The government's about to tell you to get ready. We got there first.
Author: Slightly Anxious Date: 1st September 2026 Time to read: 10 minutes
Slightly Anxious is here to help you turn any crisis into a manageable adventure — for you and everyone you care about.
The government is about to spend a great deal of money teaching you something Slightly Anxious has been saying for months, and for once we are delighted about it. When a Cabinet Office minister stands up and says, calmly and without a hint of panic, that keeping tinned food, bottled water, a torch, spare batteries, a wind-up radio and basic first aid supplies in the house is simply sensible, millions of people who have never given any of this a moment's thought will finally listen to someone other than us. That is not something we take for granted.
Multiple outlets reported in late August that ministers are preparing a public information campaign built around GOV.UK/Prepare, encouraging households to keep basic supplies at home in case of extreme weather, cyberattacks or disruption from hostile states. The underlying commitment is real: the government's own Resilience Action Plan implementation report, published on 14th July 2026, confirms that a national resilience public engagement campaign is coming later this year. At the time of writing, the detailed campaign material hasn't actually gone live. Treat any specific launch date as fluid, and check GOV.UK/Prepare directly before you plan anything around it.
We think this is good news, obviously we do, we sell the torches and the water containers! But there's a difference between a government leaflet telling you what to keep and a household actually working out how much of it they need, where it goes, and what happens when the water that was meant to last a week runs out on day four because nobody did the maths first. That's the bit the campaign won't have room for. It's the bit we exist to fill.
Look closely at what's likely to be recommended, once the detail lands, and it reads like a sensible but fairly generic list: some tinned food, some bottled water, a torch, spare batteries, a radio, a basic first aid kit. All correct. None of it tells you how much water is actually enough for your household, how long tinned food realistically lasts once you factor in a family that also needs a working can opener, or what happens to a grab bag that has sat untouched in a cupboard for two years with a torch inside it that nobody thought to charge. A national campaign has to speak to everyone at once, which means it has to stay general. We don't, and that's rather the point of us.
Take water. The official advice, once it lands, will almost certainly tell you to keep some bottled water in the house, which is correct as far as it goes. Our own rule is ten litres per person per day, not “a few bottles under the sink”. Ten litres covers drinking, basic cooking and a reasonable amount of washing for one person for one day. A household that has actually done that sum is the household that copes when the taps stop. A household that hasn't is the one queuing at a water bowser, wondering where it all went wrong.
None of this is hypothetical while you wait for a government press release, either. This has been the sort of summer where ten temporary hosepipe bans have been in force at once, a bank holiday weekend brought flash flooding hard on the heels of the worst drought since 2022, and a scrubland fire in south London made the evening news. The point of getting ready before a campaign tells you to isn't to be smug about it. It's that the risks the campaign is responding to are already turning up on ordinary streets, not just in a minister's speech.
One commentator argued this week that having supplies at home is good for your peace of mind rather than a sign of anything alarmist, and we agree with the finding, even if we would put it rather differently. This has nothing to do with being a prepper. It has everything to do with being the kind of household that isn't caught out. Think of it as the loft insulation of emergencies — dull, invisible most of the time, and the one thing you're properly glad of on the single evening you actually need it.
We're staying well away from why the government has decided now is the moment, because that's a conversation for people paid rather more than us to have, and because being ready matters considerably more than the politics behind the timing. What matters to you, practically, this week, is that the advice is coming whether or not you have read a word of it yet. Getting a step ahead of a national campaign is, frankly, one of the more satisfying things a household can quietly do!
Your to do list is:
Work out your household's ten-litre-per-person-per-day water target and store it properly, not just “a few bottles under the sink”.
Build a grab bag and put it somewhere you can reach it in the dark, not in the loft behind the Christmas decorations.
Buy a torch that doesn't rely on the phone battery you will need for everything else.
Get a wind-up or battery radio that doesn't need the mains or a mobile signal to work.
