[Paula Barker in the Chair]

I beg to move, That this House has considered preparedness for national emergencies. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker, and I am grateful to colleagues for coming to this important debate. As the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy has set out, the assumptions underpinning UK security are being challenged to an unprecedented degree in what it describes as “an era of radical uncertainty”. This is not a distant or theoretical challenge; it is happening now, and it is shaping the lives of our constituents already. We are rightly beginning to recognise that resilience at home—across our infrastructure, our communities and our economy—is vital. In opening this debate, I want to do four things: reflect on a recent example of where preparedness fell short; set out the changing nature of the threats we face; address the need for stronger co-ordination across Government; and reflect on the role of the public. During Storm Éowyn in January 2025, thousands of homes across my constituency lost power, many for several days. That came during a period of cold weather, leaving people without heating, electricity and, in some cases, access to essential medical equipment. People did not know where to turn, but they were receiving inconsistent information and had very little clarity on when the situation would improve. What stood out to me was not a lack of commitment, as energy companies, emergency services, local authorities and community organisations worked tirelessly. What it showed was that when the system came under real strain, the weaknesses were clear. Preparedness cannot be about having plans on paper; it must be about whether those plans work when they are actually needed.

It was really useful to observe the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Resilience Forum test exercise to understand what could go wrong and how it would deal with it. Does my hon. Friend agree that local resilience forums are crucial to our preparedness in national emergencies, because they know what our local communities need?

I could not agree more. A lot of planning had gone into severe weather events in Fife over the years, but it had never been tested. A lot of it was out of date, and staff had moved on. For example, in High Valleyfield, a former coal-mining village, there was an almost 10-year-old resilience plan that said that the local community centre would be opened. The community knew about the plan, but the council had totally forgotten about it. They did not even know who had the keys for the community centre, so the community figured it out for themselves. Broader lessons were also highlighted during that event, such as vulnerable customer data not being shared, confusion about support for care homes, a lack of generators, limited logistical capacity to deploy that provision, and access to temporary accommodation. Those are very practical failings, but they had very real consequences. The challenges we face now are broad and evolving—cyber-attacks, infrastructure sabotage, supply chain disruption, hybrid threats from hostile states, climate-related events and health and bio-security emergencies.

This weekend, in my Paisley and Renfrewshire North constituency, there were flight delays due to fuel shortages, which were no doubt caused by events in the middle east. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is precisely the type of event we should be mitigating against, before it becomes a national emergency?

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct: we need to ensure that we are preparing for all these eventualities, regardless of what causes them—I believe that individual case was caused by one driver shortage. The need to plan and have contingencies in place is vital.

Last year was monumental in terms of the number of events suffered in the UK and internationally; think about the economic damage to Jaguar Land Rover and Marks & Spencer, and there were power outages across Spain and Portugal for 10 hours. There is a real need for wider resilience. Certain other countries have made further progress on the issue, ensuring that each individual has, say, a “go bag” that will give them seven days’ provisions to ensure that they survive any natural catastrophe or other such event.

I am about to go on to that point; I will mention the need for resilience to be across Departments and involve the public. The impact of these events is often not immediately dramatic but gradual, cumulative and enduring. One crisis flows into another, as I am sure Ministers feel every day. We must think of preparedness as being not just for an event but for a different type of world altogether. In that context, I refer to article 3 of the North Atlantic treaty, which is often overlooked but is highly relevant. It puts a duty on nations to maintain and develop their capacity to resist attack through continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid. Article 3 refers to an armed attack, but I believe that in the unstable world we live in we should read that in the broadest possible terms. Attacks no longer happen instantaneously, as they did when NATO was created, and neither do they come just from other states.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is being typically generous in taking interventions. Last week, the director of GCHQ spoke about Russian hybrid warfare against the UK and how pervasive it consistently is. That is understood by defence experts, but is perhaps not well enough understood by the general public. Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a duty on Government to educate people about the scale of Russian hybrid warfare against the UK, so that we are properly prepared?

I absolutely agree; that is a point I will come to later. We must engage with the public if we want their permission to plan for resilience. Article 3 tells us that preparedness must be constant and not confined to defence Departments. It must be collective, but it requires active participation across the system. I would be grateful if the Minister picked up on how resilience is being embedded across Departments in the areas of threat highlighted by the national security strategy.

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this issue forward; I spoke to him beforehand. Does he agree that if groups tasked with preparedness training, such as the building resilience in communities project in Northern Ireland, are to be effective, they must be well funded? The work carried out with local groups to build grassroots disaster resilience can bring about results only if there is the scope to invest in reaching out and if groups are not hampered by tiny budgets. This is not just about England but Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland collectively.

