National Security Strategy (Joint Committee)

Monday 2nd November 2026

(began 1 week, 1 day ago)

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None Portrait Speaker 2
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There's a lot of competing variables there. But the most important point, of course, is that if one, it's part about your own individual vulnerability of your household or your community. So if you looked at that 21%, you would probably find within the data quite large number of those being already vulnerable areas to flooding. That's the important point. So that we've seen more movement in that space, which is which is good. And that's, that's a movement in that's an important one. But I think the the other aspect is that I led a project called the Prepare project, which was empowering preparedness in household and everyday resilience.

 And there we found, for example, that 75% of households weren't really had any major measures to do with climate change at all. And for example, something like 69% of UK households were only willing to spend up to one day in improving their preparedness. So in a sense, that goes down to three things. Firstly, of course, with the greatest respect to the institution that I'm sitting in, we're living in a lower trust environment with UK authorities. The citizens don't really trust the institutions. Maybe the advice in the way that they used to. And the second point is really, we have the economic position of a standard of living where households, citizens are making choices, they're rational actors.

 So the vulnerability is really related to how they perceive their level of threat or hazard, and therefore how much they're willing to invest their own resources in it, because that's resilience also starts at home. And the final element is really about new technologies, about where they go for that information. And that goes back to your point that there are different groups that use different sources of information and may not necessarily use websites or lrfs. They may go to social media or even to AI.
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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Yeah, I .
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Would, I would agree that when when we look at other countries like New Zealand, who often have earthquakes and, and tsunamis, and they've got a higher risk profile and therefore they are so much more prepared. And they're a great case study to look at how their general level of community resilience and their preparedness and how they work. And, and we've seen, and we use them as case studies as good practice through and sharing through the resilience community. And it does seem to reflect that across the world in Japan. And they have their earthquake simulations because it's a real risk for people.

 And I feel going back to your comment about like the older generation being probably more prepared because of the Cold War threats and the older generation remembering World War Two, rationing and fixing things rather than something breaks and we'll just buy another one. And like, just the mindset is different. And I feel there's a bit of a gap now in this like level of preparedness, which is why I really welcome the Be Ready campaign to actually bring up our baseline as a country to, to bring back that discussion, that everyday discussion of resilience to get people prepared.

So it's normalized and not scary because although it probably was quite scary back in the day with a Cold War threat, but now it's just, okay, let's focus on a tangible, real threat, which as we go into El Nino winter, you know, we are preparing for a really bad storms and cold snaps. So let's be prepared as a as a country and hopefully, hopefully that will resonate more with people.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Yeah. The obvious point is the start of a journey. I think that's the fundamental point. I had the privilege of working in Sweden for, for 13 years where national resilience, societal, a whole of society approach was talked about in Sweden in the 1990s, for example. So and they're the kind of links to civic society are much closer. So I think the, the first part of that is really that it's part of a conversation, which is about things and items that that you can immediately speak to citizens around there. But really it's about mindsets that fundamentally it's about if you like, developing mindsets, which are about resilience is not just the responsibility of government or the responsibility of the private sector.

 It's also involves the citizens. And in the national survey, for example, that just came out in August, one of the striking features was something like about 82% of the citizens of the population still thought or thought that resilience was fully or entirely the responsibility of government. That means that you don't have a resilient population at all, nor do they necessarily resilience as being part of their core business. And that's really part of that mindset of change. My third point, I would basically say, however, of course, is that within the within that survey, there's some very interesting data about where people are challenging.

If you like the advice, you know, particularly around the three liters of water, for example, where you see, you know, something , if I can quote in relation to to that , something like 82% of the of the people in the survey thought that three liters of water would probably not be enough for three days, and probably will probably less last one day actually. So, but at least you get into the mindset where they're challenging and understanding what are their own requirements. And that takes us a little bit further down the road where we need to go.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Yeah, I mean, from as an academic perspective, I mean, although I made the point, it's a start. It uses quite traditional mechanisms in which to connect with the population. Let's talk about really that the Be Ready campaign provides a checklist of things. And it also provides a website where you can go and look for further information. And of course, the register for for vulnerable people that that's an important element. But of course we do, as you quite rightly say, leave the cost of living crisis. And when we did the study on Emperor the Emperor pear study in 2025 at Bournemouth University, we found actually there's a need to incentivise the population as rational actors because you're requiring them to make to make choices about what they're going to spend their own money in relation to that.

