Two hundred pages of things that might go wrong, and the six that reach your house
Author: Slightly Anxious Date: 27th July 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.
On the 14th of July the Cabinet Office published the 2026 edition of the National Risk Register, the public version of the government’s own assessment of what could go badly wrong in this country. It runs to well over two hundred pages and covers close to a hundred separate risks, from severe space weather to foot and mouth disease to somebody putting an agricultural digger through a gas main.
We’ve read it. You don’t have to.
Here’s the first honest thing to say about it, and it’s the thing you won’t get from the headlines: most of it has nothing to do with your house. The National Risk Register isn’t written for you, and it says so itself. It’s “designed for a broad range of risk and resilience practitioners”, which means council emergency planners, utility companies, and the people who write continuity plans for hospitals. The section actually addressed to households is a handful of pages, tucked away in Chapter 3.
So we’re not going to march you through all of it and pretend a tin of chickpeas helps with a major maritime pollution incident. Most of these risks are somebody else’s job. What interests us are the entries where the government has quietly written down how long you’d be managing on your own, and by our reading there are six of them: a national power outage, a regional failure of the electricity network, the loss of piped drinking water, a digital resilience failure, a data infrastructure incident, and the simultaneous loss of every phone and internet connection in your region. Those are the ones that end up in your kitchen. Everything else ends up in somebody’s inbox.
The number is seven
Start with the big one. The register’s worst case for a national power outage assumes the whole of Great Britain loses mains electricity instantly and without warning, in winter, when demand is highest. The National Energy System Operator is legally required to have a plan to restore the network within five days, and a new Electricity Restoration Standard arrives at the end of 2026.
The restoration timetable runs like this. Some homes come back within hours. Around 60 per cent of demand is reconnected within two days. Restoration steps up on days three and four, and by days five and six everyone is technically reconnected, although controlled disconnections continue at peak times, which is a polite way of saying the lights go off again in the evening. And then the sentence we’d like you to sit with for a moment: “Beyond 7 days we expect full and stable power restored to all of Great Britain.”
Beyond seven days. That’s not us being dramatic. That’s the plan working.
We’ve been recommending you prepare for a week rather than the three days most guides suggest, and we’ve had polite pushback about it. Well, here’s the arithmetic, and it’s the government’s, not ours. Five days to reconnect, one or two more before it’s stable, and that assumes the recovery itself goes smoothly. Seven days isn’t pessimism. It’s the official timetable rounded to the nearest sensible number.
The regional version is likelier and no more cheerful: up to 3.5 million customers off supply for a day, 350,000 for two days, and 20,000 for a full week, with reconnection taking up to two weeks where damage is widespread or the location remote. Storm Darragh in the winter of 2024 to 2025 took power from over two million homes, and for some the disruption ran a week.
One more line is worth knowing, and it’s a hard one. During a national power outage, the register states plainly that it isn’t possible for any domestic customer’s supply to be prioritised. Not for medical equipment, not for anyone. From day five some critical sites such as major hospitals have their supply maintained, but your house isn’t on that list, and neither is ours. Support that week comes from the Priority Service Register and local welfare provision, which we’ll come to, and not from the socket.
The one that genuinely worried us
If you read only one entry, make it water infrastructure failure.
The scenario is the loss of piped drinking water, and wastewater services, to more than a million people in a large urban area. Repair, the register says, could take months. Residents would likely have to leave the area and some would need evacuating, while schools, hospitals, care homes, and prisons stop functioning normally until an alternative supply arrives.
And this is the part that made us put the kettle on. The government’s own assessment is that an incident of this size “is likely to overwhelm the capacity of the water sector to provide alternative water via tankers or bottles”, and that because everyone needs drinking water, within days the number of people classed as vulnerable would “rapidly rise”. In other words, the tankers are the plan, and the plan is expected to be swamped.
