Three days is where the plan starts

When the Cabinet Office launched Be Ready on 22 October, my first feeling was relief. Keeping water and tins in for a power cut has sat somewhere between sensible and slightly odd in British life for as long as I can remember, and now there's a three-year government campaign telling every household to do it, with more than 500 organisations signed up to share the message. The government says France, Ireland and the Netherlands already give the same three-day advice.

The ask is modest. Be able to manage at home on your own for three days, with bottled water and food that doesn't need cooking or a fridge. If anyone at home might need extra help when the power or water goes off, check whether they can join the Priority Services Register. Be Ready's own reasoning is that being ready for three days "helps you manage while support reaches those in need". If most of us can look after ourselves for a few days, the emergency services and the utilities can get to the people who can't. I agree with every word of that, and I'd do exactly what it says.

Where I part company with it is any idea that three days is the finish line. For most power cuts it will be plenty: after Storm Arwen in November 2021, Ofgem found that 82% of customers had their power restored within 24 hours. The same review found that nearly 4,000 homes went without power for more than a week. Those families didn't do anything wrong. They lived where the damage was worst, and nobody gets to choose that in advance.

So I treat three days as the first rung of a ladder. In the Playbook it's the 3-2-3 Ladder: three days, then two weeks, then three months, and you don't start a rung until the one below it is finished. Our rough planning figures for a family of four to six are £150 to £250 for the first rung and £400 to £600 for the second. Most of that is food and water you'd get through anyway, bought a little at a time and eaten oldest first.

The pace matters more than the total. Two or three extra items in each weekly shop will build a three-day store in about a month without anyone noticing, and you'll never be the person taking something a neighbour needs on the day it runs short. Islam draws that line clearly, and I wrote about it in Preparing or hoarding?.

A Muslim home also needs a few things no government checklist was going to mention. The biggest is water for wudu. Our planning figure is three-quarters of a litre per wudu, from the Prophet's ﷺ practice of making wudu with about one mudd (Sahih al-Bukhari 201). For five people who pray, three wudu a day for three days, that comes to about 34 litres on top of the drinking water, and The water nobody counts shows the sum. After that I'd add a printed prayer timetable from your masjid, because the app goes when the phone does, a head torch for each adult so both hands are free at Fajr, and your elders' medicines written on paper with the strengths and times copied from the labels. The timetable is free, and nothing else on that list is expensive.

What I haven't solved is space. Drinking water and wudu water for a whole family come to a lot of bottles, and a small London flat has no obvious place to put them. Under the beds and at the back of a wardrobe is the best I know of, and I'd be glad to hear a better idea.

When a man asked the Prophet ﷺ whether to tie his camel or leave it and trust in Allah, he was told to tie it and trust (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 2517). The government has asked us to tie the camel for three days. I'd keep tying.