Topic
How households develop the knowledge, resources, plans, skills, relationships and confidence to cope when the systems they rely on are disrupted, and what the evidence says about getting there.
Household resilience is a household's ability to anticipate, cope with, adapt to and recover from disruption to the systems it depends on: power, water, communications, transport, food supply, money and care. It is a capacity rather than a purchase, and it is only partly within a household's control. Housing, income, health, digital access, language and social connection all shape what a household can actually do.
That distinction matters for policy. A household can hold the recommended supplies and still be highly exposed, and a household with very little can be well connected and well organised.
Preparedness is what a household does in advance. In practice it covers six things: holding basic supplies; understanding local risks, warnings and trusted sources; agreeing what the household would do and who would do it; recording the information that stops being available when the power or the phone goes; occasionally testing the arrangements; and knowing who nearby might need help or be able to help.
Preparedness is the set of actions. Resilience is the capacity those actions contribute to. Conflating the two is how a shopping list comes to stand in for a plan.
It means being able to manage for roughly three days without outside help: food that needs no cooking, drinking water, light, a way to receive information, medication, warmth and a little cash. The benchmark comes from European and Nordic practice. The EU's Preparedness Union Strategy (2025) asked citizens to be able to cope for at least 72 hours, and Finland's 72 Hours concept predates it.
Three days is a useful starting line. It is not a measure of resilience. We set out why in beyond the 72-hour kit.
Not in those words. GOV.UK Prepare asks households to plan for "an emergency lasting a few days", with 2.5 to 3 litres of drinking water per person per day. Three days is already used in the Government's own preparedness survey measures, and launching Prepare in May 2024 the then Deputy Prime Minister cited Finland's campaign. A new household preparedness campaign has been announced in the Resilience Action Plan 2026 Implementation Report, but at the time of writing it has not been published and "72 hours" is not confirmed as its wording.
A kit is a set of possessions. Capability is being able to use them under pressure: knowing where the stopcock is and how to isolate the electricity, having agreed how to reach each other if mobile networks fail, holding key contacts on paper, having thought about medication and care needs, and having tried some of it.
The Government's 2026 preparedness survey shows the gap clearly: 60% of households report about three days of no-cook food, but only 14% have a household plan, 12% an agreed meeting point and 17% have discussed preparing with an adult outside the household. Meanwhile, research on disaster outcomes has found that possession of a kit and plan did not by itself reduce adverse outcomes in the households studied, which suggests the field has measured possessions far more than ability.
It is an organising framework we use to describe household capability, derived from the evidence but not independently validated. It has not been tested against household outcomes and it is not a recognised academic model.
Four of the five closely match the structure of GOV.UK Prepare. The distinctive element is practice, on the reasoning that direct experience builds confidence more reliably than persuasion. That is a hypothesis we are testing, not a finding. Our reasoning for designing ResiliKit around it is set out in why we built ResiliKit the way we did.
Household capability is one layer among several. Research across a range of disasters finds social ties among the strongest predictors of recovery, and social isolation was strongly linked to who died in the 1995 Chicago heatwave. In the UK's 2026 survey, 71% of adults said they would be willing to volunteer locally and 48% thought neighbours would need extra support, yet only 17% had discussed preparedness outside their own home.
Whole-of-society resilience should add to collective capacity, not quietly withdraw collective responsibility. Household preparedness complements resilient infrastructure, public services, emergency response, businesses, the voluntary sector and local networks. It does not replace any of them.
How capability might be described and measured is the subject of our analysis of the disaster literacy capability framework.
Evidence analysis and commentary
Britain is talking about household preparedness, and much of the conversation has become a shopping list. The UK's own survey data suggest the larger gaps lie in plans, practice and people.
Ben Spurway, ResiliGroup CIC
Evidence Review & Analysis
Ben Spurway and Natalie Gardner at ResiliGroup CIC analyse a new peer-reviewed disaster literacy framework and examine what its four skill domains might mean for household resilience capability.
Ben Spurway and Natalie Gardner, ResiliGroup CIC
Evidence & Practice
The evidence, assumptions, external challenge and changing thinking behind ResiliKit, and the research question we are now trying to answer.
Ben Spurway, ResiliGroup CIC
Research note: media evidence scan
A rapid, AI-assisted map of how UK media covered household preparedness between August and September 2026: framing, the emergence of the three-day benchmark, consumerisation and source lineage.
Ben Spurway, ResiliGroup CIC