This is why we recommend storing 10 litres of water per person per day, and yes, we know that adds up: over a week that is 70 litres each. It’s more than most guides suggest and it will take up room. Other advice puts the figure at two to three litres per person per day, which is perfectly correct for drinking. It just doesn’t account for washing, flushing, cleaning a wound, or dealing with a nappy. Drinking water keeps you alive. The other seven litres are what keep a week at home civilised, and there’s a meaningful difference between the two. Our article ‘What to do when the water has been turned off’ covers how to store that much without turning the spare room into a reservoir.
The new entries, and why your card might stop working
The 2026 edition adds several risks that weren’t there before, and two belong in a household conversation.
The first is digital resilience failure, added on the back of the CrowdStrike software update of July 2024, which disrupted thousands of services across the UK at a cost the register puts at potentially between £1.7 and £2.3 billion. Nobody attacked anybody. A faulty update went out and the modern world stopped for a day. The scenario for the next one includes the shutdown of communications, financial systems, transport, and broadcasting, alongside widespread failure of smart devices and smartphones.
The second is a pair of risks around data infrastructure. Next to them sits an older entry on the simultaneous loss of all fixed and mobile communications, usually caused by a severe storm, which in the worst case leaves a region with no way to dial 999.
The household consequence of all three is identical and thoroughly unglamorous. If the systems are down, your card doesn’t work, the contactless reader doesn’t work, and the cashpoint doesn’t either. Keep some cash at home in small notes. It costs nothing, it isn’t exciting, and it’s the cheapest thing on this page.
What the government actually asks you to do
Chapter 3 lists five steps. We’re reproducing them straight, because this is safety advice and it isn’t the place for our jokes.
Check whether you’re eligible for your gas, electricity, and water supplier’s Priority Service Register, so they know you need extra support when supply is interrupted. Ask anyone you care for whether they’re registered too.
Set a monthly reminder to test your smoke alarms. Children can help with the test.
Write important numbers down on paper, including 105 to report a power cut and the numbers of anyone you’d want to reach in an emergency.
Talk to your children about emergencies, including how and when to call 999.
Check your long-term flood risk and sign up for flood and weather warnings.
The Priority Service Register is the one to act on today. It’s free, it takes minutes, and most people have never heard of it. It won’t keep your power on in a national outage, because nothing will, but in every smaller and far likelier scenario it’s the difference between being a name on a list and being nobody in particular.
Our kit, unchanged
Nothing in this year’s register has changed what we recommend, which is either reassuring or dull depending on your temperament. We curate rather than review, we don’t own the products, and we’ll always point you to the reviews of people who do.
For light, the Petzl Actik Core head torch at c.£60-£80 is rechargeable with a battery back-up, and a head torch buys you two free hands, which matters more than you’d think. For news when the network is down, the Midland ER10VP Weather Radio with Flashlight at c.£40-£50 combines radio, torch, and phone charging. Oasis Water Purification Tablets at c.£7-£9 for 200 weigh almost nothing and earn their shelf space, and a St John Ambulance Home First Aid Kit at c.£15-£21 rounds it off. Always read the label and consult a pharmacist if unsure.
Our article ‘Slightly Anxious says Get a Grab Bag’ does the whole thing in one organised swoop, and ‘The complete UK household emergency preparedness guide’ is the long version for anyone who enjoys a project.
So where we are is this
The National Risk Register is a serious document written by serious people, and it isn’t a prediction. Nobody in the Cabinet Office thinks the lights are going out next Thursday. What it is, is the government writing down its own honest estimate of how long recovery takes, and that estimate is longer than the advice most households have been given.
A week without mains power, with the taps unreliable and the phone useless, isn’t the end of the world. It’s an indoor camping holiday with worse plumbing. It’s a week of discomfort, and the difference between a bad week and a genuinely miserable one is a few decisions made calmly on a Sunday afternoon rather than frantically on a Tuesday night. The register tells you how long you’re on your own. What you do with that week is up to you.
Remember, keep calm and visit us here.
This blog post has been AI-assisted with human oversight
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