The Minister for Security (Dan Jarvis)
With your permission, Mr Speaker, I wish to make a statement on the steps that the Government are taking to ensure that the UK is the most resilient country that we can be.
Let me begin by sending my condolences to the families of the two men who tragically died in storm conditions this weekend. It is an all-too-grim reminder of the devastating impact that storms can have. I saw that at first hand when I visited Cornwall in the wake of Storm Goretti earlier this year. Weather stations recorded wind speeds of 100 mph; some 50,000 homes, schools and businesses were left without power; and entire communities became trapped as fallen trees blocked country lanes. I heard families’ fear as they talked about how quickly the basic necessities of everyday life were stripped away—power, water and the internet. I thank the first responders for their tireless efforts in clearing roads and reconnecting homes. Those scenes will be familiar to Members right across the House.
On 8 January, in the south-west, it was an extreme storm. Over the summer, across the UK, it was wildfires. This week, it has been Storm Austen and Storm Boelo. Climate change is making extreme weather not just more likely, but more powerful. This winter is set to be difficult, with El Niño increasing the likelihood of storms and heavy rainfall.
Since we came into government in 2024, we have been hardening and sharpening the UK’s approach to resilience. We have re-written the Government’s pandemic strategy, investing more than £1 billion to build the UK’s biological defences. We have launched the home defence programme to ensure that our country is best prepared for the full range of potential threats, no matter how unlikely they might be. Up and down these isles, we are taking co-ordinated action to prepare our infrastructure for difficult weather this winter. We have £1.4 billion invested in flood defences in this financial year alone; £24 billion invested to maintain and improve our roads and rail network over the next four years; and £2.6 billion invested to climate-proof our rail infrastructure, with projects under way or completed in places such as County Durham, Derbyshire and Cumbria. Throughout the coming winter, I will be working across Government to ensure an effective response to storms as they occur.
However, in reflecting on the experience of the people I met in Cornwall, it is clear to me that, in the middle of an emergency, our brilliant first responders cannot be everywhere all at once. It is clear that proper preparedness begins in our communities, streets and homes. Our research shows that just 13% of people in the UK feel that they are prepared for an emergency, such as a severe storm, that could cut them off from the services that they rely on. That figure is far lower than the figure for our European neighbours. The very same research showed that 84% of people in the UK want the Government to share more information about the steps that they can take to increase their preparedness.
To give some credit to the Opposition, they recognised that resilience gap while in government and launched a new website to share preparedness guidance with the public. However, that website stopped short of a proper campaign; not enough people noticed it, and those who did found the guidance hard to follow. This Government are committed to having an honest conversation with the public about the risks that we face and helping them to prepare—household by household, step by step—to improve our national resilience. To that effect, we have published updated preparedness guidance for households and launched a three-year campaign to raise awareness of the simple steps that people can take to be ready for everyday emergencies.
I want to be clear from the outset that we are not launching this campaign because of any specific or imminent threat. Instead, launching this campaign brings the UK into line with almost every single European country and countless others around the world that already run similar campaigns every year. In developing the campaign, the Government have worked with more than 500 different organisations—emergency services, businesses, voluntary groups and local authorities—to develop guidance that meets the needs of communities.
I will touch briefly on the guidance before outlining the campaign. The guidance is designed to help households to be self-sufficient for three days in an emergency. We have published a full checklist of the simple steps that households can take. The two main actions are: ensuring that you have three days-worth of water and non-perishable food, and signing up to the priority services register if you or someone in your household is eligible for extra support in a utility outage. As many people who can follow that common-sense guidance should follow it. By playing their part, people will be helping themselves as well as others in their community, because, in an emergency, every household that has taken the steps set out on the checklist is one less household that the emergency services need to give extra support to.
We are also encouraging people to check in on their neighbours and to be ready to help each other out. We have worked hand in hand with charities to ensure that the campaign is helpful for everyone, including organisations representing disabled people, people struggling with their mental health and people who rely on food banks. Many actions on the checklist—such as signing up to the priority services register—are completely free, and others can be ticked off over time by adding one item per week to the weekly shop. This is about helping as many people as possible to be ready for an emergency, so that help can arrive to those most in need first. To those who think this campaign is an overreaction, I say, “Think of the people I met in Cornwall and those in countless other communities across the UK, including the tens of thousands of people who were without power this very weekend.” Their lived experience proves otherwise.
The campaign will run for at least three years, and is called “Be Ready”. It is being run hand in hand with our emergency services, local councils and resilience forums, and voluntary organisations. I am pleased to report that since launch, the campaign website has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and the campaign checklist has been downloaded tens of thousands of times, and while it is too early to have formal polling data, anecdotal evidence and partner data shows that people up and down the country are heeding our advice. This is just the start, however; over the coming weeks, people will begin to see information about what they can do popping up online, on the radio, and out and about in their local community. That is just the point—this is a community-led campaign. Over the coming weeks, we will also be sharing toolkits that partners can use to get involved. I encourage Members across the House to support the campaign, read the advice and help their constituents to be ready. Together, we can ensure our communities are ready for everyday emergencies, whenever or wherever they occur. I hope that the Be Ready campaign will unite communities across the United Kingdom, and I am working closely with the devolved Administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, all of whom back this campaign and the lifesaving advice it will share.
Mr Speaker, before entering Parliament, I was proud to serve in the Parachute Regiment, whose motto, “Ready for anything”, comes to mind today. What you might not know is that, even longer ago—perhaps longer ago than I would care to admit—I was a Boy Scout, hard though that might be to believe.
Dan Jarvis
I am sure that Opposition Members, and indeed hon. Members from across the House, will all know the motto of the scouting movement. It is not “Dyb, dyb, dyb”, as the right hon. Lady says.
Dan Jarvis
It is “Be prepared”—thank you very much. The circumstances are certainly different, but I hope the House agrees that there is wisdom in both of those mottoes. Both remind us that we have a responsibility to be ready for the sorts of everyday emergencies that people faced just this weekend. Together, by taking the simple steps in this campaign, we can help people and communities right across the United Kingdom to be ready.
I commend this statement to the House.
