Minister admits he has not followed government stockpiling advice

A minister has admitted he has not followed his own government’s guidance on stockpile supplies to prepare for an emergency such as a cyberattack, flooding or wildfires.

Under a new government “be ready” campaign, households are being urged to be prepared if everyday services are temporarily disrupted with three days of key supplies.

The checklist advises stocking three days’ worth of bottled water and non-perishable food, a battery- or wind-up FM radio to receive updates during outages, and cash in case electronic payments or cash machines are disrupted.

Treasury minister James Murray admitted he has not yet followed the government’s guidance on stockpiling supplies to prepare for a crisis.

The paymaster general told BBC Breakfast that he had a stockpile of coffee, adding: “If you look at, say, Ireland or other countries in Europe like France and the Netherlands, they’ve had this system for quite a long time, the idea of having a bit of stuff at home to protect yourselves in case something goes wrong.

“So it’s quite normal in other countries. I think it’s a bit more interesting here because we haven’t really talked about it as a country in in recent years.”

Asked what he had stockpiled, he said: “I’ve got quite a lot of coffee in my house… it’s for individual people to take choices. I’m not going to say ‘here’s a government shopping list’.”

Put to him that he had not followed the advice, he said: “I’m not going to pretend I’ve followed all that advice myself yet.”

Defence secretary Wes Streeting said he wanted people to be “alert but not alarmed” as he warned of the need to be ready in case businesses were hit by cyber attacks that could knock out supply chains of essentials.

It came after cybersecurity chiefs warned UK organisations on Wednesday that a “critical security issue” had been discovered in PHP, which is used by almost 70 per cent of websites according cybersecurity firm Cloudflare.

On Friday morning, Treasury minister James Murray said the advice is about people “working out what they need to help keep themselves prepared for things that might come down the line”, such as a cyber attack, wildfires or flooding.

“There are lots of different threats that we face, and actually, this resilience is about making sure that as many households across the country as possible are prepared for that,” he told Sky News.

Mr Streeting said on Thursday that households and businesses need to ask if they know how they would respond to possible “everyday challenges” that might manifest themselves.

“But we’ll also need to take the country a step further and ask them are they prepared for increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks on our businesses, are they prepared for the eventuality that there may be disruption to essential supply chains caused by hostile state actors or terrorists?” he said.

“How would we cope if the payment systems at the local supermarket went down?”

He later told BBC One’s Question Time that there was not a “specific thing” in mind when it comes to potential emergency incidents, but said the advice might help during power cuts or if a local shop is subject to a cyber attack and was a matter of “everyday national resilience”.

The campaign launched amid a global scramble to fix a critical security flaw in the programming language PHP used by the majority of websites.

Mr Streeting said: “We’re going to find these sorts of things happening more and more.

“And it’s not just from foreign states engaged in espionage or sabotage; it’s also organised criminals.

“In this world of AI that we live in, with all of the opportunities it brings, and I’m a massive, you know, glass-half-full optimist about the technology and what it brings, it does also present threats if people are innovating and pushing against conventional defences, conventional cyber defences.”

Thirty-two government services went offline and four were partially unavailable while work was carried out to address potential cybersecurity issues, a minister said on Thursday.