As ever, I agree with the hon. Gentleman—I always agree with his interventions, particularly when they are made so well. There is a need to make sure that we break outside of the M25, frankly, when we talk about resilience. We also need to look seriously at the resilience of our critical national infrastructure. What is striking about many of the risks we now face is that they do not require a full-scale conflict. They can arise from hybrid threats, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South (Gordon McKee) mentioned: those are much below the threshold of war but are capable of causing real and widespread disruption. In a recent discussion with senior officials about the threat of Chinese-manufactured cellular internet of things modules, in my role as chair of the Coalition on Secure Technology, it was suggested to me that because the threat from such modules was theoretical—even though it was acknowledged that it was clearly feasible and would have a significant impact—there might be no need to prepare for it. Most risks are theoretical until they are very real, and the public then wonder why we were not prepared. I ask the Minister to specifically say what conversations he is having about the threat of cellular modules to the UK. Which Departments have been involved in those discussions? I move on to our energy system—a key and particularly sensitive part of our infrastructure. We have seen how Vladimir Putin has used energy as a weapon against ordinary Ukrainian people, and he would be more than willing to do the same to British people as well. Without reliable energy, hospitals cannot function, communication systems begin to fail and supply chains break down. The Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, which I am a member of, will hold an evidence session on this very topic tomorrow. I have raised the issue with Defence Ministers before, but I believe that there are areas where we lack clarity on the legal position when it comes to hybrid attacks on our offshore infrastructure. I would welcome the Minister’s thoughts on what role the Cabinet Office can play in resolving that, as there seems to be an unclear boundary between the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Ministry of Defence in particular. I turn to the point made by the hon. Member for Strangford about the importance of the devolved Administrations. Emergencies are experienced locally, as I highlighted at the beginning—they are managed locally, and resilience must be built locally. Too often, the UK’s national security infrastructure can feel as though it is concentrated within the M25 and shaped in central Government rather than fully embedded across all parts of the United Kingdom. I do not believe that that is intended, but it does create a risk: if preparedness is genuinely to be a whole-of-society effort, it must extend beyond Whitehall. In those areas, security, advice and expertise do not always flow consistently to devolved Administrations and local partners. At the same time, those Administrations do not deal with national security issues with the same regularity as central Government. That creates a potential blind spot—due not to a lack of commitment, but the structure of the system. It is exactly the kind of gap that hostile actors could seek to exploit. I hope the Minister will address what more can be done to ensure that security advice and capability are fully embedded across the devolved Administrations and local authorities, and how we can ensure resilience is genuinely UK-wide, rather than only inside central Government. Finally, I turn to a topic that is becoming a bit of a hobby horse of mine: the requirement to trust the public when we are developing our national security and resilience. Preparedness cannot be delivered by the Government alone; it must involve the public.

My hon. Friend is making a powerful argument. He has mentioned the M25 a few times; people may not expect South Hampstead to suffer from frequent surface water flooding. I have been contacted by two groups, the Hillsiders and the Hampstead and Highgate Climate and Nature Group, who would like to talk about strengthening education, especially about climate change in the national curriculum. There is limited information in the national curriculum when it comes to climate change and the climate emergency. Does my hon. Friend agree that strengthening education for children and young people would help in the long run when it comes to tackling national emergencies?

I absolutely agree. We need to make sure that we are preparing clear information about the risks that we face, what a climate emergency means in reality, and how communities can help respond to that fully and effectively. We also need to make sure that we are providing practical guidance for individuals and communities, as well as a shared understanding of what resilience is.

Often when we are talking about building confidence among the public, we tend to think about it at the moment of crisis, rather than making sure that we explain the causes of the crisis that we need to prepare for. Particularly in the context of the energy crisis that we are living through, it is more important than ever that we emphasise that those global drivers could end up having consequences for our own communities. We need to be working to prevent them collectively, collaboratively and at an international level in order to be part of our national security and resilience.

I agree with my hon. Friend. We have discussed that issue many times, both in the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee and outside. The need for collective action is required and we must make sure the public are a key part of that. They must understand why certain crises are happening. Sometimes they are outwith Government control; we are affected by what happens in the world and we must make sure that we are bringing them along in that conversation.

Nowhere is it more apparent what happens when a community is not prepared than in South Devon. We have a major A road that washed into the sea in February and we now have communities that are completely severed: bus services are not running, school buses are not running, and people cannot get to healthcare appointments or to their jobs. It is a complete nightmare. The community knew that that might happen at some point, but for many years the local authority refused to address the issue and do the preparation required to make sure that the inland road network was sufficient to compensate for the main road that has now washed into the sea. It is an absolute disaster. If we had been better prepared, our communities would not be in the situation they now find themselves in.

