Be Ready, Not Alarmed: What the Government's New Campaign Means for Care Providers

When Covid hit in March 2020, I was running a busy care company. In the first week of lockdown, our office phone did not stop. Not one of the calls was about the virus itself. They were about toilet roll, about whether the carer was still coming, about a son in Manchester who could not get through to his mum.

Nobody rang the government. They rang us.

I thought about that when I read the headlines about the government's new Be Ready campaign. "Stock up." "Prepare for attacks." "Here's what to buy." Within days, shops were reporting runs on bottled water and wind-up radios. A Question Time audience called it scaremongering. A bank's survey found one in four adults now say they are stockpiling.

If you run a care service, you have a decision to make. You can let the noise reach the people you support unfiltered, or you can do what care providers have always done in a crisis: take the drama out of it and get on with the practical part.

What the campaign actually asks for

Strip away the headlines and Be Ready is fairly modest. It launched on 22 October 2026, run by the Cabinet Office, as the first stage of a three-year campaign. It replaces the older GOV.UK "Prepare" website. The ask is that each household could manage on its own for three days if power, water, phones or the internet were disrupted.

The checklist is ordinary: bottled water (three litres per person per day for drinking), food that does not need cooking or a fridge, a torch and spare batteries, a wind-up or battery radio, a charged power bank, some cash, copies of important documents, a first aid kit, blankets and warm clothing, and a written list of phone numbers and medication names and doses. Baby formula, nappies and pet food if you need them. Review it every six months. Swap numbers with your neighbours.

The Defence Secretary's own phrase was "alert but not alarmed", and he said there was no specific event behind it. The same three-day benchmark has been standard advice in France, Ireland and the Netherlands for years.

That is it. There is no siren in the checklist. It is the kind of list a sensible grandmother kept in the pantry anyway.

Why this lands differently in care

Here is the problem. The people care providers support do not read the Cabinet Office press release. They see the front page in the pharmacy, hear a snippet on the radio, or get a worried call from a relative who has spotted "war" and "attacks" in a headline.

For a 92-year-old living alone, "the government says stock up for an emergency" does not sound like sensible housekeeping. It sounds like something is about to happen.

And for many people who receive care at home, the carer who comes in at 8am is the only person they will speak to that day. Care providers are, whether they planned it or not, that person's news filter, their reassurance and their practical help rolled into one.

That is a responsibility. It is also an opportunity.

Step one: write two messages, and file them under Well-led

You cannot ask a carer to calm a frightened person down if the carer is rattled too. Carers have children and ageing parents of their own, and they are reading the same headlines.

So the first step is not a meeting or a policy. It is two short messages, written in plain English, sent the same day. One to your staff. One to the people you support and their families. Send both through Careberry's communication, tag the right people in, and label the threads "Be Prepared / Well-led". Carers, the people you support and their families can then reply in the same place, instead of ringing the office one by one, and you have a dated trail of what you told people, when, and what they said back.

Message one, to staff. Sent to every carer through Careberry's communication, and kept to a screen on the app:

"You'll have seen the headlines about the government's Be Ready campaign. Here's what it is: a household checklist asking everyone to be able to manage for three days if power, water or phones were cut off. Here's what it isn't: a warning about a specific event. The Defence Secretary has said that himself. Some of our clients will be worried. When you visit this week, please reassure them in your own words, and have a quick look at the basics with them: a working torch, some water and tins in, a paper copy of their medication list, and a neighbour's number. Note what you checked in the visit notes. If anyone is frightened or has nothing in, tell the office the same day."

Message two, to the people you support and their families. Sent through Careberry's communication to the family app, with a printed copy left in the house where someone does not use a phone:

"You may have seen news about the government's Be Ready campaign. There is no emergency and nothing has changed. The government is simply asking every household to keep a few basics at home, in the same way we have always suggested for snow or a power cut. Over the next couple of weeks your carer will check a few things with you, such as a torch, some bottled water and a written copy of your medication list. If you have any worries at all, please ring the office and we will talk it through."

Two messages. Ten minutes to write. And a carer who can say "nothing's happening, shall we have a look at what you've got in?" calmly, in the kitchen, with the kettle on, is worth a hundred leaflets.

