Poorest can’t afford to heed Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden’s warning to prepare for crisis – Laura Waddell

The government’s resilience strategy has a hint of passing the buck while raising the prospect of insurers making one

To be prepared for power and communication outages Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden wants the British public to retain “analogue capabilities” such as candles and battery-powered radios and torches, according to news reports following his visit to Porton Down on Monday.

I make a mental note of my own supplies. Were my lights to go, no worries: at this time of year there’s often a cinnamon tealight already burning off the gloom. There is much to be said for analogue communication. While I was researching my book Exit, I went down a rabbit hole about the potential for public signage to be corrupted. One distinct problem with having digital screens everywhere in our society, especially if they contain essential information, is that non-analogue displays are vulnerable to both system failure and hacking.

Dowden’s trip to the military lab came after the release of his risk and resilience statement to parliament, which is to be an annual event. Businesses are being urged to invest in stratagems to cope with emergencies as diverse as cyberattacks or supply chain collapse, the threats to society in a digital era are complex and many.

The foreword to the government’s resilience policy paper states: “The core of the Framework is built around three fundamental principles: that we need a shared understanding of the risks we face; that we must focus on prevention and preparation; and that resilience requires a whole of society approach.” This message is signed by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, as reminder of how committed Westminster is to championing Britain’s archaic class structures in its halls of power, its stationery, and its stylings in the present day.

One of the most eyeball-arresting headlines of 2023 came last month with the Guardian’s “King Charles secretly profiting from the assets of dead citizens”, a report into how the Duchy of Lancaster has collected in last decade more than £60 million from ‘bona vacantia’, the assets of those who have died without next of kin.

In an article published on the National Preparedness Commission’s website in February this year, Richard Smith-Bingham pinpoints a weakness of the existing resilience framework as “gloss[ing] over the issue of moral hazard and the frequent situations where there is a mismatch between those who stand to be impacted by a risk and those who have the power to address that risk”. Individual preparedness requires, not merely intention, but means and capability – and not all are equally equipped.

Intriguingly, Smith-Bingham’s piece also picked up on how it was “puzzling to see references to insurance solutions without acknowledging the need for greater public-private collaboration as the risk landscape becomes more complex, a development that will inevitably affect availability, coverage, and affordability". As it stands, the government’s resilience strategising has a hint of passing the buck while raising the prospect of insurers making a buck.

Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden has warned people should be prepared for major power cuts (Picture: Peter Nicholls/PA)

In his novel Life: A User’s Manual, George Perec described the contents of a cellar in such a way that it has stuck with me years after reading. It’s generally this time of year it floats into mind (“… apricot halves, pears in syrup, cherries, peaches, plums, packs of figs, boxes of dates, dried bananas, prunes…”) But aside from the joy of the long list of rich foods, which read like the contents of a particularly extravagant hamper, the aweing impact of this scene is really in how soothing it is to consider the perfectly equipped storeroom in general; anything that could go awry, in this fictional household, is intended to be met head-on with the assurance of advance preparation.

“The Altamonts’ cellar, clean, tidy, and neat: from floor to ceiling, shelving and pigeonholes labelled in large, legible letters. A place for every thing, and every thing in its place; nothing has been left out: stocks and provisions to withstand a siege, to survive a crisis, to see through a war.” Such organisation in the face of prospective disaster makes the mind feel clean, tidy, and neat too: a fantasy image too good to be true. Of course, maintaining such security depends hugely on personal funds and having not merely enough, but a surplus, so as to be able to spend speculatively into the future.

Building resilience, in general, is possible only after baseline needs are secured. But Britain’s societal foundations are crumbling. In the last year, the number of UK children facing food poverty almost doubled to 3.7 million. A pity the Duchy of Lancaster’s £60m bona vacantia profits didn’t go to feeding them, or helping the 3.8 million people in Britain estimated by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to have experienced destitution in 2022.

How resilient can Britain be when its children are hungry? How able to bounce back are whole communities wracked by poor quality housing, axed services and social clubs, shuttered high streets, closed libraries and cut courses, and decimated arts and music venues, discouraging even dreaming? Britain is a burnt-out nation with a government disintererested in healing its people holistically. Dowden addressing parliament on Monday said British risk and resilience planning should aim to make our people safer, and our country stronger.

But a wide band of people in Britain struggle just to stand still. Poverty eats through the ability to find security or put down a stable foundation in life. Lack of resources makes it more difficult to recover from setbacks of any kind, whether it's flooding, a pandemic, cyber-terrorism or struggling with a bill. The British public can set aside candles, but many are already in crisis. When the building blocks are crumbling, a ‘whole of society’ approach to building resilience is anything but.