 So it requires quite there is a funding aspect in relation to how you're going to incentivise populations. Then my final point would be that one would expect, as you've seen in that, in the news and in the media, that there's been a pick up. But my observation is that that would be largely among parts of the population who are already already speaking, who are already share the view that resilience is more to do. The real challenge is to get to the vulnerable parts of the population, particularly where their standard of living are challenged. And that does require incentivization.

 And that may mean that you are looking at, for example, to what extent you could build resilience, for example. And if people embark on resilience training or do more in their houses, to what extent they might, for example, be therefore eligible for lower insurance premiums on their house contents insurance so they can share some of those costs. To what extent you might be able to use supermarkets, for example, to provide preparedness packs at discounted rates or for for parts of populations. So those are the things that will make the difference. And where words become actions.

 Okay.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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I will always receive challenge. Obviously, being in a local resilience forum and working with all public sector partners to try. We're here and I champion all of the partnership here, ultimately to protect and save lives and, and recover and, and save people from a resilience perspective. But what I will say is before this campaign, every local resilience forum, like I said, was doing their own messaging anyway. So since 2004, resilience forums have been saying, be prepared, this is your emergency grab pack. This is. Sign up for flood alerts. Travel safely and. The messaging has always been there and the wording therefore across the UK would have been inconsistent because we've all been doing our own things.

 There's not been that national kind of coordination with it. So I do like welcome, like I said, this kind of consistency and the National Emergencies Trust have also created a Be Ready Together campaign, looking at community resilience for not just place based communities, but community groups as well. And that's had a lot of academic research and time invested into that. And it's, it's, it looks to be very similar, like dovetailing messaging, which is again, really welcome and will help us to be more consistent. But I feel like with the cost of living challenge is a genuine one.

And my feedback to, to people at the moment is for those who can be prepared, be be prepared. And you know that that then takes the pressure off those communities and the people who cannot be prepared. And then therefore, you know, the system will will aim to look at those people who, who can't afford it. But it's yeah, the cost of living crisis is.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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The important thing about the Brady campaign is turning it into a being ready campaign. And I think that's the the fundamental point. What I mean by that is actually what we've what we've got at the position is the start of a journey where they've actually outlined the kind of things that citizens need to take into account in their own lifestyles. And that is an important start. But as I said to you before, it will only really be acted when you turn words into actions by parts of society that can, at this point, present time afford to have those kind of or have high levels of vulnerability.

 So in the check list, of course, there is this recommendation that you can take time. So we will have different levels of resilience across the population because it will take time for them to develop that. And of course, we also have the point about the frequency of events, which is that it will be your resilience capacity could be wiped out very quickly by a series of events that take place over a summer, like a summer that we've been through, or major flooding where there's greater frequency now of events. For me, therefore, the important thing is also that the next step for Be Ready is about providing financing around that for Incentivisation, working with businesses to be able to achieve that, because of course it is.

 There is a market for new products to be developed that are accessible for citizens as well. And that, I think is important. And the second element in relation to that is to link it with as part of collaboration connections. So it's very important for citizens that they're linking in their flood awareness about what's actually happening weather wise with their level of resilience, because the two things are related at different points in time, you may need higher levels of readiness in your own house than before. So what basically we're saying is that there needs to be a policy where we're making our own citizens and householders, risk managers of their own households, and that is that requires further information and more conversation to take place.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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Yes.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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Okay.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Yeah, so three points. Firstly, on the point about actions or what you might call complacent if that's I won't put words in your mouth, but to what extent or apathy. Let's use the phrase apathy in relation to to this point. Yes, I think of course it depends on which parts of the population you are talking about in relation to that, and to what extent they make in connection with the geopolitics of those, those issues that we've talked about. We've talked a lot about flooding and in relation to that, but the geopolitics are now becoming much more clear and the connectedness, I think the main bit of work is around supply chain resilience, really about supply chains, because there is your connection.