Why the tag? Because when an inspector asks how the service responded to a national campaign that worried people, you want to open one label and show the staff brief, the family note, the replies that came back, the visit checks and the follow-ups, in order, with dates. That is Well-led evidence you did not have to go looking for.

Step two: take the worry out, then do the practical bit

Once your staff are steady, the next visit is the moment. Not a special visit, not a campaign. A normal visit where the carer notices and asks.

• Is there a torch, and does it work?
• Is there some bottled water and a few tins the person likes?
• Is the medication list up to date, and is there a paper copy in the house, with doses, in case phones are down?
• Who are the neighbours, and do they have each other's numbers?
• Is the person on their energy and water supplier's Priority Services Register? It is free, and it means they are flagged for extra help in a power cut or supply interruption. Many eligible people have never heard of it.
• Does the family know where the folder is?

None of this needs a stockpile. It needs a kind person, ten minutes, and a record of what was checked so the next carer does not ask the same questions again.

Step three: get your own house in order

The campaign is aimed at households, but a care provider carries a different responsibility. There is a legal duty here, not just a moral one.

In England, the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 place the duty on the registered provider. Regulation 12 (safe care and treatment) requires you to assess the risks to people's health and safety and do all that is reasonably practicable to mitigate them. Regulation 17 (good governance) requires you to assess, monitor and mitigate risks to the health, safety and welfare of the people you support. In practice, CQC expects a business continuity plan that works, and inspectors will ask what happens when the roads close, the power fails or the system goes down. Providers in Scotland (Care Inspectorate), Wales (Care Inspectorate Wales) and Northern Ireland (RQIA) face the same expectation under their own regulations.

It is also worth knowing what the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 does and does not do. It places emergency planning duties on "Category 1 responders" such as local authorities, the emergency services and NHS bodies. Care providers are not Category 1 responders. Nobody is coming to write your plan for you. But your local authority and Local Resilience Forum (or its equivalent in Scotland and Northern Ireland) should know which of the people you support are most vulnerable, if you tell them.

So the questions for a registered manager are simple:

• If the office lost power and internet for three days, could we still see who needs a visit today, and who is highest risk?
• Could carers still see care plans and medication records on the road without a signal?
• Do we know which people depend on powered equipment, oxygen or fridge-stored medication?
• Could we re-plan the rota in an hour if half the roads were flooded?

Where the technology earns its keep

This is the part where I am careful, because the campaign has already attracted enough hype. Technology does not make a service resilient. People do. But the right system makes the people's job much easier on a bad day.

We built Careberry after running a number of care companies through years of winters, floods and then a pandemic, so some of this is personal. A few things we rely on:

• Offline mode, so carers can open care plans, notes and MAR charts when there is no signal, and sync when it comes back.
• eMAR and medication levels, so the "medication names and doses" the checklist asks for already exist, accurately, for every person you support, and can be printed for the house.
• Rostering with travel optimisation, so when a road is closed you re-plan the day rather than ring thirty people.
• Rota read receipts and live clock-in and clock-out, so the office can see the moment a carer arrives and the moment they leave, which matters most in bad weather.
• Dynamic labelling and Report Hub, so you can pull a list of every person who lives alone, uses powered equipment or sits on a priority register in seconds, not by going through folders.
• Communication and the family app, so a message to families goes out once, they can reply where they read it, and a daughter in Manchester can see that mum's visit happened this morning instead of ringing the office in a panic.

None of that is dramatic. It is the quiet, dependable stuff, which is exactly what resilience looks like.

We have done this before

In 2020, care providers were on the front line before most people knew where the front line was. We sourced PPE from car boots, rewrote rotas nightly and kept turning up. Nobody wrote a checklist for us.

So when the government asks households to be ready for three days, my reaction is simple: care providers have been ready for far worse. The job now is to pass that calm on. Steady your staff. Let your staff steady the people they visit. Fix the practical gaps while you are there.

Alert, not alarmed. We have been living that for years.

People first. Process next. Technology always.

If you would like to see how Careberry supports offline working, dynamic labelling and rapid rota re-planning, book a viewing of Careberry.