Civil Preparedness for War

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the United Kingdom’s civil preparedness for war.

My Lords, I begin by declaring my defence interests: I am patron to the various RAF regiment associations, and I have just heard from their group captain that their gunners have shot down more Iranian drones, by quite some margin, than any other UK defence unit. I am sure that the Minister will want to congratulate them on that. I would also like to thank our fantastic Library’s research staff for their excellent briefings.

This short debate cannot really address all the issues the Government will have to face if we find ourselves in any situation in which we as citizens must react in order to survive any attack on our country. Geopolitical storms are raging in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere, and I am concerned that we are not prepared for what I feel may well be the future: strikes on our critical infrastructure; drones—now the favoured form of bombing; sabotage; air and maritime invasions; online disinformation; cyber attacks; attacks on our underwater cables, which carry more than 95% of our international data; and attacks on the one single pipeline which carries 77% of our gas, said the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, in his speech during the strategic defence review debate in July 2025. And then, of course, there is climate change.

That excellent review, however, says little about how we citizens should prepare ourselves for any future crises that will occur when we find ourselves without the life-sustaining structures around us that we are used to—unlike Europe, which appears to be alerting its citizens to major disruptions to their lives. The EU has adopted its preparedness union strategy, which aims to

“enhance the EU’s civilian and military preparedness and readiness for future crises so that all actors are ready and capable to respond quickly and effectively if needed.”

It sets out 30 actions across seven areas. They are too numerous for me to go into this afternoon, but one of the seven areas is population preparedness and societal resilience: supporting citizens and communities to prepare for and respond to crises—not the first responders or gold commanders, but we, the citizens.

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble namesake for securing this debate. I declare my registered interest as chair of the National Preparedness Commission.

Not only are we closer to widespread war than we have been for 60 years, but conflict has become much more hybrid, with increasingly hostile cyber activity coupled with deniable sabotage and other disruptions already affecting us here at home in Britain. That is to say nothing of the misinformation and disinformation that floods people’s social media feeds non-stop.

Despite the events since this debate was originally scheduled, the public remain blissfully unaware of the various threats and risks that the nation faces, let alone their urgency and scale. This must change. We urgently need the national conversation called for in the SDR, but it should not be couched solely in terms of defence; it must encompass everything else on the national risk register. The whole of society needs to be engaged. It is not sufficient simply to rely on the GOV.UK Prepare website; we need messages that are repeated in household booklets, as in other countries and as referred to by the noble Baroness. These then need to be amplified through broadcast and social media platforms. Think back to the major public health programmes that have taken place in the past: these were multimedia and you could not escape them. Everybody knew about them and everybody understood them.

We should also be building the sort of civil reserve they have elsewhere: a reserve of volunteers, with skills, that can be deployed in an emergency here at home. It is an emergency whether it is caused by a hostile state, by severe weather events or by another pandemic. Perhaps we could have a register of electricians who have had extra training to repair the grid, or retired doctors to be brought back into the NHS, or those willing, with the right skills and equipment, to clear fallen trees or masonry from roads and railway lines. We could also have people to help pile sandbags. The list is endless. Why do we not have such a public register of reserves for use in those circumstances?

My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, for securing this vital and timely debate, and it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Harris, who is such an expert on resilience.

I am on this House’s National Resilience Committee, which is looking inter alia at how to take the whole-of-society approach essential for civil preparedness for war. As we have heard, the Nordic ambassadors’ already publicly available evidence to our committee describes their countries’ decades-long approach to civil preparedness, given their proximity to Russia. It is too soon to know what the committee will recommend, but I personally admire the ambassadors’ Governments’ highly informative booklets, which are available in every single household and which we have already heard about from the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, and the noble Lord, Lord Harris. These describe not only the importance of storing water but things such as how to dispose of human and pet waste. I suggest to the Minister that this would be a low-cost implementation to start with immediately.

The Swedish ambassador defined resilience as “public support through awareness of risk, readiness to act and trust in institutions”. We must be healthily sceptical about how well the UK measures up to that. Currently, despite heightened awareness of the risks facing us, the UK population is very divided. The idea that people need to be good citizens and act in a concerted way is treated with suspicion, and trust in institutions is low. Culturally, we are not in a promising place for public support to grow.

Anthropologists say that culture is shared, deep-rooted assumptions that are powerful resistors to change. Our assumptions include that patriotism is naive and politically or culturally loaded, efforts to encourage citizenship are suspect and potentially exploitative, and hyper-individualism is the priority. An effective whole-of-society approach needs to challenge these. We talk blithely about cultural change, but people fear changing their deep-rooted assumptions, so they resist—unless they realise that their survival depends on it.

My Lords, I add my gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, for bringing this vital Question forward, and I declare my interest, having served for a brief while in chaplaincy in our Armed Forces. Both the SDR and the 2025 resilience action plan raise this whole-of-society approach as a “fundamental element” of our national security. We have heard comparisons with the Nordic states. I would also draw comparisons with such countries as Ukraine and Taiwan, except the difference is that social inequality is far greater in this nation.

I had intended to make some erudite points about faith communities, which are brought in by the resilience action plan—I am sure that my right reverend friend the Bishop of Manchester will make them far more eloquently than I could—but I was hijacked by an accidental focus group that I found myself conducting over the weekend. As I discussed this matter with my nieces, nephews and godchildren—a group of highly intelligent 18 to 27 year-old adults—some clear and, for me, shocking themes emerged.

