Melanie Ward

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing this debate. Before I was elected to this House, I served as a humanitarian aid worker and spent time in a number of war zones, so I know the importance of preparedness for emergencies and for scenarios that one hopes will never happen. In a country like ours, the role of the state is crucial in this. As my hon. Friend set out, foreign aggressors threaten our country, along with a whole range of new and emerging threats. My hon. Friend also spoke about Storm Éowyn, and we know that, as the rate of climate change increases, the effect of such storms will be exacerbated. When Storm Éowyn hit my constituency, more than 15,000 people across Fife lost power in freezing conditions, and it brought to light flaws in the preparedness for the storm at many different levels, including failures in the priority services register. People’s phone batteries ran out and they had no signal or way of contacting anyone. There were also failures in how the Scottish Government and local authorities planned to get resources to vulnerable communities, including those in areas served by independent distribution network operators, such as Fordell Gardens in my constituency, which was completely left out. It took me more than a year of follow-up to get any kind of action on that issue. We need more joined-up thinking to prepare for such events in future, but we must also be prepared for the international threats that we face. I have to say that we lag behind our European allies in this kind of national preparedness. Our peers such as Sweden and Finland are much further ahead than we are, because of the threats that they have faced historically from Russia. We have the new strategic defence review and the resilience action plan, but we must speed up that work so they are not just frameworks on a shelf but the culture of our country, where individuals, communities and agencies work together to prepare for the threats that we may face in future.