I am sorry to hear that the hon. Lady’s constituents are having that issue; that is terrible. Again, it is why we must make sure that we are preparing for all different types of resilience. That must be at the forefront of the minds of the public and different levels of Government when we consider the different challenges that we face, whether internal or external and whether beyond our control or very much within our control, as it sounds that example was. The national security strategy tells us that the assumptions underpinning UK security are being challenged to an unprecedented degree. We must not hide from the public the scale or nature of the threats that we face. We must trust people with information that we might previously have chosen to withhold and we should worry less about causing alarm and more about appearing to hide the truth. If the public do not feel and understand that, they will not support and force us to carry out the investment and actions required to address the challenges. Any Government who have not undertaken that work with the public at its heart will have very large political price to pay. I have not even had time in this speech to touch on the threat to the public and the need to prepare for ongoing misinformation. If we lose trust with the public, resilience will be weakened. Preparedness for national emergencies is not a single policy or programme; it is a system—more than that, it is a mindset. When the next crisis comes, and it will, the question will not be whether plans existed on paper. It will be whether, on the ground, the Government did enough to prepare and make sure that our communities were ready.

Order. After the next speaker, I will have to impose a two-minute speaking limit. I call Dr Ben Spencer.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing this important debate. Given the number of hon. Members here, we could have had a three-hour debate on his wide-ranging speech. I will be brief so colleagues can get in. In Runnymede and Weybridge, we have flooding incidents almost every year. Thankfully, they are often not huge, but sometimes they very much are. The local resilience forum exists to deal with the really big emergencies, but we often have what I call sub-acute flooding events—where there is enough flooding to cause risk to properties and people, but not enough to trigger an LRF major response. The problem for people facing flooding incidents is that Floodline operates as a telephone directory. The roads are dealt with by the county council. The Environment Agency deals with the direct response. The fire service deals with emergency rescue. The local authorities, Runnymede borough council or Elmbridge borough council, deal with different responses. We have Affinity Water, which is for direct freshwater coming to people’s homes, and we have Thames Water, which deals with the drainage. Each is responsible for a different bit. We have the county council, which leads on overall flood preparedness. It is too disjointed. What we need locally, and also nationally, are flood control centres that can bring all these different organisations together to co-ordinate a flood response. A few years ago, during the last big flood that we had while I have been an MP, my team and I ended up dealing with a lot of the flood response and communicating directly with people. I am very happy to do that, but we need a flood control centre to be able to do so. I think that would help our national resilience. MPs, broadly speaking, have a role in being embedded in our communities. We usually know what is happening at all different levels and we have key contacts on the ground. On that basis, for the local resilience response, does the Minister agree that MPs should have direct access to local resilience forum chairs, both before and during an emergency event?

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) for securing this important debate, with so many MPs and such a short amount of time for such a big topic. As the former shadow Paymaster General, I spent two years working on national resilience policy, and I am pleased to see many of those policies emerging in Bills in our programme of government today. I am proud to have secured the 2024 manifesto commitment to strengthen preparedness across central Government, local authorities, emergency services and local resilience forums. I speak today as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for the environment. Our APPG is currently conducting an inquiry into national resilience and adaptation. We welcome written responses from any organisations or individuals listening to this debate, including any Members here today. Across two critical evidence sessions, we have covered housing, infrastructure, nature and food systems. We have learned from vital stakeholders including the National Farmers Union, Zurich Insurance, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the UK Green Building Council, the Woodland Trust and Kew Gardens.

Will the hon. Member give way?

No, I only have two minutes; I am afraid I will not be able to give way. The message from stakeholders has been unequivocal. The UK is fundamentally unprepared for the scale of the climate risks that we face. These risks cascade across systems. Extreme heat killed nearly 3,000 people in 2022, but by 2050, deaths could reach 10,000 people annually. Flooding costs us £2.4 billion every year. Crucially, 60% of England’s most productive farming land is at high flood risk. As the Climate Change Committee’s recent report, “A Well-Adapted UK”, warned, nature must be treated as vital infrastructure. To match the urgency, we must adopt some critical interventions. I first want to ask the Minister whether the lessons from the covid inquiry will be learned and shared. It was an enormous achievement to get that inquiry—there was an enormous amount of evidence—but it really showed that Ministers must not take their eye off the ball, as the previous Government did with Brexit and their lack of preparation for covid. We must learn the lessons, and they must be shared with us now. We need stronger flood mitigation planning, and enforcement by local councils. We must embed strict resilience standards, including, among many other things, planting trees, which is a key action. We must act now before the risks become unmanageable crises.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing this important debate. Before summer has even begun properly, an amber wildfire alert has been issued in West Dorset. Since 2021, there have been 397 wildfire incidents meeting national wildfire criteria, requiring more than 2,100 appliance mobilisations. Last year’s fires on Holt Heath and Newton Heath required 164 and 134 appliances respectively over multiple days. Yet at precisely the moment when demands on our fire services to respond to emergencies are increasing, Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service faces huge financial pressures. It has already lost about one fifth of its workforce since 2010, and £15 million of savings have been required. It now faces ongoing budget deficits and declining central Government support; the central Government funding deficit will rise from £1.2 million to £1.7 million by 2029. As a result, proposals have been brought forward to close eight on-call fire stations, including Charmouth and Maiden Newton in my constituency, which would mean the loss of 72 firefighters and the closure of 16% of fire stations across the area. If we are serious about our preparedness for emergencies, we must reform the fire funding formula, provide greater flexibility over local funding arrangements, and ensure that rural services remain sustainable.

