Government Resilience Action Plan

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for the answers she has given. I join in the general welcome that has been given by the Benches opposite for this action plan. As chair of the National Preparedness Commission, I will say that that my noble friend will not be surprised that there are all sorts of extra things that, in an ideal world, I would like to have seen in this action plan or, indeed, I would like to have seen it as a strategy rather than simply a list of actions that will be taken over the next four years.

My specific point is that reference has been made repeatedly to the next test of the emergency alert system. I hope that, on this occasion, and I hope my noble friend can clarify this, the publicity around this will not be done in an apologetic way—“We are so sorry for disturbing your Sunday afternoon”—but much more as “This is a positive measure to try and protect the public in different ways”. This should be part of a much wider national conversation, which was promised by the Prime Minister as part of the strategic defence review and which will raise the awareness of the public in every single, possible way about the range of dangers and threats we face and the fact that these are getting worse. As a nation, we have to have a whole of society and indeed a whole of government response to deal with these issues.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for both the work he has done for decades in this area and his expertise, and also for raising an incredibly important point. Our general security environment has changed, and the national security strategy was clear. The resilience action plan and strategy we believe to be one and the same. The action plan is part of enabling a holistic all-society approach. The reality is that we need cultural change. I, like my noble friend, would expect to see that we use the 7 September alert system as an opportunity to facilitate that conversation, to make people very aware that they have responsibilities too, that they are not impotent in what might be coming, and they can make appropriate preparations. This is part of that conversation. I will seek to explore the comms programme and I will come back to the noble Lord if there are any concerns.