Asked by: Roz Savage (Liberal Democrat - South Cotswolds)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what steps he is taking to strengthen (a) national preparedness and (b) resilience for (i) public health and (ii) other national emergencies.
Answered by Dan Jarvis - Minister of State (Cabinet Office)
The Government published the Resilience Action Plan on 8 July 2025 to set out its resilience strategy. It set out three core objectives to improve the UK’s resilience to the full range of risks we face: (1) continually assess how resilient the UK is in order to target interventions and resources; (2) enable the whole of society to take action to improve their resilience; and (3) strengthen the core public resilience system. These goals inform a series of activities to deliver greater resilience across the whole of society, as set out in the Resilience Action Plan.
The plan includes a commitment to the delivery of the National Exercising Programme (NEP) to improve preparedness for national emergencies. This covers a range of whole-system risks, with the priority areas for testing informed by our assessment of cross-cutting and systemic vulnerabilities and capability gaps. The NEP sets out a timetable of annual Tier 1 exercises requiring a central response, cross-government coordination, and ministerial engagement.
We are delivering the UK Biological Security Strategy to strengthen preparedness for future pandemics, and to mitigate the risks of biological accidents and incidents. In Autumn 2025, ‘Exercise PEGASUS’ tested the United Kingdom’s pandemic preparedness, involving every Government Department, the devolved governments, and included arm’s length bodies, local resilience fora, and the engagement of businesses, academics, and external stakeholders.