PEOPLE will be told to stockpile food, water and medicine in new UK Government plans to prepare for war.
A "resilience" campaign launching later this year will urge households to be ready for a range of emergencies by ensuring they have basic survival tools to hand "should the worst happen", The Times reports.
This includes stockpiling essentials such as food and medicine, along with wind-up radios, to prepare Britain in the event of a Russian cyberattack.
It comes after chief secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones announced earlier this week that the Labour Government would hold the largest "national home defence exercise" since the Cold War.
Next year's multi-day "war game", named Operation Albiston Shadow, will see UK Government ministers and hundreds of civil servants test their response to a "hybrid" attack on the UK by a foreign adversary.
According to The Times, while the precise scenario will remain classified, a hybrid attack includes scenarios such as cyberattacks and acts of sabotage that knock out critical infrastructure such as transport links, the national grid or undersea cables.
The newspaper also reports that officials quietly held a major wartime preparedness exercise last week, in which Russia hit hospitals with missile strikes and shut down traffic light systems.
Branded Exercise Tucana, the simulation took place in London last Tuesday and involved around 120 experts from the NHS, the Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Office, along with civilians.
The exercise found a "significant shortfall" in the UK Government's ability to move and repatriate the injured into the healthcare system at scale.
The exercise also found wider systemic gaps in the response, including the lack of a central civil-defence co-ordinating body, gaps in specialist workforce registers which would allow retired doctors to be called upon, as well as limited surge capacity across several critical areas of care.
Jones also said the UK Government would launch a "national resilience public awareness campaign" to "help the public to take small but important steps to be prepared in case of emergencies and disruption".
It will also include new guidance to schools and colleges to teach children how to stay safe in emergencies.
A UK Government spokeswoman said: “As the public would rightly expect, we regularly conduct exercises on a range of worst-case scenarios to ensure government preparedness. Exercises are not a prediction of future events and are designed to test the most stretching scenarios. The government is yet to evaluate the exercise.”