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. Agility and long-term planning are two essential cornerstones of our preparedness for national emergencies. There are two types of national emergency where we must instil those traits: climate and nature, and artificial intelligence and data centres. The UK’s food system, economy, water security, flood protection and public health all depend on functioning ecosystems, yet the Joint Intelligence Committee has warned that every critical ecosystem that the UK depends upon is on a pathway to collapse, posing huge risks to our security, prosperity and way of life. Restoring nature is vital to avoid national emergencies. A functioning, healthy ecosystem reduces flood risk; protects our homes, hospitals and transport systems from overheating; sustains soil so that we can grow food; and cleans the very air that we breathe. By legislating for a strategic nature network and recognising it as national infrastructure, we can restore, connect and maintain a system of key functional ecosystems that strengthen our national security, protect communities and build resilience across the UK. Furthermore, in terms of the preparedness of our infrastructure for national emergencies, Britain is not truly sovereign as long as we are helpless to act in an AI emergency in our country. Data centres are now part of our critical national infrastructure, but the UK does not have the sovereign capability to pull the plug in the case of a dangerous AI cyber-attack or the takeover of Britain’s data centres. My amendment to the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill would change that. This kill switch would be a last resort, allowing the Government to pull the plug when things go wrong or where there is sufficient evidence that things will go wrong. It would cover two threats: AI-driven cyber-attacks and the development of superintelligent AI that is utilising UK data centres. Most of the public would be surprised to find that kill switch powers do not already exist: there is no big red button to shut down a data centre that poses a risk to people, the economy or our national infrastructure. Kill switch powers are an essential first step in preparedness, and Parliament should seize this opportunity to truly prepare for such a national crisis.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. One of the greatest threats to public safety is climate breakdown, with the increasing frequency and severity of extreme heat, flooding, food and water scarcity, critical infrastructure failures, and risks to public health and safety. Climate resilience must be embedded at the heart of national emergency planning, yet the Climate Change Committee’s key message in its latest advice is that the UK is woefully ill-prepared for the catastrophic impacts to come. The CCC makes it clear that affordable, practical solutions are available and that the cost of inaction will far exceed the investment required to prepare. Those dangers are not distant: more than 1,500 deaths have been recorded on average each year from extreme heat in recent years, and this could rise to 10,000 a year by 2050. By 2050, one in four properties could be at risk of flooding. The Joint Intelligence Committee report in January made it clear that ecosystem collapse and biodiversity loss make our food system extremely vulnerable. The Government and Members of most parties in this Parliament rightly have a strong focus on carbon reduction and climate mitigation, but we must increase our collective focus, and the Government’s focus, on climate adaptation and resilience. As the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) said, we currently see far too little co-ordinated action across Government. There must be cross-Government approach, which is why I argue that we need a Cabinet Office Minister responsible for climate resilience across Government: preparing the NHS for new public health challenges; investing in flood protection; developing a comprehensive extreme heat strategy and a national drought plan; strengthening transport, water and energy infrastructure; and supporting a farmer-led transition to climate-resilient food production. Climate breakdown is not simply an environmental issue; it is a matter of national security, public health and emergency preparedness. I ask the Minister: will we prepare now, or pay a greater price later?