And in answer to the previous question, to reinforce the previous question, that's where the understanding comes. So understanding how how, for example, a cyber attack on electricity power station may lead to a darkness not just of electricity, but also a digital darkness, which of course, is also one of the major concerns here in relation to that. And that requires citizens to make their own, have their wind up radios or whatever it might be, to be able to do that. So there is that that cascading linkage that has to be point. Of course, I'm a professor of a disaster management centre who would argue that to really make risks, understood, you do need to exercise and that exercising has two purposes.

 One, it's about reinforcing changing mindsets really to get people to if if they were complacent or really didn't understand what the major issues. It allows them to understand some of the issues more that would come from it and from that really challenge their own point about whether they are ready or not. So actually, by doing that, it really does greatly improve the awareness. Will it lead to go back to the point that if you have an exercise, the population will by default be more prepared? That's a much more mute point. And I would basically say probably not, but it does mean reality that you are able to take a debate as to what kind of exercising that you need and where it might be.

 There's an opportunity, of course, with our changes to our devolved governance, to do much more localised events of that kind and the work with others. And that, of course, is the place to start. For me, fundamentally, exercising is about creating trust and expectation, and that becomes important. That is not necessarily done at the national level because that would be incredibly expensive, incredibly difficult, and the distance to the impact might be large, but localized is the place to start.

 And that may start with communities.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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And so forth.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Yeah. Ready for what, if you might put it that way? Yeah. I think the important thing is that in terms of when you talk about risk or you're talking about the hazards, again, to reinforce the point, the the vulnerability or the risk is partly defined at the localised level. I'm not necessarily convinced, apart from having national registers about what's the priority for the nation, you will end up with a common perception of what risk is across the country because it's it's localised by its very nature. That's the fundamental point. And it's also localised by what you might call by gender group or by by, in relation to different parts of our society.

 The question comes really about how do you build resilience, a whole of society approach when effectively society isn't whole. And that is a real challenge, because what it means you have to have a differentiated strategy to apply to different points. What the checklists are doing are giving you a way of the be ready is giving you a way of understanding the kind of things you need to think about and the kind of levels that you are. It's down to householders and citizens to decide whether they need to do more or less better in relation to their own localised environment.

So that's it's the place to start, I think more more than that. And of course, the fundamental point is that you may not necessarily be make everybody resilient already. It is a choice at one level, and there is part of that choice. And that means you get down to trust, trust and how we build that. So part of the Be Ready campaign for myself is effectively how do you build trust not just in the message, but in the, in the action and meaning behind the message.

And that requires a level of trust.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Do you mean like from my role as like a chief resilience officer or as a member as. Yes, I'd say that is quite clear, and I because local resilience forums have been around since 2004 and, and we've had a lot of floods and storms and Covid and a lot of incidents where we've stood up our command control coordination structures really effectively. And we every time we have one, we debrief, we learn from it. And we have a really good relationship with our government liaison officer and using Mhclg as our government department to go cross-government for whatever it is we need.

 Unless there was something specific and we'd have Department of Transport there, for example, as well as Mhclg. So I think that does work really well. And what lessons have we learned from Covid? So many lessons from Covid. And like one example for us in Suffolk was to have one standing command control coordination function. So when there was a, we had Covid response happening and we had storms coming in and tidal surges rather than have different loads of different command structures, because obviously public sector is, is so, so thin, so cut. And we just didn't have the capacity to have lots.