Put together a first aid kit, and actually open it once when it arrives so you know what's inside.
Charge a power bank properly, and keep it charged — a power bank bought once and never topped up is just an expensive paperweight.
Write down, on paper, the numbers and addresses you'd otherwise look up on a phone with no signal.
What we would put on your shelf
25 Litre Jerry Can Water Container at c.£10-£20 – a proper stackable water container, not a repurposed squash bottle, that holds enough for two people's daily ten litres with a bit to spare; buy two if you can, and you have covered a family of four for a day without doing mental arithmetic at eleven o'clock at night. Simple, but it works.
Blukar LED Torch Rechargeable Ultra High Lumens at c.£20-£30 – a proper hand torch you charge like a phone rather than one that eats its way through AAs, bright enough to light a whole room rather than just the bit directly in front of your nose, and one of the few things on this list that's genuinely satisfying to own even when nothing has gone wrong.
Midland ER10VP Weather Radio with Flashlight at c.£40-£50 – a wind-up and battery radio with a built-in torch, which sounds like the sort of thing only your granddad would buy until the mobile signal drops and it's the only device in the house still telling you anything; we'd rather you found it endearingly old-fashioned than found out the hard way why it earns its shelf space!
St John Ambulance Home First Aid Kit at c.£10-£20 – a properly stocked kit from people who genuinely know what a first aid kit is for, rather than a tin of plasters with delusions of grandeur; open it once when it arrives so you know what's inside, check it every so often for anything out of date, and as ever, always read the label and ask a pharmacist if you're ever unsure about adding anything of your own.
Anker Prime Power Bank 20,000mAh at c.£110-£130 – yes, it's the most expensive thing on this list, and yes, we know a power bank isn't usually anyone's idea of an emergency purchase, but it will keep a phone — and therefore the radio app, the torch, and everyone you need to call — going for days rather than hours, which is worth rather more than most people assume until the sockets stop working.
Cabinzero Classic Backpack 36L (Unisex Adult) at c.£70-£90 – the bag itself, for anyone building a grab bag from scratch: proper straps, a sensible size that won't tempt you to overpack, and sturdy enough that it will still be doing this job in five years rather than falling apart on the one occasion you actually need to grab it and go.
Lantana Can Opener with Bottle Cap Lifter at c.£10-£20 – the cheapest thing here, and one of the most forgotten, because a shelf full of tinned food is no use whatsoever to a household whose only can opener lives in a kitchen drawer three feet from the tins it's meant to open; keep a second one in the grab bag, and you will never again be the household defeated by its own tinned peaches!
For the fuller version of everything above, including exactly how we arrived at ten litres and what else belongs on a proper emergency shelf, read ‘The complete UK household emergency preparedness guide’. And if a grab bag by the front door still isn't one of the things you own, ‘Slightly Anxious says Get a Grab Bag!’ will take you through building one properly, in about the time it takes to watch a film.
None of this is free, and none of it happens in an afternoon, however much a government leaflet might make it look that way. It takes a bit of money, a shelf you can spare, and roughly an hour of your evening you'd probably rather have spent on something else. But the government is about to tell several million households that this hour is worth having, and there is, we will admit, a certain satisfaction in being the household that already had it. We got there first.
Remember, keep calm and visit us here.
Sources
IBTimes UK, ‘UK Government Urges Households To Prepare For Emergencies’, 25–27 August 2026 — https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/uk-government-urges-households-prepare-emergencies-1816361
GOV.UK, Resilience Action Plan 2026 Implementation Report, published 14th July 2026 — confirms the GOV.UK/Prepare public engagement campaign is coming; the detailed launch material had not gone live at the time of writing (31 August 2026), so check gov.uk/Prepare directly before publishing.
Also reported by Euro Weekly News, citing The Guardian and The Independent — specific article URL wasn't captured during research; verify before this draft goes live.
This blog post has been AI-assisted with human oversight
Comments