London preppers shrug off three-day government checklist and stock months of supplies
Cabinet Office survey found quarter of Londoners could manage a day without utilities, torch sales jump 284 percent at Maplin
Images
Dan Jarvis explains the guidance for households to prepare to be 'self-sufficient for three days'
standard.co.uk
People have been encouraged to store supplies (Alamy/PA)
standard.co.uk
The British government recently sharpened its "Be Ready!" advice — a checklist of food, water and kit like a wind-up radio intended to carry households through three days of severe disruption, whether weather emergencies or cyber attacks. Retailers logged the response immediately: Maplin recorded a 284 percent jump in torch sales, power banks doubled, radios rose 92 percent, and Iceland saw tinned food sales climb 40 percent over a single weekend.
But the three-day checklist has turned out to be a floor, not a ceiling, for a growing number of Londoners. The Standard's Lucy Siegle interviewed households who stopped waiting for official reassurance long ago and started doing the arithmetic themselves.
Alex lives in a 1950s house in north London with her husband and three children aged 13 to 24. Her larder, cupboards and under-stair storage hold tins bought by the case, pasta, rice and eggs; she keeps three freezers running and maintains a minimum stock of a dozen eggs and half a tank of petrol. Her husband, formerly of a food charity, rotates the stock. She estimates she could look after her household for three weeks, pushing four. When a relative's mains water failed last month, she filled one of her garden containers at the tap and drove it over.
Craig, on the ninth floor of a Lambeth block with a partner and a young child, keeps catering buckets of heat-sealed Mylar packets — rice, lentils, beans, pasta, oats — lined up along the bottom shelf of an Ikea bookcase. The top row is reserved for nappies, formula and Calpol. He lived through Covid-era shortages in Australia and had a baby since; both experiences, he suggests, taught him the same lesson.
A Cabinet Office survey conducted this year found that a quarter of Londoners believed they could manage no more than a single day without utilities. The people filling bookcases with sealed grain have evidently run the numbers on what state agencies actually deliver in a crisis versus what they promise — and concluded the gap is theirs to fill. The government checklist, intended to calm the public, has become the best marketing the private stockpile industry never paid for.
Alex missed a £15 Lidl solar charging station last month — it sold out before she arrived. Someone else in north London is doing the same arithmetic faster.