are not changing our number

We get asked about this a lot, so let's deal with it plainly. The government's three-day figure is a floor, not a ceiling. It is the minimum that gets you through the overwhelming majority of short, sharp disruptions: a storm-felled power line, a burst main, a night stranded by snow. Our seven-day standard exists because some of the things that knock out power or water in this country, our own winter storms chief among them, do not always resolve in three days. NESO's own Winter Outlook for this year puts the margin on the electricity grid at just under ten percent above peak demand, and the operator says plainly it is not forecasting blackouts, which is a useful corrective to some of the more excitable headlines doing the rounds. None of that is a reason to stock less. Seven days is still the safer, saner number for a household that would rather not find out the hard way which kind of week it is having. Think of the government's three days as the entry ticket and our seven as what you actually want in the cupboard!

The Prime Minister's own emergency cupboard: beans, soup, and Twiglets

Some light relief from the campaign's launch week: Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, was asked on the twenty-third of October what was actually in his own emergency cupboard. His answer, beans, soup, and a box of Twiglets, is about as reassuringly unglamorous an inventory as you could hope for, and honestly, it's exactly the sort of grab bag we'd sign off on ourselves! No freeze-dried rations, no generator, just the sort of thing that is already in most kitchens. That is rather the point of the whole campaign: readiness that looks like a slightly fuller shopping list, not a lifestyle change.

The five-minute task almost nobody has done yet

If you take one thing from this campaign, make it the Priority Services Register. It is run by your energy network operator and your water company, it is free, and it means that if the power or water does go off, you are on the list to be told first and helped first, particularly if anyone in the household is older, disabled, or medically dependent on power. Most people have genuinely never heard of it. Five minutes now, done.

What it adds up to

The government's three-day standard and our own seven-day one are not competing claims, they are the same advice at two different levels of caution. Sign up to the Priority Services Register this week; it is free and five minutes. Then, if you have not already, have a look at 'Slightly Anxious says Get a Grab Bag' for the kit, and 'Kitchen in a crisis' for making your cupboard do double duty, emergency and otherwise. Three days covers the government's floor. Seven days is still ours!

Remember, keep calm and visit us here.