Charlie Dewhirst (Bridlington and The Wolds) (Con)
I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement, and join him in sending my condolences to the families of the two men who lost their lives in the storms over the weekend.
We welcome measures to address the resilience gap—a process that started under the previous Government, as the Minister said. I am a little surprised that the Housing Secretary’s suggestion of stockpiling sauvignon blanc has not been taken on board by the Minister, but it is absolutely right that the Government tell people to be prepared for adversity. However, I have a number of questions that I hope he will be able to address this afternoon. First, the Government’s Be Ready campaign website lists 18 hazards, ranging from terrorism and adverse weather to animal and plant health and fires in the home. Which of those 18 hazards do the Government consider to be the highest risk, and have there been any recent changes to risk assessments that led to the launch of this campaign?
Secondly, how do the Government plan to reach people who are digitally excluded, and will they be distributing printed resources? Not only are such resources vital for those who are digitally excluded, they could become a lifeline for anyone who is unable to access the internet at the time of an incident. In his statement, the Minister rightly pointed out that only 13% of people in the UK feel they are prepared for an emergency. This is in stark contrast to other countries, such as Spain, where I believe the figure is just below 70%. Can the Minister tell the House whether he has a specific take-up figure that he would like to achieve by the end of the Be Ready campaign?
I now come to the issue of costs. We all know that times are tough for people right across the country, so how much do the Government expect this preparedness to cost the average family, and how much do they expect to spend on this campaign over the next three years? It has been reported that since the Government announced the campaign last week, supermarkets have seen water and baked beans sell out, as well as a run on wind-up radios and torches. Did the Government communicate with major supermarkets and other retailers to prepare them before they made this announcement, or was it just dropped on them?
With reference to emergency response coverage, the most important thing across the nation is that we have a joined-up approach, so that nobody is left behind. We cannot have a postcode lottery of an emergency response system, so can the Minister tell the House how he is working with the devolved Administrations across the four nations, and how he is working with local authorities? The Government became familiar with the emergency alert system over the summer after using it to warn people about disposable barbecues. Has the Minister reflected since then and made any assessment of the threshold for future use of the system, and of how many people may have turned off their emergency alert capability following its use in August?
Next, I would like to address vulnerable people, and what consideration the Government have made of them in the Be Ready campaign. How will the Government ensure that our vulnerable, our elderly, people with illness, parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities, and others are effectively communicated with and supported in a time of emergency? This cannot vary from place to place.
Turning to national security, the former Defence Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns), said this week that the cyber-attack that caused £2.1 billion of damage to Jaguar Land Rover last year was a state-sponsored attack. First, Jaguar Land Rover deserves to know whether it was a state-sponsored attack, and I hope the Government have told it. Secondly, can the Government say whether there needs to be more awareness among businesses that they are at risk from these types of attacks, and what more are they doing to support our critical national infrastructure with cyber-resilience and cyber-security?
The Government have claimed that defence spending will reach 2.7% of GDP by the end of 2028. Considering the valuable work of our intelligence services, can the Minister confirm that the entire single intelligence account is included in that figure, and can he explain how this fits with the NATO definition of defence spending? Finally, the Government have refused to confirm whether improving broadband infrastructure is included in the classification of critical infrastructure for the purposes of reporting against the additional 1.5% NATO commitment. Can the Minister clarify today that improving broadband infrastructure does not contribute to the NATO spending commitment?
In conclusion, we welcome the continuation of the previous Conservative Government’s efforts to address the resilience gap. We will support the Government where appropriate, and look forward to scrutinising the Be Ready campaign as it progresses.
Dan Jarvis
I am genuinely grateful to the hon. Member for the reasonable way in which he has presented quite a long list of questions today. I will endeavour to work my way through them in as systematic a way as I can; if I miss anything, though, I am happy to write to him or meet him to discuss this matter, not least because it is my intention that the work we do to make our nation more resilient is a shared endeavour across this House. I do not believe that it should be a matter of political disagreement. I think the measures we have brought forward are reasonable and common-sense ones, and I hope we can work together across this place to ensure our communities—our constituencies—are as resilient as possible, not least because that activity will contribute to our overall national resilience and national security as part of this work.
The hon. Member asked an entirely reasonable set of questions, which I will run through as best I can. At the outset, he asked whether the campaign is in response to a range of different risks. He will know about the Government’s risk register, and will have heard me say earlier that this campaign is not a consequence of any specific piece of intelligence or born out of any specific concern. He and the House will understand that at any one time, the Government are tracking a range of different threats to the United Kingdom, and this campaign will contribute—I think effectively—to our overall resilience. I think he will also understand that there is a lot of merit in making sure we prepare households and communities at a local level for the kinds of everyday emergencies we have spoken about today, and that there is a broader and wider utility in that preparedness when it comes to other risks that have been debated recently, even those that are much less likely.
The hon. Member made an important point about inclusion, particularly of people who are not online, and he is right to raise those concerns. Over the coming weeks and months, he will see a range of different activities under way to ensure we are able to reach every corner of the United Kingdom, including those who are offline. I mentioned the radio, but I am happy to think more about how we can ensure that nobody is unable to access this important messaging.
The hon. Member asked about the take-up figure. I said in my statement that I expected the campaign to run for three years, but I think it likely that messages of the kind that we are discussing today will continue in the longer term. The work that we are now launching in the United Kingdom is, in fact, done routinely in other parts of the world, and particularly with partners in Europe and Scandinavia. Such messaging is routine in most countries, and I anticipate that this sort of activity will take on a certain normality in the future.
The hon. Member asked me about the alert. The decision to launch any alert is taken very carefully, and we weigh up a range of different risks. Whenever an alert is launched there is an extensive process of review. We are working through the detail of the most recent alert, and I shall be happy to discuss that further with the hon. Member and with other Members.