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing this debate. Before I was elected to this House, I served as a humanitarian aid worker and spent time in a number of war zones, so I know the importance of preparedness for emergencies and for scenarios that one hopes will never happen. In a country like ours, the role of the state is crucial in this. As my hon. Friend set out, foreign aggressors threaten our country, along with a whole range of new and emerging threats. My hon. Friend also spoke about Storm Éowyn, and we know that, as the rate of climate change increases, the effect of such storms will be exacerbated. When Storm Éowyn hit my constituency, more than 15,000 people across Fife lost power in freezing conditions, and it brought to light flaws in the preparedness for the storm at many different levels, including failures in the priority services register. People’s phone batteries ran out and they had no signal or way of contacting anyone. There were also failures in how the Scottish Government and local authorities planned to get resources to vulnerable communities, including those in areas served by independent distribution network operators, such as Fordell Gardens in my constituency, which was completely left out. It took me more than a year of follow-up to get any kind of action on that issue. We need more joined-up thinking to prepare for such events in future, but we must also be prepared for the international threats that we face. I have to say that we lag behind our European allies in this kind of national preparedness. Our peers such as Sweden and Finland are much further ahead than we are, because of the threats that they have faced historically from Russia. We have the new strategic defence review and the resilience action plan, but we must speed up that work so they are not just frameworks on a shelf but the culture of our country, where individuals, communities and agencies work together to prepare for the threats that we may face in future.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. Across the river, we can all see the covid memorial wall with a quarter of a million red hearts—a quarter of a million of our people lost. Few families were unaffected. My son is an accident and emergency doctor, and he was then working at a London hospital. His accounts of A&E were terrifying, and my wife felt that we had sent our son to war. There was inadequate protection for staff, with masks that did not fit and plastic aprons. PPE—personal protective equipment—was an acronym we had never heard before. Our hospitals simply did not have enough ventilators or intensive care facilities, and were forced to triage those who could be salvaged and those who could not. This must not happen again. We must be prepared, for who knows when there will be another pandemic. Let us learn the lessons and never forget those whom we have lost. Still today, there are healthcare workers with long covid and post-traumatic stress disorder. I think especially of our very young doctors and nurses, who were suddenly exposed to death and loss on levels quite unprecedented in our NHS. We must look after them. We must invest in pandemic research and preparedness. Public health is national health, and we must invest in it. Jenner first discovered vaccination in 1796 when he took pus from a cowpox lesion on a local milkmaid called Sarah Nelms and inoculated his gardener’s son, an eight-year-old lad called James Phipps—the first person ever to be vaccinated. Our country has a strong record of medical research, and we are all proud of it. Our scientists developed a covid vaccine that saved countless lives. Let me use this moment to make a further plea to do all we can in this House to support basic and applied medical research, for it is upon such scientific advances that we will all rely.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) for bringing us this important debate. In remote villages and communities such as mine, severe weather can often lead to prolonged power outages. Following Storm Arwen last year, one village in my Carlisle constituency was without electricity for five days. Data analysis found that the storm triggered a rapid, severe and sustained decline in mobile performance across all operators on a scale not seen before. Historically, when electricity networks were hit by power cuts, people could still rely on the old copper wire telephone network to remain in service. However, with the full retirement of the public switched telephone network scheduled for January next year, our communications infrastructure will become increasingly dependent on digital fixed lines and mobile networks, both of which require power. That raises an important question about resilience. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which a prolonged power outage leads not only to the loss of electricity but to a telecommunications blackout. Mobile masts are currently required to have only one hour of back-up power, which is nowhere near sufficient when there is a real possibility of a multi-day outage. I recognise that mandating longer power back-up on every single mast would be disproportionate. A more proportionate response would be to require mobile network operators to maintain a fleet of mobile electricity generators that could be towed to mast sites to restore power while the electricity network is repaired. With extreme weather events becoming more frequent and intense as the climate warms, I believe that the UK’s preparedness for national weather-related emergencies requires the Government and Ofcom to look again at the adequacy of the current regulatory requirements for power back-up to mobile masts.

After the next speaker, I will have to reduce the time limit to one minute. I am really sorry; this is obviously a very popular debate. I will call the Lib Dem spokesperson at around 5.10 pm.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Barker. Emergency preparedness in east Kent is essential because the area contains major strategic entry points to the UK, including the port of Dover and the channel tunnel. Those vital gateways for trade and travel handle a significant proportion of the nation’s freight and passenger movement. However, their importance also makes them particularly vulnerable to disruption, whether through accidents, severe weather, security incidents or operational pressures. The consequences of such disruption can extend far beyond the region, affecting national supply chains, businesses and the movement of essential goods. We saw a clear example of that over the recent bank holiday weekend when travellers experienced delays of around four hours at border checks, highlighting what can happen to these systems when they are under severe pressure. In that context, effective preparedness, co-ordination and communication are critical. Another key element of resilience in the region is the international rail service between mainland Europe and London, which passes through my constituency. Members will be aware that I have previously raised the economic and strategic importance of restoring international services to Ashford International, for which I will continue to campaign. Although trains do not currently stop at the station, it nevertheless plays a crucial contingency role. In the event of an emergency on the line between London and the channel tunnel, Ashford International remains a designated location where passengers can safely disembark. Despite the absence of stopping services for over six years, Eurostar has until now maintained a contract to keep the facilities at Ashford available for emergency use. Importantly, the infrastructure remains fully operational, with international platforms, security arrangements and access routes enabling emergency services to reach trains quickly and passengers to be evacuated safely when necessary. However, that contract is due to expire later this year. I know the Minister may not be able to give much detail, but I hope he will take that matter up with his colleagues in the Department.