And it would be very confusing. Our major lessons, like we just have that one structure to deal with all of the concurrent incidents at once because the right people around the table and then it's just better connectivity. So before Covid, that wouldn't necessarily have happened. We'd have tried to deal with things differently because it's all theoretical. But we had Exercise Pegasus last year, which was a national pandemic exercise, and that was really good because it was five years on from Covid, and it got everyone in the room again before that, organizational learning and memory is lost and people retire.

 We were there to capture the lessons learned because it's such a unique kind of incident compared to a flood. Pandemics is a very different response. So and it's making sure that that learning then is definitely embedded into our plans and our frameworks. And it keeps it keeps our eye on the ball. And to echo the sentiments earlier, exercising is, is where it's amazing and it happens and you learn, learn from lessons. And your final question.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Of course. Yeah.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Okay. So no, it's I really wish it was on the curriculum. And I would love for all children and teenagers to have resilience in the, in their curriculum. I really, really welcome that and I hope we can do it. I mentioned earlier, we have crucial crew events aimed at Key Stage two children, which is a really fun day of activities to learn resilience across a wide variety of different sectors. But that is, again, that's just not every local resilience forum does that. It's very hit and miss. So some areas have none. Some areas have really good education packages and they do something different, but it's very, very inconsistent, which is such a shame.

 And I really feel like if you invest in children and then and they get inspired by it and they go home, they tell their families and it just, it's such a nice way to build resilience and build community pride. And it's just a brilliant thing to do. So we do a lot of engagement with charities through our Resilient Communities coordinator, again, very lucky that we've got the funding to have one to to do that. But again, that is a Suffolk, you know, different to other LFS who have not got that capacity to do it. So it is very inconsistent.

But I would really, really welcome it as a baseline, again, across us as a country to, to build that foundation resilience. And, and it goes further than just resilience to shock events, but things like growing your own food and there's just so many things that we could be more resilient in so many ways.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Yeah, certainly. Obviously on the education side, I may have a conflict of interest there in a sense, but if I may just allude to that one very quickly, if I may, in relation to that, smart schools and smart education space to start. And in a sense, when I was in the Scandinavia, of course, that is built in. It's about the civic part of society. And that's. Education is not just about educating for society. It's about giving, building our civic capacity as well. And that starts and that also by education, the children. Of course, it's often argued that to get into the households, this is a way of particularly influencing the mothers and that part of the family, which are really the resilience householders in relation to that and building that from within.

So you build it as a generational piece. I would say our Fe sector has a major role in relation also in building that technical capacity, particularly around data science and computer science, that we're going to need for the different messaging. And of course, we have undergraduate and master's degrees where professional practice is also taught, including at my own institution in relation to business. The the point made is that in terms of recovery, it's often argued that 80% of all recovery is funded by the private sector. It actually takes place through construction companies. It takes place through finance and insurance.

 It takes place apart. So collaboration is at the heart between the public and private sector is at the heart of any successful crisis management and resilience strategy. The fundamental point, I would argue, is to make sure, however, that the government and public sector don't see business just as an asset that is used by them to according to their own plans, because they have their own plans, they have their own resilience priorities. And of course, they do have the potential to act as a market. If we think about in the climate, for example, with CFCs, we saw major changes in consumer behaviour simply by the ability to provide that resilience can be a market for new products to be developed all through from flooding.

 All the way through to supermarkets, providing different types of resilience kits, all the all that kind of element as well. So business collaboration is key. And also at the localised level, it's very important because as part of any local resilience forum, you need to involve your business leaders who are also part of often your your local resilience infrastructure. And therefore that becomes really important as part of that play. Thank you.
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None Portrait Speaker 6
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Great. Thank you.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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I'm going to talk as a professor, if you if I may, as an independent scholar in that sense, I have real concerns about the relationship between the trajectories where we have an increasing movement of digital optimization across government and across all parts of society and building resilience. And I think that's an important point for us to, to consider. And you can think about that in a number of ways. The first, of course, is that most of our critical infrastructure is, and in addition to that, most of the ways that our citizens do business require us to have a digital imprint and to have those digital services provided through power and with power is undermined.