The hon. Member was right to raise the need to ensure that the vulnerable and the elderly are properly accommodated in the context of the campaign. We have worked very hard with a range of stakeholder organisations, including local resilience forums, the voluntary sector and the British Red Cross, to ensure that vulnerable people are properly catered for. The hon. Member will have heard what I said earlier about the importance that we attach to people signing up for the priority services register. There is a job of work that I hope every Member will do, namely looking into their own communities and encouraging their constituents to engage with this messaging and specifically, when they think they might be eligible—the criterion is fairly broad—to sign up for the register.
The hon. Member rightly mentioned cost of living pressures. I hope that he heard what I said about there not being a requirement for households to assemble all these items in one go: this is the kind of thing that people can do progressively, perhaps adding a single item to each weekly shop. Although many households will probably already have many of the items on the checklist, I hope that, through the process of this campaign, they will think about how they can draw those individual items together and be better prepared should an everyday emergency strike. We are acutely conscious of the cost of living pressures on households throughout the country, and we are determined to ensure that the campaign is carried out in a value-for-money way. The actual costs are relatively low, and we think that it is very good value for money, but we will ensure that that is the case.
The hon. Member asked about cyber, an issue that I take extremely seriously, both in my remit as a Cabinet Office Minister and through the Home Office. As the hon. Member will know, earlier this year the Government published a landmark cyber action plan to overhaul public sector digital security. The next stage of that plan is the introduction of the national cyber action plan, which will drive up standards in businesses and the wider society. A great deal of activity is under way across Government, and I hope we can all get behind that collectively.
Finally, the hon. Member mentioned defence spending. I genuinely welcome this debate, because I think it important for our national security. As the Prime Minister has said, the Government’s commitment to the defence of our country is unwavering. We have already delivered the biggest sustained boost to defence spending since the cold war, committing nearly £300 billion over the next four years. We will honour our NATO commitment to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035, and will specify a target date for 3% in the spending review. We are also delivering on our commitment to NATO by spending 1.5% of our GDP on wider security and resilience. That includes protecting our critical national infrastructure, defending our networks, ensuring our civil preparedness and resilience, and unleashing innovation and strengthening our defence industrial base.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
I commend my right hon. Friend and the Government for starting this national conversation. Given the extreme heat during the summer, the storms that have ravaged our communities in recent days and the issues involving rogue states attacking our infrastructure, there was clearly a real need for that conversation to start. As my right hon. Friend will know, my Committee’s inquiry on societal resilience is under way. Along with, I am sure, all other Members, I welcomed what my right hon. Friend said about the three-year programme, but will he commit to giving the House regular updates on the roles of local resilience forums, individuals and businesses in ensuring wider societal resilience?
Dan Jarvis
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the important work that he does in chairing his Committee. The piece of work that he mentioned is significant, and we look forward keenly to his Committee’s findings. He rightly mentioned the three-year commitment that we have made. I think that is the right duration to aim for initially, but as I said, we now live in a world in which I expect we will need to have constant conversations of this nature with communities throughout the country, in line with our European partners, and with our allies around the world—and yes, I can absolutely give him the commitment that he seeks that we will update his Committee and the House.
Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)
I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement. Let me place on record our thanks to the emergency services, volunteers and communities who respond to civil emergencies, be they storms, floods or wildfires.
I welcome the announcement of the Be Ready campaign, and agree that every household that can be ready to look after itself should be ready to do so, for at least three days. During the first covid lockdown, I raised an eyebrow when my other half stockpiled enough bottled water to keep us going for weeks, but today he has been proved right, and I fear that I will never hear the end of it.
The Security Minister rightly mentioned the importance of volunteers. I wonder if he has spoken to our Finnish allies, for example, to learn from their experience of establishing a formal civil volunteer reserve. Its members would receive non-military training, and could be called on in an emergency, just as community first responders can attend medical emergencies.
As the Minister said, not everyone can stock up for three days. People relying on food banks, older people and people with mobility difficulties are often the least able to prepare and the most exposed. The priority services register can work well only if it is accurate, so what more can the Minister do to ensure that it is kept up to date? Can he say specifically what co-ordination is in place with the utility companies, so that information can be shared about their lists of vulnerable customers?
It is not just weather or climate change that we need to be prepared for; the number of nationally significant cyber-threats has doubled in the last year. The Liberal Democrats have called for a digital sovereignty strategy to ensure that critical national functions are powered by technology that the UK can control. Can the Minister update us on any progress being made on digital sovereignty?
Dan Jarvis
The hon. Member has made a series of important points. I join her in thanking the emergency services for the extremely important work that they do in communities throughout the country. She was right to mention volunteers. I am aware of the very good work being done in Finland and Scandinavia, which have taken a more forward-leaning approach to campaigns of this sort than the United Kingdom, but I will look more closely at her specific point about how things are working in Finland.
I agree with the hon. Member about the importance of the priority services register. We are working with utility companies to ensure as much awareness as possible, at household level, of the need to sign up for the register. As I said, the criteria are quite broad, and I urge Members to encourage their constituents to check their eligibility.
The hon. Member made an important point about sovereignty. I work closely with colleagues across Government—from the Cabinet Office, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and elsewhere—to ensure that our digital infrastructure and critical national infrastructure are as resilient and as protected as they can be. As she knows, we face a range of threats on that front, and it is important that the Government are properly geared up to stand against them. We work closely with our international allies to that end.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the Chair of the Defence Committee.
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)
I thank the Security Minister for his statement on this vital topic, and welcome the much-delayed start to the national conversation. It is widely acknowledged that, in the event of conflict, military effectiveness is reliant on civilian systems being able to function under attack, be it physical or cyber-attack, and that relies on us taking a whole-of-society approach. Why is the forthcoming national exercise, Albiston Shadow, classified, thereby excluding those from outside Government? If we accept that resilience is a whole-of-society endeavour, why are the Government not engaging more widely with industry, councils, civil society and Members of this House, so that we can properly stress-test the planning? What information-sharing mechanisms have been established to ensure that key individuals without the necessary security clearance are included in the event of crisis or conflict?
