Government Resilience Action Plan

Claire Hughes Excerpts

Tuesday 8th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Pat McFadden]

The gov.uk/prepare website refers to having a supply of food and water in case of an emergency. We recently struck an agreement with the European Union that will remove a huge amount of the cost, bureaucracy and delay in ensuring the free flow of food to and from the European Union. That is a good agreement for food security.

[Claire Hughes (Bangor Aberconwy) (Lab)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement. As he rightly says, planning and responding to these kinds of incidents—whether it is the pandemic, storms, flooding or major water outages, like the one that happened in my constituency earlier this year—requires people across all levels of Government to work with communities. How will the resilience plan launched today encourage closer working between the devolved Governments and the UK Government?

[Pat McFadden]

My experience in the year since the general election is that on matters such as this, co-operation and joint working between the UK Government and the devolved Governments is good. I am pleased to say that this is an area where party politics is usually left outside the door, and I think that is right. My hon. Friend is absolutely right: when an emergency hits, we need good co-operation and dialogue with either the devolved Governments or local authorities and local resilience forums, which I referred to in my statement.