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing this debate. I want to put a proposal to the Minister for a national resilience strategy to sit alongside our national industrial strategy, not in competition with it but in parallel as a strategic, essential partner. That new national resilience strategy should look at the key elements that our communities and nation cannot afford to function without: first, food, water and waste; secondly, health emergency services; thirdly, construction, housing, transport and logistics; fourthly, energy production and transmission; then, education and local resilience networks; finally, defence and military technology. Each pillar of that strategy should have an individual programme to make sure that we are able to grow those industries and act individually without being reliant on imports. For food, we are reliant on imports of fertiliser, for instance. Making sure that we can adopt the strategy used for the renationalisation of British Steel in our critical industries will be hugely important for national resilience.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I must declare an interest as a registered pharmacist. Before my election as an MP I worked in community pharmacy for nearly two decades and, crucially, worked on the frontline through the covid-19 pandemic. Like so many frontline healthcare workers, in my constituency of North Somerset and up and down the country, I went to work every day during lockdown as a key worker to serve members of my community, helping patients to maintain continued access to essential medicines and medical advice. Any pharmacist will tell you that that was not an easy time for our profession. We were not prepared. We were scared that we could bring covid to our own families and we desperately tried to do our best by our patients even when we had little advice to go on. I will not list a litany of failures, as the detailed covid inquiry did, but I will say clearly that under the previous Government our healthcare system was stretched thin. In a national crisis the public and frontline workers need to trust the Government, yet pharmacies were told that they did not even need PPE. Resilience must be built into future plans. True neighbourhood health means ensuring that we have systems, processes and governance ready before the next crisis hits.

I call Perran Moon.

Meur ras, Mrs Barker. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship. On 8 January Cornwall was smashed by one of the most powerful storms in decades. Storm Goretti delivered 100 mph winds, thousands of trees were torn from their roots, roofs were ripped off and communications infrastructure was flattened. Despite warnings that storms of this nature will become increasingly frequent, resilience systems proved wholly inadequate. The local resilience forum is not even based in Cornwall but 110 miles away in Exeter, which led to a woeful response at critical moments. Five months on, where is the review of Cornwall’s digital connectivity? What is the assessment of Cornwall’s critical infrastructure? When will the Government commit to an overhaul of the 40-year-old Bellwin formula? What assessment has been made of the use of satellite technology in remote areas? I cannot help thinking that if the storm had hit Surrey, London or Manchester, those questions would have been answered and solutions put in place, but for us in Cornwall—the home of the critical minerals industry—it feels once again like we are second-class citizens. I have to say that if the Minister thinks Cornish MPs can be ignored or placated, he is wrong.