Dan Jarvis
I am grateful to the Chair of the Defence Committee for his question, and I agree with his broader point about the importance of wider societal resilience—he is absolutely right about that. That work is taking place through the home defence programme, on which we lead through the Cabinet Office, though we work with partners across Government, including the Ministry of Defence. He referred to Albiston Shadow, which is due to be the largest home defence exercise run in the United Kingdom for many years. We are still working through its precise design, so I will reflect on his comments, and we will look at whether we can accommodate some of the points that he has helpfully flagged.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
In the early 1980s, along with other enthusiasts, I set up the National Council for Civil Defence, and worked with Willie Whitelaw. We achieved a major milestone in the form of the Civil Protection in Peacetime Act 1986. The NCCD was taken over by the local government office as a serious organisation. When the cold war ended, the whole civil defence effort atrophied, because there was considered to be no threat. We now live in a very different world, so will the Minister make an attempt to improve our entire civil defence structure? There was a leaflet issued by the then Conservative Government called “Protect and Survive”. I know a war is very unlikely, but it is best to be prepared.
Dan Jarvis
I certainly agree with the Father of the House that it is best to be prepared. It is interesting that he reflects on a time when there was greater awareness of the risk of conflict, but he is right to say that the threats we face today are very significant, and the world is more dangerous than at any point since the period that he describes. I hope that he will understand that the Government take these matters incredibly seriously. I hope that he will see that we are working across Government to ensure that we have the appropriate defences in place, and the appropriate resources to underpin those defences. We need to focus people’s minds on a range of different threats to our national security. The Be Ready campaign will better insulate households and communities, and I hope that he will agree that there will be a broader, wider benefit, in terms of our national security and keeping the country safe.
John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)
I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. Will he join me in praising Ben Brook, the chief fire officer in Warwickshire, and his firefighting and administrative teams for their brave efforts this summer? In July, there were 771 incidents, which is the highest number on record—double the rate in July 2021. Can my right hon. Friend confirm that the Government will do all they can to provide the fire service in Warwickshire with the resources it needs, and will offer help with reaching out to the public about the parts of his statement to do with their involvement in resilience?
Dan Jarvis
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question, and I absolutely join him in praising Ben Brook and his team in Warwickshire; they did incredibly important and difficult work over the summer. My hon. Friend may have seen that last week the Prime Minister hosted our inaugural wildfire summit, at which he announced that military planes and helicopters will take to the skies to fight wildfires for the first time, as we prepare for future extreme weather driven by climate change. In his announcement, the Prime Minister paid tribute to those who put on a uniform and serve in our fire and rescue services for the incredibly important work that they do, including, clearly, in my hon. Friend’s constituency.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
If rule No. 1, as far as resilience is concerned, is “be prepared”, does the Minister agree that rule No. 2 should be “have a reliable back-up system”? In that connection, does he share my concern that both in the field of telephony and in the field of banking, back-up systems do not seem to exist? In particular, were the Government consulted before British Telecom decided not only to move to an internet-based telephone system, but to dismantle the copper wire system, which could have given us useful resilience in an emergency?
Dan Jarvis
I broadly agree with the right hon. Gentleman’s rule No. 2, and he is right to stress the importance of having back-up systems. Essentially, a guiding principle in this campaign is making sure that households have their own back-up systems, but he is right to say that the Government need to think about the bigger picture, and to ensure resilience across our critical national infrastructure and in the areas of business and commerce to which he refers. I can give him an assurance that the Government work very closely with partners in the private sector, and various forums provide opportunities to engage on these matters. We take them very seriously, but I will look more carefully at the point that he has made.
Dame Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)
Tinned food is key to being prepared for an emergency, as it can be eaten when there is no power to cook it. Does the Minister recognise that Tata’s Trostre steelworks, in my constituency of Llanelli, which makes the tin plate used by big-name manufacturers to can their products, is of strategic importance to our national resilience? Will he stress to his ministerial colleagues the absolute necessity of ensuring that conditions, such as energy prices, are competitive, so that we can secure a viable future for tin-plate production in Llanelli?
Dan Jarvis
My hon. Friend makes a really important point, and I will make sure that colleagues in Government have heard it. She is right to emphasise the wider industrial issues at play here. She will know that tin cans were included on the checklist, and she is right to talk about tin production. I give her a reassurance that I will raise that with colleagues in other Government Departments.
Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) (Con)
Our subsea infrastructure is incredibly important; we know from recent reports that the Russians have been sniffing around it in their GUGI submarines, and that Russian trawlers have been investigating our undersea infrastructure. I am very concerned that we have only one UK-based and UK-flagged repair ship, the CS Sovereign, which is due to go out of service in 2030. Six months ago, I asked the former Department for Science, Innovation and Technology what it was doing to investigate replacing that capability. Could the Minister give us assurance about the Government’s plans to ensure that we have UK-based and UK-flagged repair capability for our subsea infrastructure?
Dan Jarvis
The hon. and gallant Gentleman makes a really important point about subsea infrastructure. It is something in which I have taken a particular interest, working with colleagues across Government, including those in the Ministry of Defence. He is right to mention the threat from Russia, which is well understood. I know he will understand that there is always a balance to be struck, both in recognising the threat that we face and in ensuring that we are properly prepared to defend against it. At the same time—the director general of MI5 made this point—we should not make the Russians out to be better than they are and do the propaganda work on their behalf, but the hon. Gentleman makes an important point. Let me look more carefully at the detail, and I will come back to him with a more precise response.
Rachel Taylor (North Warwickshire and Bedworth) (Lab)
Storms can strike anywhere at any time, as I found out last week. In many of our communities, neighbours and volunteers step in at critical times. In North Warwickshire and Bedworth, groups such as the Fillongley Flood Group step in to keep homes safe. What more can the Government do to ensure that community groups can help make sure that all vulnerable people are ready?
Dan Jarvis
My hon. Friend makes a really important point. She speaks about the kind of group that all of us will have in our constituency—those local groups that come together to provide support. On a recent visit to Leicestershire, I saw the excellent work done by a local flood action group to protect their community following floods. We have been very careful to ensure that the design of this campaign has been worked through with local authorities, local resilience forums, and a range of voluntary and charitable organisations. I believe very much in the public and community spirit found right across the country. We want to encourage and enable activity of this kind, so that when an everyday emergency does strike, communities can come together and look out for each other.