 And often, if there is major storm damage, often our for example, our our mobile phone networks are damaged, then citizens are often using their mobile phones as the main way of accessing huge amounts of information, which is related to resilience. So the first point point is how do you reconcile the movement of digital optimization and maintain the resilience. Because within the be ready checklist is also about having, for example, you know, having wind up radios, having battery capacities in case the net goes down or for example, the power goes down as it did in Spain, for example, as we know from from the last couple of years.

And I think there's a tension within that, a real tension which we haven't got there. The second point, of course, is that actually when you're trying to access certain parts of our society, the Gen Z group in particular, they are increasingly using, for example, as part of our society AI solutions and digital solutions as their main point over a conference last week. And it was cited to me that the average person in Europe now uses AI 16 times a day. And that is a fundamentally important point, because if your main way of accessing information is not by going to websites, not by going to social media, but going to use AI, then it means you'll be ready metrics how you actually transfer that information to those parts of society has to be highly digitized and highly digitally, where it has to be picked up by AI systems and according to the metrics that they use, the algorithms and so forth.

 And that is we don't have that within the be ready. It's in the logic of where we need to be. But there are different parts of the society, and the more digital they are, they may seem to be more easy to contact, but they are using different forms than we. So for example, reliance upon the the Prepare website. Most data shows that this year, for example, with the introduction of AI systems and new systems into research engines, there's been a huge drop in website footfall in general across. People aren't using them in the same way.

 Hence relying upon websites as a way to communicate. Be ready messages to the entire population may mean you're only speaking to some and not to all.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Yeah.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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I mean, it partly feeds into what you were just talking about here. And that is that there's some tidying up that really needs to be done in terms of around the CNI in particular, around the critical national infrastructure being included in our definitions of resilience in a much more clearer way. I think that's important. It's there, but it needs to be very, very clear. I think the important thing also is about what you might call a kind of more of alignment or a coterminous of the of the regions, because, of course, one of the challenges for the Lrfs is actually the regions don't map.

 Health authorities are police trusts, regional governance afire. They don't align in many places. And that actually creates a coordination headache of its own kind and brings in the political accountability question about how many you need and whatever. But fundamentally, the point about that, that needs to be a major issue. The other point is that we know from Covid, the Covid experience, that the role of devolution was particularly important in the way that it was actually dealt with across the different territories with Covid. And we need to modernize to reflect that. That piece, I think, which is really quite important.

 But I think alongside the alongside any modernisation of the of the of the act needs to be, of course, what you might call a financing or funding framework to make this work. I'm very conscious that actually resilience is an expensive activity. There's no two ways to put it. It is an expensive activity, but it should be fundamentally at the heart of the nation. If it's about saving lives, protecting property and reducing casualties and all of the issues that that we have in mind. But it is a shared competence and that needs to be more clearly identified, particularly around our category and one category one and two, I think.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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I would agree .
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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That's perfect.
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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Address the right .
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Stabilise the situation, and finding out the causes may take time. And often the work that we do is actually about twinning and training. So the journalists and change roles. So there's an understanding from that. You can manage. expectations between those two elements. That's the granular point. The point about to end with really is also to say, how do we link, if you like, be ready. actions with trust. And it's really about managing expectations. And I would use at the, at the big level for ease that I think really need to be the first. And the first one is really about if you're to engage, you have to trust the public that they won't necessarily be frightened.

They are, they are. They are able to be to make decisions on their own. And we have to be careful that we don't just take a top down approach, providing. information and direction in a society that no longer trusts the institutions and the way that it is. So really, you need to about enlightened context. Firstly, the first is really about actually explaining the connections between the the cascading effects. The second is about empowering choices. So effectively, citizens can make choices within this resilience framework and checklists about what they should invest more in and therefore enable actions which.

The third one, which is enabling actions, which is providing. incentivised schemes, different types of financing. So people and parts of society can be improved. And the final element is to evaluate outcomes. So in light and context, empowering choices, enabling actions and evaluating .
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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E's are .
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Of what who's.
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