NO AFFILIATE LINKS ON THIS PAGE. Everything below goes to a government body, a public service, a charity, or one of our own guides. We earn nothing if you click any of it. How we normally fund the site.

This is the page we wish existed when we started: the official sources worth signing up to, the registers worth knowing about, and the free advice that’s better than anything with a price tag. No products, no opinions — just the people who actually run this stuff, in their own words, with a link straight to them.

The government’s own preparedness campaign

Be Ready is the UK government’s official readiness campaign — free, sensible, and the thing this whole site sits on top of rather than replaces. We went through what actually changed when it launched and, before that, what the campaign tells you to do. Read the campaign’s own site first; come back to us for the kit it deliberately doesn’t name.

Weather warnings worth signing up to

One that applies to everyone, whatever the risk near you:

• UK weather warnings — the Met Office’s own current-warnings map, yellow/amber/red, updated as they’re issued.

Registers worth knowing about

• Priority Services Register — free extra help from energy, gas and water suppliers if you’re vulnerable in an outage, including households with young children, not just the elderly or medically dependent.
• Ofgem — joining the Priority Services Register. Explains that your supplier and your network operator each keep their own register, so you sign up with both.
• Energy Networks Association — extra help for customers. The industry body’s own statement of what the register does and does not promise — it won’t get your power back faster, but it means they know to look for you.
• NHS 111 online — for when something’s wrong and you’re not sure it’s a 999 situation.

Security and the law, from the people who enforce it

• ProtectUK — the police’s own protective security advice service. Lighting, locks, Secured by Design standards, straight from source.
• ICO — home CCTV systems. What the law actually requires once a camera or doorbell sees past your own boundary. Worth reading before you buy, not after a complaint.

First aid and wider resilience

• St John Ambulance — free first aid resources. Proper first aid guidance from the UK’s leading first aid charity, no course fee required.
• British Red Cross — Prepare for Emergencies. Plain-English guides on emergency kits, power cuts and flooding, from the organisation that turns up after.
• National Preparedness Commission. For the reader who wants to go a layer deeper — the UK policy and research body pushing for better national resilience, not a consumer site, but the real thing behind a lot of what eventually becomes government guidance.

Independent gear reviews worth reading

We’d rather point you at someone else’s good work than pretend we’re the only people doing this properly.

• The Prepared. American, not UK-specific, so treat sizing and some products as a different market — but a genuinely rigorous, independent gear-testing operation rather than an SEO content farm, which is rare in this space.
• Which?. The UK’s own independent consumer testing body — not prepping-specific, but its lab reviews of torches, power banks, batteries and the like are as rigorous as it gets, and it owes nothing to any manufacturer.

Our own checklists

No affiliate links in this section either — just the guides people actually ask us for, gathered in one place.

• Start here — if you’ve arrived with no plan at all, this puts everything else on this site in order.
• The UK 72-hour grab bag — what to pack and why, for the version of this list written for British homes rather than American ones.
• Power cut kits — what you actually need, in order of priority.
• Prepping in a flat — the same list, for anyone without a garage or a garden.

If flooding is a specific risk for you

Most readers don’t need this section — it applies to a smaller slice of the country than the kit above. If you don’t know your own flood risk, it’s worth two minutes to check before you decide these don’t apply to you.

• Sign up for flood warnings — GOV.UK. Free text, phone or email alerts for rivers, the sea and groundwater. It does not cover surface water flooding — see our piece on the flood risk you can’t get a warning for.
• Check your long-term flood risk — GOV.UK. Reports river, sea and surface water risk separately for any English postcode.
• Check for flooding near you, right now — GOV.UK / Environment Agency. Live warnings and alerts in force today.

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Spotted a dead link, or know a genuinely useful official resource we’ve missed? Tell us in the comments — this page only stays worth bookmarking if we keep it current.