Freddie van Mierlo (Henley and Thame) (LD)
In my constituency of Henley and Thame, Greener Henley has already sprung into action and is seeking community champions to organise street by street. What action will the Government take to support community organisations to improve resilience not just on a household basis, but at street level?
Dan Jarvis
The hon. Member makes a similarly important point. I reiterate what I said a moment ago: the design of the campaign has been worked on in conjunction with community and voluntary groups, which we all know from our constituencies do an incredibly important job. The launch of the campaign has been warmly welcomed by a range of community and voluntary organisations right around the country. We want to work through local authorities and with local resilience forums—those kind of organisations—so that they feel both empowered and enabled to support their communities, but all of us as Members of this House have a responsibility to work with and support them at the local level.
Mary Creagh (Coventry East) (Lab)
Madam Deputy Speaker, you and I spent many hours in meetings managing the disastrous fallout from South East Water’s outages in Tunbridge Wells and its surroundings. I would like to put on record my thanks to you for your role—and to those around the House for their role—as a trusted message bearer to the people caught up in those outages. One of the lessons I took from that was the need for people at the start of their life or at the end of their life to be properly looked after. What can my right hon. and gallant Friend do to make sure that local authorities, water companies and energy companies are working with local nurseries and, critically, acute NHS services so that they know who has just left hospital, who is at the end of life and who is under five in order to put them proactively on the priority services register?
Dan Jarvis
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who speaks with great authority on these matters, not least from her own time in government, and she is right to make the point in the way that she does. I know that she will understand that a lot of work takes place in local authority areas and with local resilience forums on the issues she has raised to ensure that there is visibility of where there are more vulnerable households. That is precisely why we are taking this opportunity to encourage members of the public to check—and to encourage Members of this House to get their constituents to check—their eligibility for the priority services register. That is a really useful document in this regard, but I know that local resilience forums will be working on the issues she has raised, and we in the Government will of course keep a close eye on them.
Sir Gavin Williamson (Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge) (Con)
We all know that at points of emergency, such as power outages and so many other things, mobile networks are incredibly important. The villages of Huntington and Hatherton have virtually no signal at all. With the withdrawal of the shared rural network, which provides funding for rural communities to get better mobile services, what should such villages do to ensure that they have access to the mobile networks that are so important at critical times?
Dan Jarvis
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that mobile networks are very important. I saw for myself, in the aftermath of Storm Goretti in Cornwall, the impact of losing the mobile and digital signal, even for a relatively short period. A lot of work is taking place in Government, led by the DCMS, to ensure that there is that resilience and that, in the aftermath of any extreme weather event, there is urgent and ongoing work to restore capabilities that have been lost. He makes an important point, and I know that, again, local resilience forums will be looking at the particular challenges in their areas and working with utility providers to ensure that, where coverage is lost, it can be returned as quickly as possible.
Mark Sewards (Leeds South West and Morley) (Lab)
I welcome the Minister’s statement. He will know very well that the “Protecting What Matters” strategy, which was announced to the House earlier this year, had some excellent proposals to strengthen community resilience. Will he update the House about progress on that strategy, and say exactly which proposals we have made progress on to date?
Dan Jarvis
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and I think he raises an important point. I am limited in the time I have to respond, but I can update him that there has been positive progress on that area of work. It sits adjacent to the discussion we are having, but he is right to raise it. At points of everyday emergency, or where particular communities are subject to emergency circumstances, there are those who may seek to use it as an opportunity to sow misinformation and disinformation. The Government are of course extremely mindful of that, which is one of the reasons why the Prime Minister recently announced the creation of the national centre for information defence.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
Laying in three days’ supplies in the Northern Isles is what we do if we are confident that we are having a mild winter. Just four years ago, parts of Shetland were without electricity for six days, so resilience looks different in different parts of the country.
To take the Minister back to his answer to the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty), the Government recently launched a consultation on critical undersea infrastructure, security and resilience, in which they seemed to see the answer as one of regulation and legislation. As the hon. Gentleman told the Minister, we need the capacity to effect repairs to undersea cables, and to do so without long delays, as currently occur. Will he take away that need and the experience of my constituents in recent years, who have suffered a number of digital outages as a consequence?
Dan Jarvis
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to raise this issue. He and I have discussed it previously, and he explained with great clarity the impact of the loss of that capability on his constituents. I hope he gets a sense of the seriousness with which we take it, but I will write to him and the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) with more details of the work we are doing.
Helena Dollimore (Hastings and Rye) (Lab/Co-op)
I want to raise the issue of water outages, which I know you have also been working on in Sussex, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have previously lobbied the Minister about upgrading how we see the risk of a water outage in the national risk register, and I was pleased to see it upgraded from the lowest form to the highest form of risk in the most recent register. However, I want to flag some issues, particularly with the priority services register, that we have encountered during outages in Hastings.
The first issue relates to blocks of flats with multiple residents but one bill payer, such as a management company, which is particularly common in sheltered accommodation. Southern Water has told me:
“Across the water industry…arrangements are designed around identified account holders and bill-paying customers. In centrally billed or bulk-metered properties, such as some blocks of flats, water companies typically have no direct relationship with individual residents and do not hold information about…personal circumstances. This creates a recognised industry challenge”.
We really need to look at that in relation to resilience. Secondly, I am aware that the risk register is not updated in line with the electoral register, so the register is not updated when people move out and it ends up with so many people on it that delivery becomes unsustainable. Will the Minister look at those issues?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. I am just as interested in the response, as it covers my constituency too, but we need to make sure that questions are much shorter and answers are on point.
Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)
The Security Minister and Cabinet Office Minister knows that I have a huge amount of time for him, but I want to slightly break the consensus that has mostly held in the Chamber today. I think the Government’s communications—mass public communications—are confused on this issue. We are being asked by senior Ministers to stock up on corned beef, water and whatever, because of storms. Well—breaking news—there have been many storms over the last 80 years in Shropshire, and indeed across the country, and we have never been given this advice before.