After the next speaker, I will call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I want to focus on two areas of national resilience. The first is hospital capacity. The covid inquiry highlighted the lack of surge capacity within the NHS, and NATO recognises the lack of medical capacity as a critical vulnerability. The UK has an opportunity to address both challenges together through better integration of civilian and military capabilities. The second area is supply chains for essential medicines. China now controls about 85% to 90% of global production of the antibiotic precursor 6-aminopenicillanic acid or 6APA, on which many common antibiotics depend. There is only one remaining producer of it across Europe and within the NATO area. That is a strategic dependency that should concern us all. Indeed, it especially matters because of the NATO article 3 commitment to national resilience, which is becoming increasingly important. We are targeting the 1.5% spending on the resilience component, so resilience is far more than defence.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing this debate. It has been extremely fruitful and I hope that the Minister will be able to answer all the questions that have been asked. In preparing for the debate, I reflected on Raymond Briggs’s book, “When The Wind Blows”. It is shocking to think that it was published 44 years ago. It is a very useful reflection on how the state failed to prepare the UK for nuclear war and on how we were equally unprepared. I also reflected some of the challenges that we face. Although the number of challenges we face now may have increased, the players out there—Russia, Iran, China or North Korea—are the same. I will touch on three key areas today. First, there is false information or fake news. I visited Moldova earlier this year, and people there were really alive to it, because Ukraine is acting as their shield. Russia is engaging in lots of nefarious activities in that part of the world and the Moldovan population is used to dealing with false information. Secondly, I was delighted to support an event at Torquay Library last week, where a librarian called Hazel was helping youngsters to understand which sources of news can be trusted and which cannot. I would like the Minister to reflect on how that approach could be built into our curriculum, because the sooner we make young people, and their parents and grandparents, alive to the importance of such an approach, the better. Another area of significant challenge is cyber-security. There are real challenges, whether they involve Jaguar Land Rover or people’s personal finances, and the consequences can be devastating. We know that the number of threats to national infrastructure has doubled over the last year, mostly from hostile players elsewhere in the world. Minister, we should develop a sovereign digital approach to such threats, so that we can protect our own infrastructure without having to outsource it to a third party.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker, for this vital debate on our nation’s preparedness for national emergencies. We live in an era defined by profound and accelerating global volatility. The primary duty of any state is the protection of its citizens: we must ensure that the United Kingdom is as properly prepared to meet the threats of an unstable world as it is to respond to a domestic crisis. Our adversaries are becoming bolder. We have seen hostile state action inching closer to our shores, with alarming incidents such as Russian-flagged vessels anchoring mere miles off the UK coast and directly above the critical transatlantic telecommunication cables that underpin our digital economy. When the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster introduced the UK Government’s resilience action plan last year, he promised that it would assess the UK’s resilience, enable a whole of society approach and significantly improve public sector resilience. Almost a year later, however, what we find is a framework characterised by high-level bureaucratic ambition that is fatally undermined by deep structural fragility, broken promises and ministerial inaction. I must start with the foundational prerequisite for national resilience—the economy. I understand why the Government want to talk about resilience planning, but they ignore the elephant in the room: a collapsing economy locked in a doom loop of high spend, high debt and high taxes. True national resilience requires immense fiscal headroom and economic stability. A Government who are actively hollowing out that macroeconomic foundation are inherently making Britain more vulnerable and far less equipped to absorb and recover from future crises. Turning to the machinery of central Government, the Amber Book, updated in April 2025, rightly makes explicit the leadership role of the Cabinet Office in the cross-Government response to national emergencies, yet its operational execution relies entirely on seamless co-ordination with lead Government Departments. Nearly a year ago, the Government explicitly committed to publishing refreshed lead Government Department expectations to clarify the exact role of the Cabinet Office and other Departments in planning and responding to crises. Ministers promised that we would have those by spring 2026. It is now approaching the middle of the year, but there is seemingly no sign of those vital expectations. Why does that administrative failure matter? Take the grave case of a national power outage. The resilience action plan claims that the Cabinet Office would provide oversight, but experts at the Royal United Services Institute have explicitly warned that the current fragmentation of responsibilities between the Cabinet Office, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and arms-length bodies like the National Energy System Operator risks creating profound confusion. They warned that this fragmentation will fundamentally slow down central Government’s response during an acute crisis. Ministers must urgently rectify this failure and explain to the House why they have failed to publish those expectations on schedule, leaving interdepartmental boundaries dangerously ambiguous. This failure extends to the Government’s promises to the private sector. The resilience action plan includes a commitment to use the critical national infrastructure knowledge base to map out the various resilience standards to which businesses in those vital sectors are held. While Ministers have confirmed that the interactive map of vulnerabilities has been completed, they have not provided any timeline on their progress in mapping out those resilience standards. Furthermore, businesses were promised a comprehensive package of support to help them to improve their own resilience. The Government committed to publishing further information on business impacts alongside the national risk register, including a dedicated business section on the Prepare website. Where are they? None of the commitments seems to have been fulfilled. If the Government expect the private sector to take a leading role in improving our preparedness, they must honour their commitments to support businesses in doing so. At a local level, local resilience forums are the absolute frontline of our emergency response, yet the foundational wider guidance detailing the fundamental role of those forums in emergency response was last updated in 2013. That means that we are asking our local emergency planners to combat the complex, cascading threats of 2026 using a conceptual framework that was drawn up in what may as well have been a different world. The previous Government launched the emergency alert system in March 2023 after almost two years of public testing. It was an important part of our preparedness for a national emergency, allowing Government and the emergency services to send a text alert to mobile phones in a situation where there is perceived to be an immediate risk to life. However, a ping on a mobile phone cannot be a substitute for robust national infrastructure, and strategic documents are meaningless if the core guidance for our frontline responders remains over a decade old. It is now time for the Government to move beyond issuing glossy action plans and start doing the hard foundational work of actually preparing this country for the realities of the modern threat landscape.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on his work in this area and on securing this important debate. In the interest of time, I intend to go through my pre-prepared remarks, but I have noted the themes that have been covered. I hope that colleagues will forgive me if I breeze through the themes and pick up any shortfall in subsequent correspondence, either through me or the Cabinet Office. We have heard excellent contributions on the impacts of hot and cold weather; covid and the need to learn lessons from the discoveries in the inquiry; the role of the Cabinet Office; the role that MPs lead locally; and education, skills and the role of devolved learning. I assure my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon) that specifics on Cornwall shall not be ignored or bought off, and I look forward to a conversation with him on this in due course. The Government’s first responsibility is to keep the country safe. Domestic resilience is a fundamental element of our national security strategy. The resilience action plan, published in July 2025, sets out the Government’s strategic vision for a stronger and more resilient UK and the steps being taken to deliver that, including building domestic resilience and supporting the whole of our society to build its own resilience. The Government utilise a range of tools as part of emergency response, including the National Situation Centre, which was established in 2021 and provides situational awareness for crisis response and the emergency alerts system, which is an essential capability to inform and warn the public in emergencies. We are living through a rapidly changing global risk landscape, driven by geopolitical instability and rapid technological change, where the threats facing the UK are numerous, complex and exist on many fronts. Those risks may be non-malicious, such as accidents or natural hazards, or they may be malicious threats from malign actors who seek to harm us. Against that set of risks, it is more important than ever to make resilience front and centre of the UK’s approach to national security. Without security and resilience at home, we cannot deliver economic growth, peace and prosperity or any of the other Government missions to improve everyday life in Britain.

Where does the energy crisis we are currently in with the situation in the strait of Hormuz sit on the national risk register?

