I recently travelled to Copenhagen to see something Britain does not yet have: a government department dedicated entirely to preparing the country for crises before they happen.
Denmark set up its Ministry of Resilience and Preparedness in 2024, becoming the first country in the region to place national readiness under a single Cabinet minister. Energy security, food supply chains, cyber threats, and emergency planning are all led from one department, with a Resilience Agency beneath it bringing together work that used to be scattered across government.
What struck me most was not what Denmark has built, but how it talks to its own citizens about risk. Danish ministers have been open about the threat of cyber-attacks and hybrid warfare and have asked households to keep three days' worth of food, water and essential supplies at home in case of an emergency, whether that is a power cut, or a cyber-attack on infrastructure.
Britain has recognised the importance of resilience too. The Strategic Defence Review called for exactly this kind of national conversation about preparedness. Yet that conversation has barely started here. Responsibility for resilience remains split with no single department or minister in clear charge. When ownership is divided that thinly, action slows down, and the public has no obvious place to look when they want to understand who is responsible.
I raised this directly in Parliament, in an Adjournment debate I led on national resilience. The point I put to the then Security Minister, now Defence Secretary, was straightforward: when responsibility is split across departments, no one truly owns it, and that is precisely when coordination breaks down, now it matters most. What I saw in Denmark only sharpened that argument.
The lesson is not that government needs to grow or add another layer of bureaucracy. It is that responsibility needs to be clearer. Bringing today's overlapping functions under one minister would strengthen accountability, improve planning for hybrid threats and attacks on critical infrastructure, and make it far easier for the public to know who is in charge when something goes wrong. This is not a question that should divide along party lines, and I would welcome a cross-party effort to get it right, because the country's preparedness should not depend on which government happens to be in office.
This matters in Exmouth and Exeter East as much as anywhere. Our communities depend on secure energy, water and digital networks, and those systems face the same pressures seen across the country. I will keep raising this with ministers and pushing for a more coordinated approach to national resilience. Denmark did not wait for a crisis to force the change. Neither should we.