If this is about war preparedness and being on a war footing, as the Defence Secretary has suggested we should all be, I think the Government should just come clean and treat the British public with a little bit more respect. At the beginning of the Ukrainian war, defence intelligence was signed off by the excellent then Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, and shared with the British public, so that they came along with the Ministry of Defence and the Government. I think that the Security Minister needs to look at that as a good example.
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. In case I was not understood earlier, questions need to be shorter and answers on point.
Dan Jarvis
I have a lot of time for the right hon. Gentleman, and he has basically asked a series of good questions that lend themselves more to a longer debate, so I may not be able to do justice to them now. However, let me emphasise that, as I said earlier, this campaign is about taking the simple, straightforward steps to be ready for everyday emergencies such as severe storms or flooding. At the same time, there is significant bandwidth across Government to talk about the other threats we face as a nation, and I think that is what he is referring to. Ultimately, what we have to do, and this is done from the centre, is to make sure that we are preparing communities at the local level for the everyday emergencies we have been talking about today, while at the same time making sure that we are properly prepared for the very severe threats we face from countries such as Russia.
Graeme Downie (Dunfermline and Dollar) (Lab)
Just a few weeks ago, I hosted an event in Parliament with ambassadors from Denmark, Norway, Estonia and Finland on this exact topic. There were two common themes in the plans they are implementing. One was building public trust, and hopefully what we are seeing today in the national conversation is part of that. The second was the need to engage with businesses—and, indeed, the benefits of doing so—to inform employees and potentially use them as a resource, and to say that they could be the targets of something like a cyber-attack but also part of the response. Will the Minister confirm that he will speak to those allies specifically about the importance of engaging businesses, and that that point will be considered?
Dan Jarvis
My hon. Friend makes an important point about engaging businesses. We are certainly doing that. We are also working closely with our allies, including the countries to which he referred. Trust is important. The polling we have done shows that 84% of the public expect the Government to provide this information and only 13% of households think that they are properly prepared. It is important that we establish that honest conversation with the public to give them good, common-sense, practical advice that will make them more resilient in their own households. That is what we are doing.
Pete Wishart (Perth and Kinross-shire) (SNP)
The area I represent has the biggest river system in the UK and some of the most inclement weather in the UK, so my constituents and I are fully familiar with being prepared and being ready for what could possibly come. What I struggle with a little bit is the other stuff in the statement. I am baffled by the lumping together of storm readiness and other undefined threats that cannot be properly outlined in name. Does the Minister not agree that storms and weather events are critical known stand-alone threats, and that there should be distinct and separate strategies for them? Lumping them together with national security, subsea cables and cyber-threats is confusing and perhaps even unhelpful to people who just want to be prepared.
Dan Jarvis
Let me say to the hon. Gentleman how much importance we attach to doing this right around the United Kingdom. This is a UK-wide campaign and we have worked closely with partners in the devolved Governments to ensure that it can be as simple and as joined up as possible. The relationship with colleagues in Scotland is a really important one, not least because of the challenges he alluded to. I hope he will see that this is the beginning of a campaign. Fundamentally, we want to engage the public about simple measures they can take in their own lives. This is a first step. I hope he will join with us and support it.
Cat Eccles (Stourbridge) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for his statement and I welcome the Be Ready announcement. I have friends in Valencia who were impacted by the devastating flash floods in 2024. Spain and many other countries have long provided resilience and emergency preparedness advice to their citizens. Thankfully, my friends Eva and Pablo only lost their cars in the floods, but that culture of resilience meant that they had essentials at hand, and could help neighbours and vulnerable people as part of the community effort alongside the emergency services and regional authorities. With extreme weather threats now a reality here in the UK—as we saw this weekend—does he agree that it is right for us to adopt that approach to resilience, and that it is about everyone playing an active part in preparedness and in their communities?
Dan Jarvis
My hon. Friend is absolutely right: it is about people playing an active part in their own communities to ensure that collective resilience. She is also right to refer to the example of Spain. Spain has been doing this work for a considerable period of time and it has been able to build more of a culture of resilience. That is common practice among our neighbours in Europe and further afield, and that culture of resilience is something we are seeking to build here.
Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)
In rural South Shropshire we face flooding and power cuts every year, so I welcome this campaign. However, I do not believe it has landed as the Government intended, because the strategic defence review set out a whole-of-society approach and a national conversation about the threats we face to our resilience. We have talked about the Finnish model. The Finns clearly know the threats through proximity. I believe that to get the public on side, we have to clearly set out the threats to critical national infrastructure that could close the internet down for several weeks or lead to power outages and so on. Does the Minister agree that taking that approach will help the country to prepare better?
Dan Jarvis
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his broad welcome of the campaign. I listened very carefully to what he had to say and I do not think there is much disagreement between us. Let me say to him that the Government are constantly reviewing and updating our response to a wide range of threats and scenarios to ensure that we are prepared for every eventuality. He will know that, through the home defence programme, we have been running a variety of security and resilience exercises. There are more of those to come. That is important work, but the Be Ready campaign sits as a strand of that activity, alongside other work we are doing with other colleagues, including in the Ministry of Defence.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee.
Ms Abena Oppong-Asare (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)
I welcome the statement and I support the Be Ready campaign. The Committee heard from the fire and rescue service, which is very much in support of the whole society resilience approach. A constant theme was the need for clarity on the role that the Government would like the fire and rescue service to play in this space. Essentially, when looking at the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, I urge the Minister to think about the role that the fire and rescue service could play and to make sure it is part of the process.
Dan Jarvis
The Chair of the Select Committee raises an important point, which I know was discussed at the Prime Minister’s inaugural wildfire summit just last week. It is absolutely on the Prime Minister’s mind and it has been raised with me on a number of occasions at a local level. I know that colleagues in other Departments are looking, along with my own Department, at what more we can do.
Adam Dance (Yeovil) (LD)
Flooding in Somerset is a huge issue. One of the care homes in my constituency flooded last year within seconds. Yes, the Government have given Somerset a lot more money towards tackling flooding, but that does not go far enough. What else can the Government do to support rural Somerset in being ready for flooding this year?
