Civil Preparedness for War

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 20th April 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, for securing this debate. Like other speakers, I will not just talk about civil preparedness for war but acknowledge that we are in the age of shocks, and that we face not just geopolitical and terrorism threats but threats from climate, from the collapse of nature and of course from pandemics, which continue to loom over us.

It is not just me or the Green Party saying this. I can go back to October 2025, when, as we now know, the Joint Intelligence Committee security assessment report for Defra warned that

“biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse”

threatened the foundation of our lives. That was in October 2025. That report was supressed by the Government and finally published on 20 January 2026. That report may only be in the redacted form. This is unclear—perhaps the Minister can tell me whether that is the full report.

Then, there was a second repressed Defra report, finally released on 24 March, which warned of the risk of the “catastrophic failure” of the UK’s food and water systems by 2030. Therefore, my first question to the Minister is: would he acknowledge that the first step of preparedness has to be the Government being honest with the public about what they know and the risks that we face?

To focus on those risks for a second, the government advice—which noble Lords may not know, because it is not very widely publicised—is that every household should keep three days’ worth of food in the cupboard. Here, I reference the very powerful speech by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka: how many households cannot afford to buy three days’ worth of food and stick it in the cupboard? There are very many. So, it is no good giving that advice if they cannot possibly do it.

Then, there is our oligarchic food system. Some nine big retailers supply 94.5% of all retail food. Tesco supplies nearly one-third of retail food sales and sends those out from 20 distribution centres. It is not just me who points out the vulnerability of that; it is obvious to anyone who might want to disrupt British society. Across all the retailers, it is 131 distribution centres.

I am going to be party political here for a second and address a question of philosophy. For the Green Party, resilience is at the heart of our political philosophy. We know we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. We know that an over-fertilised seedling with a thin, slender stem and very shallow roots that races up for the light will not be resilient. To be resilient, we have to build a healthy society, which is what is at the core of Green Party political philosophy.