Billions are being spent on flood defences, railways and roads, while Clare Bellingham of the Household Readiness Liaison Unit asks the public to locate a torch and call it resilience.
A Cabinet Office press release has announced the national winter strategy, which is to spend billions making Britain harder to flood, strand or lose power, then ask households to locate a torch. It reports £1.4 billion for flood defences, £2.6 billion for rail improvements and £24 billion for roads over four years. The nation is being fortified at infrastructure scale and briefed at bedside table scale.
Clare Bellingham, director of the Household Readiness Liaison Unit, said the campaign would give families practical guidance. “The Government will reinforce the railway. Households can reinforce the torch drawer,” she said, with the calm authority of someone moving national security next to the spare batteries. The campaign is due later this autumn and includes basic supplies plus joining the Priority Services Register, which helps vulnerable households get help more quickly during outages.
The release says more than 600 flood defence projects are under way in England. It also says network operators will remove branches and send engineers to at risk areas. This is a magnificent arrangement. Public money will hold back the sea, while the public is asked to hold back a branch and remember where the torch lives.
Security Minister Dan Jarvis described the policy as pairing multi billion pound defences with practical guidance. Mara Ellison, deputy head of Public Calm, welcomed the balance. “There is no stone left unturned,” she said. “Several may be waiting under the sofa, but households now have instructions.”
More than 5,000 people and 400 partners helped shape the campaign, according to the release. After Storm Amy, it reports, 99 per cent of electricity customers were reconnected within 24 hours. Britain can therefore look forward to a fully coordinated winter response involving councils, rail engineers, network operators and one exhausted resident searching the junk drawer.
The state has built the defences and prepared the guidance. The final line of defence is apparently the person who knows where the batteries are.
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