Dan Jarvis
I understand why the hon. Gentleman will want to raise concerns about his own area; that is absolutely his responsibility. He will, I hope, have heard the comments I made earlier about the amount of money that has been invested in flood defences. These are matters that we take incredibly seriously. I know, as a former metro mayor, the importance of issues relating to flooding and of working across local authority boundaries to make sure that, along with the Environment Agency and water companies, we have a proper response and a proper defensive posture is put in place. I discuss the matter regularly with my colleagues in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. If the hon. Gentleman has any specific concerns, or anything specific that he would like us to look at, I would be very happy to do that on his behalf.
Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)
As a Cornish MP, I can tell the House that we had 18,000 off-grid again this weekend with Storm Austen. We all worked together closely during Storm Goretti, and I want to mention Cormac, our farmers, the National Grid and our parish councils. National guidance was missing during Storm Goretti. It is really important that we now have it and that we have a locally led response, with parish emergency plans in place. Other countries have been doing this for years and I am really pleased that this Government have finally brought it in and have launched the campaign. One issue we will always have, though, is comms. We do not have copper wire any more. Perhaps internet and mobile phone providers should be category 2 responders under the Civil Contingencies Act. I wonder if the Minister could comment on that.
Dan Jarvis
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend, not least because the Cornwall experience and the experience of Storm Goretti has been genuinely important in shaping this campaign. I am grateful to her and her Cornish colleagues for the important role they play. A storm summit will be taking place in Cornwall towards the end of November. I have asked the director of Cobra and his deputy to be there. That will provide a really important forum for discussing the kinds of issues my hon. Friend has raised today.
Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)
In any emergency, communication is key. In answering the question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge (Sir Gavin Williamson) earlier, the Minister talked about restoring mobile services if they had been damaged in a storm, for example. But that rather misses the point for the villages that my right hon. Friend mentioned and the villages in my constituency, such as Cuddington and Bryants Bottom, that have no mobile signal right now. Through this resilience work, what more can the right hon. Gentleman do, with other Government Departments, to speed up delivery of the shared rural network and get those rural notspots the connectivity they need and deserve?
Dan Jarvis
The hon. Member makes an important point. Communication is key. I know he will understand that I was responding to a specific point about where a particularly capability had been lost and how it could be restored as quickly as possible, but I take his point about areas that do not have connectivity in the first place. I am sure that that is a conversation we want to have across Government, to look at what more we can do, working with colleagues in DCMS, but let me take that away and I will come back to him with some further thoughts.
Alex Ballinger (Halesowen) (Lab)
I welcome the Government’s serious approach to civil preparedness. I want to push back slightly against some Members on the Opposition Benches who implied that there was a difference between being prepared for natural disasters and for some of the hybrid attacks we are seeing across Europe. In recent months we have seen attacks against energy infrastructure, railways and supply chains; the same preparations will help folk in the UK be prepared for both those attacks and natural disasters. I was in the Finnish embassy a few days ago to talk about that issue. As other colleagues have mentioned, in Finland they talk about businesses working together with the voluntary sector and public bodies. Will the Minister say more about how we are learning from countries such as Finland on the whole of society working together?
Dan Jarvis
We are determined to learn lessons from our neighbours, and Finland, which has been mentioned previously, is a good example of that. My hon. Friend will understand that this campaign brings the UK into line with many other countries across Europe and further afield. It builds on the existing guidance that has already been published on gov.uk. My hon. Friend makes another important point, which is that the actions that people take in their own households to be ready for one emergency can also help in the context of other emergencies.
Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)
The United Kingdom is arguably already in a state of hybrid war against our adversaries. Does the Minister anticipate a cognitive component to this strategy designed to strengthen community resilience, not least to make it resilient against the kind of active disinformation that is likely to seek to undermine it? In that spirit, how will the strategy dovetail with the national centre for information defence?
Dan Jarvis
I hope that the hon. Gentleman will see that there is a reasonably obvious correlation between resilience at a local and community level and national resilience. Our national resilience will only be as strong as it can be if we have underpinned it with work that takes place at a localised level. It is work that we have not done previously as a Government—we need to build that wider societal resilience. We are starting bottom up, by investing in individual households to ensure that there is localised resilience. There will be wider and deeper benefits to our national security as a consequence of that. NCID, which the Prime Minister recently announced, will mean that we are much better placed to deter and defeat the misinformation and disinformation that we have seen for too long.
Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)
I pay tribute to the men and women of Scottish and Southern Electricity, who are out there right now reconnecting the homes in the Western Isles that lost power over the weekend due to the storms. Resilience is in-built on the islands, but as other Members have pointed out, we have major problems with connectivity because of the move from analogue to digital phonelines, which means that when the power goes out, people do not have the phone or the internet—and they often do not have a mobile signal either. BT and Openreach’s response—to give powerpacks to vulnerable customers who ask for them—is simply not adequate, and mobile phone providers do not have the means to maintain their signal during storms. Will the Minister call in those companies and get them to up their digital game and ensure that there is digital resilience—not just in the places that are easy, but on the edge, where people are vulnerable, isolated from their neighbours, and where the ambulance is an hour away?
Dan Jarvis
My hon. Friend is right to raise his concerns in the way he has. Our telecommunications networks are a vital part of the UK’s critical national infrastructure, and our emergency response in weather-related crises supports the functioning of essential services, keeping people connected when they need it most. My hon. Friend will understand that there is an important role for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport; I have listened carefully to his comments, and I will speak to colleagues in that Department.
David Reed (Exmouth and Exeter East) (Con)
The Minister will know how much I want the Government’s Be Ready campaign to succeed—I have shared my views with him at length—because the threats are real and increasing. But if the Government are going to ask people to stock up on tinned food and wind-up radios, they must be honest when we are attacked. The shadow Minister raised the case of Jaguar Land Rover, and the fact that the former Armed Forces Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns), said at the weekend that the incident was state sponsored. That is incredibly serious, so can the Minister use this opportunity to tell the House which state was responsible?
