Trust the public on threat resilience, Downie urges

The government must stop treating national resilience as a set of plans on paper and instead trust the public with the truth about the threats facing the country, Labour MP Graeme Downie told a Westminster Hall debate on preparedness for national emergencies.

Downie, the MP for Dunfermline and Dollar, opened the debate by setting the question against what the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy has described as an era of radical uncertainty, in which the assumptions underpinning UK security are being challenged to an unprecedented degree. He argued this was a concern already shaping the lives of constituents, and that resilience across infrastructure, communities and the economy had become vital.

Downie set the argument in a failure he had watched unfold during Storm Éowyn in January 2025 thousands of homes across his constituency lost power, many of them for several days, and because it came during a spell of cold weather people were left without heating, without electricity and, in some cases, without access to essential medical equipment. They did not know where to turn, he said, and were given inconsistent information with little clarity on when things would improve. What stood out to him was not any lack of commitment, because the energy companies, emergency services, local authorities and community organisations had all worked tirelessly, but rather that when the system came under real strain its weaknesses were laid bare. “Preparedness cannot be about having plans on paper,” he said. “It must be about whether those plans work when they are actually needed.”

He drew on the case of High Valleyfield, a former coal-mining village in Fife, where a resilience plan that was by then about a decade old had said the local community centre would be opened in an emergency, and although the community itself knew about the plan the council had forgotten all about it and did not even know who held the keys, so in the end, as he put it, “the community figured it out for themselves.” The same episode threw up a string of other practical failings, he said, from vulnerable-customer data not being shared and confusion over what support care homes were entitled to, through to a shortage of generators, little logistical capacity to get what provision did exist to where it was needed, and poor access to temporary accommodation.

The challenges now facing the country were broad and constantly shifting, he said, taking in cyber attacks, the sabotage of infrastructure, supply-chain disruption, hybrid threats from hostile states, climate-related events and emergencies of health and biosecurity, and what struck him was how rarely their effect is immediately dramatic. More often it is gradual, cumulative and enduring, he argued, with one crisis tending to flow into the next. “We must not just think of preparedness for an event, but for a different type of world altogether,” he said.

He pointed to Article 3 of the North Atlantic Treaty, an often-overlooked provision placing a duty on member nations to maintain and develop their capacity to resist attack through continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid. Although the article refers to armed attack, Downie argued that in an unstable world it should be read in the broadest possible terms, since attacks no longer happen instantaneously as they did when NATO was created, nor do they come only from other states. Preparedness, he said, had to be constant rather than confined to defence departments, and he asked the minister to address how resilience was being embedded across government in the areas of threat identified by the national security strategy.

Turning to critical national infrastructure, Downie said much of the risk no longer required full-scale conflict, but could arise from hybrid threats below the threshold of war that were still capable of causing widespread disruption. Drawing on his role as chair of the campaign on secure technology, he described discussions with senior officials about the threat posed by Chinese-manufactured cellular internet-of-things modules. The danger had been treated as theoretical, he said, and therefore as something that might not need preparing for now, even though officials acknowledged it was feasible and would have a significant impact. “Most risks are theoretical until they are very, very real, and the public wonder why we weren’t prepared,” he said. He pressed the minister on what conversations were taking place about the threat from cellular modules and which departments were involved.

On energy, which Downie described as a particularly sensitive part of the national infrastructure, he warned that Vladimir Putin had used energy as a weapon against ordinary Ukrainians and would do the same to British people. “We have seen how Vladimir Putin has used energy as a weapon against ordinary Ukrainian people, and he would be more than willing to do the same to British people as well,” he said, warning that without reliable energy, hospitals could not function, communications would begin to fail and supply chains would break down. He said there remained a lack of clarity on the legal position when it came to hybrid attacks on offshore infrastructure, and asked what role the Cabinet Office could play in resolving what he saw as an unclear boundary between the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Ministry of Defence.

Downie also argued that resilience had to be built locally and across the whole United Kingdom rather than concentrated in central government. Emergencies were experienced and managed locally, he said, yet the national security infrastructure could feel as though it was shaped within Whitehall rather than embedded across the country. Security advice and expertise did not always flow consistently to the devolved administrations and local partners, he said, while those administrations dealt with national security less regularly than central government, creating a potential blind spot that hostile actors could seek to exploit. He asked what more could be done to embed security capability across the devolved administrations and local authorities so that resilience was genuinely UK-wide.

His central argument was about the public, as he argued that preparedness could not be delivered by government alone, Downie said, and required the trust and participation of the public to succeed. “We must not hide the scale or nature of the threats we face from the public,” he said. “We must trust people with information that we might previously have chosen to withhold, and we should worry less about causing alarm and more about appearing to hide the truth.” If people did not understand the threats, he argued, they would not support the investment and action needed to address them, and he warned of a significant political price for any government that failed to do that work with the public at its heart.

Preparedness for national emergencies, in Downie’s view, was a system and ultimately a mindset rather than any single policy or programme, and he ended by warning “When the next crisis comes, and it will, the question will not be whether plans existed on paper,” he said.

“It will be whether, on the ground, government did enough to prepare and make sure our communities were ready.”