Be Ready’s First Receipts: 40% More Tins, and Two Storms in the Same Weekend

Ollie Marshall, Maplin’s managing director, said shoppers reached for the basics within hours of the Be Ready announcement. He named the three items they reached for first: a torch, a wind-up radio and a power bank. At Maplin, torch sales rose 284% against the same period last month, radio sales 92% and power-bank sales 106%. Robert Dyas reported radio sales up 160% on the week before.

Iceland said tinned sales rose 40% over the weekend, with bottled water selling strongly too, and added that its supplies of both remained healthy. Ocado’s shoppers found the gap instead: several bottled-water lines and soup ranges were listed as unavailable on Monday, with the site offering alternatives. Booths, the northern chain, reported year-on-year rises across tinned goods, bottled water and batteries.

Booths added the caveat the other retailers did not: the weekend’s widespread storms may have shaped what people bought. Storm Austen, the season’s first named storm, reached the south-west on Friday, the day after the campaign launched, and at the peak reading 74,169 homes were without power across the networks, 28,807 of them in Cornwall. Storm Boelo followed for the weekend, with yellow wind warnings across Northern Ireland, mainland Scotland and northern England.

Cash, copied documents and a written list of medicines leave no receipt. The Be Ready list asks for three litres of drinking water per person per day, food that needs no fridge or cooking, a torch, a radio, a power bank, cash, copies of documents and a written list of medicines. It also asks households to sign up to the Priority Services Register. The register is free. Government research cited with the campaign found only 13% of people felt prepared for an emergency that could cut essential services. Another 84% wanted more information. Security Minister Dan Jarvis put the campaign’s purpose plainly at the launch: “By taking simple steps to be ready for everyday emergencies like severe storms, people can reduce pressure on emergency services, helping them prioritise people who need more support in an emergency.”

The advice is older than the launch that triggered the shopping. Household resilience advice has existed since May 2024, and in September the signals stacked up: Streeting had already asked households in a newspaper interview to keep cash, bottled water and tinned food at home, and Ireland was due to deliver a preparedness booklet to about 2.2 million households. The October launch gave that advice a name, a number for water and a three-year campaign behind it.

Cornwall Council counted 2,241 Priority Services Register customers among the properties cut off in the county during Storm Austen. The register is the free list the gas, water and electricity companies use to find the customers who need extra help first.