Dan Jarvis
I am sorry to disappoint the hon. Member, but I am not going to use the occasion of talking about Be Ready to get into matters relating to cyber attribution, not least because those are complicated processes that need to be done in a certain way, as I know he understands. The House will be well-versed in the challenges that Jaguar Land Rover faced last year. There is a lot of work across Government to ensure that there is resilience among both the public and private sector organisations in the United Kingdom. I will have more to say about that with the launch of the national cyber action plan, which is coming later this year.
Fred Thomas (Plymouth Moor View) (Lab)
I welcome the Government’s Be Ready campaign, which I will champion in my patch in Plymouth. I thank the Minister for his continued endeavours, over the last several years, to knot together different bits of Government agenda and Departments to grow greater resilience. Can he assure the House that this will encompass AI and emerging technologies as well, and can he give us a sense of what new endeavours are being stood up, given the massive acceleration of the threat to our national resilience in that space?
Dan Jarvis
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his kind words and his observation about the importance of drawing the campaign together from across Government. There needs to be a response that is balanced across Government Departments in order to ensure wider societal resilience. My hon. Friend is right to reference AI. I tend to focus on the significant challenges that AI brings, but there are also significant opportunities, including in this area. I work closely with the Minister for Artificial Intelligence in this endeavour, and I would be happy to discuss that with my hon. Friend further.
Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley) (Green)
The Minister is right to highlight the growing risk of the loss of services and utilities in emergencies. Preparedness needs to be driven at a national level, but much of it needs to be delivered at a local level. Will the Minister tell us how he is ensuring that local resilience forums are adequately funded, and can he assure us that every part of the UK has got a local resilience plan in place?
Dan Jarvis
Fundamentally, the hon. Gentleman makes an important point, and I agree with him. He is right that preparedness needs to be driven at a national level, which is precisely why we have launched a national campaign. But he is also right that it needs to be delivered at a local level, which is why, for some time now, there has been extensive consultation with local authorities through the Local Government Association, and with local resilience forums. The hon. Gentleman makes an entirely reasonable challenge on ensuring that there is coverage in every corner of the United Kingdom. We are working closely with metro mayors in England, and the devolved Governments in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, but it is my job to be satisfied that we have got that response right around the country. It is a responsibility that I take seriously.
Perran Moon (Camborne and Redruth) (Ind)
The Cornish peninsula is on the frontline of our Atlantic storms—and we are getting more storms. In January, Cornwall was smashed by Storm Goretti, as the Minister knows. Cornish MPs then met Ministers and civil servants to discuss the Cornish infrastructure issues that were exposed. On Thursday, 18,000 Cornish properties were left without power after the first storm of the season. Can the Minister advise, following those discussions, specifically on what the Government changed in Cornwall’s infrastructure to improve our resilience in the nine months between 6 January and 22 October? The time for talk is over.
Dan Jarvis
I agree with the hon. Member that Cornwall is on the frontline when it comes to our resilience. I am personally determined to ensure that we not only learn but implement lessons post Storm Goretti. There has been extensive consultation between officials in the Cabinet Office and in Cornwall. As I referenced earlier, the storm summit that will be taking place later next month provides an important opportunity to discuss those issues further.
Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)
The Government are right to talk about national resilience and preparedness—about where we keep our torches, among other things. I do not wish to catastrophise, but national resilience starts with something fundamental: producing food. That means supporting our farmers. Does the Minister agree that if food is not being produced, this country will quickly discover how fragile resilience really is?
Markus Campbell-Savours (Penrith and Solway) (Lab)
Echoing concerns raised by Members across the House, I ask the Minister to imagine an elderly constituent living alone in an isolated Lake district valley where copper phonelines have been replaced with fibre; a storm takes out the power to their router in the night, and by the time that they wake, the modest battery back-up has failed, as has the mobile mast. Does the Minister share my concerns that they would have no way to raise an alarm in an emergency, and agree that we need a new technological solution to protect the elderly?
Dan Jarvis
I absolutely share my hon. Friend’s concern, but I would again take this opportunity to emphasise the importance of the priority services register.
Helen Maguire (Epsom and Ewell) (LD)
I very much welcome the Be Ready campaign today. This Government have been pushing for devolved responsibilities, particularly at the mayoral level, but in his statement today, the Minister made no mention of the vital role that local authorities can play. Could the Minister expand on the role of local authorities in community resilience and preparedness?
Dan Jarvis
I think that is a little unfair, as I have been at pains to emphasise the important work that local authorities and local resilience forums do in that regard. That is certainly my view. We have been very careful to ensure that local authorities have been involved with the design of this campaign, and we have been in regular contact with the devolved Governments and the metro mayors. The hon. Lady’s fundamental point about the importance of local government is absolutely right. Local resilience forums, which have long championed the need for a campaign like this, do a really important job, and we will continue to work closely with them in its delivery.
Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)
The Minister will know from our many conversations my concerns around the threats we face from foreign states and terrorism. He will also be aware that Bracknell Forest, which is 33% trees, is at particular risk of forest fires; many of my constituents are also seeing power cuts at the moment because of the storms. Will the Minister confirm to the House that the Government’s Be Ready campaign is about raising awareness, not alarm, of the full range of threats that we face to our community resilience, and empowering local people to have the tools at hand to address those concerns?
Dan Jarvis
Absolutely. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his long-standing interest in these matters. He is right that this is about ensuring that the public are alert, but not alarmed, and that they are ready. That is the purpose of this campaign.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
For the final question, I call Claire Young.
Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)
Millions rely on daily medication to stay alive and healthy. We know the concern shortages cause; the NHS does not allow people to stockpile prescription medicines, and some require refrigeration. Will the NHS therefore now allow people to keep a small amount of spare medicine, and how will the Government ensure access to essential medications during widespread disruption to supplies, movement of goods or power?
Dan Jarvis
The hon. Lady is absolutely right to raise this particular issue. I know she will have seen that there is specific advice on the checklist with regard to medicine and health. The design of the campaign has been worked up closely with a range of different organisations, with a range of different stakeholder cohorts in mind, including people who are medically vulnerable for a range of different reasons. We are acutely conscious of the risk to those particular people, and the campaign has been carefully designed with them at the forefront of our mind to ensure that they will be best protected in the context of an everyday emergency.