I will get on to preparedness and the impact of global events, including in the middle east, but I will come back to my hon. Friend on specifics. Responsibility for the overarching resilience system is led by the COBR Directorate in the Cabinet Office. Colleagues are rightly asking about the role the Cabinet Office takes in this work. It leads work on cross-cutting and high-priority risks, and in scenarios with major impacts, it uses the COBR mechanism to manage the Government’s response to major crises or events. The UK Government define resilience as the ability to anticipate, assess, prevent, mitigate, respond to and recover from shocks. The resilience landscape is extensive and encompasses natural hazards, deliberate attacks, geopolitical instability and so on. The foundation of the Government’s approach is the national security risk assessment, which identifies and assesses the most serious acute risks facing the UK over a two to five-year time horizon. Under the lead Government Department model, each NSRA risk is owned by a lead Government Department, ensuring that those with the most relevant expertise, relationships and levers are responsible for putting the necessary planning response and recovery arrangements in place for each risk area. The Government are also taking steps to enhance our readiness for the highest impact, whole-of-system crises called catastrophic risks, including by explicitly embedding the leadership role of the Cabinet Office in our central crisis management doctrine, the Amber Book. Alongside that, the Government have an extensive programme of assurance to understand how prepared we are to assess risks, including through a dedicated red teaming capability in the Government Office for Science and independent expert panel reviews. Together, this approach ensures that the Government collectively understand and are prepared for the risks the UK faces overall, which relies on a collaborative approach and a shared ownership across Government Departments. The Government are committed to working in partnership with both the devolved Governments and the local tier to effectively plan for and respond to risks wherever they occur. The Cabinet Office leads for Government on the overall response to severe weather. That is, in effect, a co-ordinating role, as individual Departments lead for the response, planning and longer term resilience of the sectors they represent. A key component is the severe weather resilience network, which is chaired by the COBR Directorate and comprises representatives across Government Departments. On the matter of heat, periods of high temperature and heat waves are not a new phenomenon, and their risk—in terms of both impact and likelihood—is well documented in planning advice from the Government. There are tried and tested arrangements in place to warn of impending extreme temperatures, to review preparedness and, if needed, to co-ordinate the Government’s response to the impacts that they may have. On the devolved authorities, it is vital that the four nations across the UK work together to keep communities safe, so that we can ensure that we are most effectively using the different levers that each Government hold. On the matter of local resilience forums, it is also essential that we strengthen resilience at the local level, and the Government are committed to the stronger LRF trailblazers programme, which provides selected areas with the opportunity to test approaches and strengthen leadership. I encourage local MPs to engage with that leadership.

Will the Minister give way?

I will not, as I want to make some progress, and I am afraid there is still a lot to cover. On covid, several Members made excellent points about the need to recall, remember and learn from that damning period. One such example is the significant improvement made to our crisis response structures and capabilities in line with the recommendations made in the covid-19 module 1 inquiry. That included establishing the National Situation Centre in 2021 to improve the use of data in crisis response, creating a single Cabinet committee for resilience to ensure ministerial oversight. On the issue of education and resilience, we must provide excellent training, and exercising is also essential to ensure that individual sectors can work together to prepare for, respond to and recover from crises. The Government have also established the UK resilience plan. On the matter of AI, AI sovereignty is defined as the UK having resilient access to key AI capabilities. My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) referred to the need to counter the increasing threats posed by AI that is housed and created away from these shores. Sovereign capability is vital, and the launch of the sovereign AI unit is vital as we transition towards that authority, as it will help the UK to win at strategically important parts of that value chain. Civil society also plays an important role in the UK’s resilience, including the many voluntary, community and faith sector organisations that contribute to community-level resilience and emergency planning. The resilience of the UK’s critical national infrastructure is of central importance to ensuring that the essential services on which the public rely continue to operate. Given the fundamental and connected nature of those services, failure has the potential to cause cascading and catastrophic consequences. The resilience action plan’s all-hazards approach, combined with the priorities in the strategic defence review, the national security strategy and the 10-year infrastructure strategy, underpins the Government’s commitment to improving the security and resilience of CNI. On smart devices and tech resilience, the Government take an actor-agnostic, risk-based approach to supply chain resilience. Instead of reacting to individual firms or components in isolation, we must focus on the structural choke points and systemic dependencies that create national-level vulnerability, regardless of where in the chain they are. While cellular modules present some specific cyber-threats, those can be mitigated in effectively the same way as any other cyber-risks. Therefore, existing work to strengthen our cyber-resilience will impact how vulnerable sectors and organisations are to threats via the cellular internet of things. In conclusion, the Government continue to regularly engage the public and parliamentarians on risk and resilience through our annual statement to Parliament, which gives a strategic overview of the current risk picture. The next annual statement will be made in July this year, and it will provide detailed updates on progress made to deliver against the commitments over the last 12 months.

I thank everyone for participating in the debate this afternoon, in which we heard the different range of threats that the UK is undoubtedly facing. I urge the Minister to continue to work across Government wherever possible, particularly on the threats to energy infrastructure, subsea cables and other items that were brought up by Members. We must ensure that such work is co-ordinated through Government, and that the public are fully aware of the level of threat that we face. I thank the Minister for his response. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered preparedness for national emergencies.

Sitting adjourned.