Households urged to build emergency food supplies as weather risks grow
Households in Southport and across the Liverpool City Region are being urged to keep enough food and water at home to cope for several days if extreme weather causes power or water supplies to fail.
Environment Secretary Dame Angela Eagle said a developing El Niño event in the Pacific could bring drier summers, wetter winters and more severe storms to the UK. El Niño is a natural climate cycle linked to warming ocean temperatures and changes in wind and rainfall patterns.
“We're about to experience probably the largest El Niño that has ever been seen, and that will lead to drier summers, wetter winters, with more extreme storms in this country.”
She added:
“It will do a lot more damage in Asia with flooding, and therefore I think that we need to take it seriously.”
Dame Angela, the MP for Wallasey, said people with basic supplies at home would be better placed to manage an emergency while waiting for help.
“If you've got a store of a bit of food that can keep you going for a while before the emergency services can get to you, you're going to be a lot better off than if you haven't.”
She said the advice was part of becoming “a bit more resilient”.
The warning came as the National Audit Office said the UK food supply chain faces growing risks from extreme weather, cyber-attacks and plant or human disease outbreaks. It said climate change could create longer-term pressure on food supplies, with disruption potentially pushing up prices and making it harder for vulnerable people to afford food.
The NAO said Defra had taken some steps to improve its emergency planning but had not done enough to involve households, communities and food businesses. It recommended that ministers learn from countries such as Finland, Sweden and other European nations, where household emergency-preparedness advice is more established.
A Cabinet Office campaign due in the coming months is expected to encourage households to keep non-perishable food and prepare for national emergencies. The NAO said 51% of people surveyed in 2025 considered their household slightly or not at all prepared for an emergency, while 66% had enough non-perishable food to last about three days.