The first was their surprise that this issue is on our radar. They said, “Surely war is a thing of the past”. Secondly, when I asked what we needed for civil preparedness, they said, “We do not feel like a cohesive group. We don’t really have a sense of national pride”. One of them even said, “Rather, it is more a sense of national shame. When people fly our national flag, we are concerned”. I asked them, “What about Covid, when we pulled together?” They said, “That’s true, we did”. I asked, “Would we do it again?” They said, “The problem is that, in the end, Covid diminished trust rather than increasing it”.

Three themes emerged from this informal conversation. The first was a really serious diminution in trust. The fact that our political system across the nation, at every level, is addicted to tearing down rather than building up will end up biting us.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, for tabling this debate.

A resilient economy and resilient households are key requirements for national defence, yet successive Governments have degraded them. Some 13.4 million people now live in relative poverty, and 25.3 million people live in households that fall below the minimum income standard. Work does not pay enough. Some 4.4 million people earn less than the real living wage, and 32% of universal credit claimants are in work. Millions rely on charity to survive.

Further, one in four young people in England has a mental health condition. Victorian illnesses such as rickets and scurvy have returned. Three million people in the UK are malnourished or at risk of malnutrition. In 2023, 800,000 patients were admitted to hospital with malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies. Years of real wage cuts, austerity and unchecked profiteering have made people less resilient. Some 16% of UK adults have no savings, and 39% have less than £1,000 to negotiate emergencies. Some 6.11 million individuals await 7.22 million hospital appointments. Some 300,000 people a year die prematurely while awaiting a hospital appointment, and 100,000 people die every year in poverty. This is the state of our resilience.

We are not self-sufficient in food, energy, auto, steel, bricks, cement, shipbuilding or semiconductors—and more—yet there is no reform of corporate governance and short-termism in the City of London. Neoliberalism has provided neither economic growth nor household resilience, yet welfare cuts are being mooted to make the poor poorer. The poorest 20% already pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes than the richest 20%.

It is interesting that the Ministers mooting this are silent on corporate welfare spending and the tax perks of the rich. HMRC has failed to collect more than £500 billion in taxes since 2010. In the past three years, banks have received £100 billion in subsidy in the form of interest in central reserves, yet no one is talking about ending any of that. The bones of the less well-off make poor cement for national security, and it is the bottom 50% who need to be strengthened. Can the Minister say when a different approach to managing the economy and society will be unveiled?

My Lords, I too congratulate my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, on securing this extremely timely debate.

As we know, we are living in dangerous times. What makes matters worse is the stark reality that they are times for which we, the United Kingdom, are woefully unprepared. This was made clear last summer when His Majesty’s Government published the strategic defence review. At that time, the esteemed noble Lord, Lord Robertson, who oversaw the review, expressed his frustration that government funding was too little and too late to match the ambitious defence overhaul that was—and is—urgently required. He has since expressed even starker views, for which he should be commended.

There can be no doubt that years of underfunding under previous Administrations left the current Government with an abominable legacy to deal with. However, what now seems to be lacking is a sense of genuine urgency for putting the country back on its feet militarily. I do not blame the Ministry of Defence for that; instead, the problem seems to lie at the feet of His Majesty’s Treasury. Indeed, the Prime Minister himself essentially conceded that point when appearing before the Liaison Committee in another place.

We are many months on from when the defence investment plan was due to be released, yet it seems the Government have no clue as to how they will pay for it. The finger of blame is often pointed at the Chancellor but the Prime Minister is the First Lord of the Treasury: he needs to make that decision. In the 1950s, the UK spent 8% of GDP on defence, 6% on the NHS and 5% on welfare. In 2026, we spend a little over 2% on defence, 8% on the NHS and 12% on welfare. That imbalance is indefensible.

But there is some good news, thankfully. Replying to a Written Question from me last month, the Minister confirmed that:

“The Ministry of Defence will launch the Northern Ireland Defence Growth Deal in Spring 2026”.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, gave me a copy of his Salisbury speech last week. I want to quote the final sentence because, in some ways, that speech was a cry of despair that nobody has yet taken seriously the strategic defence review. He said:

“Eighteen months ago, a national conversation about defence was promised by the new government. It is about time to get it started”.

I was very struck when I read the SDR by what a radical set of ideas it presents. It proposes the remobilisation of people throughout the United Kingdom. It also proposes a home defence programme and a new home defence force. A lot of it has to be done at the local level. A joined-up Government would not at the same time have been pushing through a complete restructuring of local government to remove local government to a further distance away from ordinary people, in which there will be lower-level councils representing half a million people, which is slightly larger than the population of Iceland. That is not local mobilisation; it is not even really local government.

What we now need, clearly, is political leadership and money. What I am hearing from those who have already spoken is that we have a political culture that encourages all political parties to attack each other and not to co-operate with each other. We have to change that. It is also a political culture in which anyone who says that we ought to raise spending rather, and that we should perhaps under the current emergency raise taxes, will bring down the wrath of the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and everyone else upon them. Political leadership requires you to change the political agenda and to call for the sort of money which is going to have to be spent on home defence as much as on reviving our ability to operate outside the home territory and home waters. So, there is a huge amount to be done, and it is extraordinarily ambitious.

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.