UK tells households to keep 3 days of food and water. Here is what the guidance actually says

The UK government's Be Ready campaign, run through the Cabinet Office, asks households to have three days of supplies at home. Coverage this week, including Express reporting carried by AOL and ITV News, has framed it as a stockpiling order tied to cyber attacks. The official pages are more modest than that, so we read them.

What the official checklist says

The campaign's own wording is that being ready for three days "helps you manage while support reaches those most in need." Its checklist sets out:

• Water: bottled water for 3 days, at 3 litres per person per day for drinking. More is needed for cooking and washing.
• Food: non-perishable food for 3 days that needs no refrigeration or cooking, such as tinned meat, fish or vegetables, dried fruit and nuts. The page advises buying food you would normally eat.
• Other items: hygiene products, a torch and spare batteries, blankets and warm clothing, a battery or wind-up FM radio, a charged power bank, cash in coins and notes, copies of documents, a first aid kit, medication, and baby and pet supplies where relevant.

The arithmetic: 3 litres a day for 3 days is 9 litres of drinking water per person, or 36 litres for a household of four, before any cooking or washing water. The checklist also says to build the kit gradually and to check it every six months.

Which threats it names, and whether AI is one

The campaign homepage opens with one line on risk: "From severe weather to cyber attacks, emergencies can disrupt the services you rely on." Its hazard section lists many others, including flooding, storms, power cuts, water supply interruptions, phone and broadband outages, heatwaves, terrorism and overseas emergencies. The cyber page is ordinary online-safety advice and points readers to the National Cyber Security Centre.

We searched the campaign homepage, the checklist page, the cyber hazard page, the resilience page and the community page. None mentions AI or artificial intelligence. The claim that the government told people to stockpile because of AI-driven cyber attacks is not in the official guidance.

Where the AI link comes from

The AI thread in the news is a separate event. ITV News reported that 32 UK government services were taken offline over a critical flaw in PHP, with four more partly unavailable. The government said this was largely a precaution while updates were applied, and Downing Street said no large public-facing critical services were hit. A Lords minister said the NCSC was briefed by OpenAI about the vulnerability, and Downing Street said it is working with OpenAI. That is AI used to find a software flaw. It is not the Be Ready guidance warning about AI attacks, and nothing we read links the two officially. Express reported that ministers also cited supply-chain disruption by hostile states, undersea cables and payment-system failures when discussing the campaign; we could not find those threats on the campaign pages themselves.

This is also not new advice. The Deputy Prime Minister announced a three-day supplies message in May 2024, alongside the National Risk Register.

What it means for owners

For a restaurant, shop or contractor, the checklist's cash line is the most relevant: it says to keep a mix of coins and notes in case card payments or ATMs fail. The Be Ready pages are household advice. They do not give business continuity guidance, so a firm that depends on card terminals, cloud booking or a single supplier should plan its own offline fallback.

Sources: Be Ready (Cabinet Office), the Be Ready checklist, Express via AOL, ITV News, gov.uk. Chart is our own arithmetic from the official 3 litres per person per day figure. Information only.