Everything else in this app can be bought, stored, learned or built. This one cannot, because it is made of other people and it takes months to a year to acquire. That makes it the item to start now and the one most households never start at all.
It is also, on the evidence of every emergency there has ever been, the thing that most determines how a household comes through.
Why this outranks the equipment
In any real event, help arrives from a few doors away long before it arrives from anywhere else. The person who pulls somebody out, notices the smoke, hears the call, or realises the elderly neighbour has not opened her curtains, is a neighbour. Organised services arrive later, and in a widespread event much later.
A street holds far more than a house does. Skills, tools, vehicles, freezers, generators, medical training, physical strength and time are all distributed across it. No household can hold all of that and no household needs to.
It is also security. The measure that most reduces the chance of trouble at your house is people who would notice, and that is exactly the same asset. See the layers before hardware.
And it works in both directions, which is the part that makes it sustainable. A household that is only ever taking is one people avoid.
Start with names
Unglamorous, and it is the whole foundation.
- Learn the names of the people either side, opposite, and behind. Then the rest of the street.
- Exchange phone numbers with the two or three nearest.
- Say hello properly. Not the nod. A conversation, occasionally, about nothing.
- Take a parcel in. Return a bin. Offer a lift. Small unrequested favours are the entire mechanism, and they cost nothing.
If you have moved recently, this is much easier in the first month than in the second year, and most people miss the window.
If you are shy about it, an opening that always works: knock, introduce yourself, say you are putting together contact numbers for the street in case of a power cut or a burst pipe, and ask if they would like to be included. Nobody has ever been offended by that.
Who is vulnerable and who knows it
The single most useful piece of local knowledge, and it is entirely informal.
Work out, for your street, who would struggle:
- Anybody older, living alone.
- Anybody with a disability or a condition that limits mobility.
- Anybody dependent on mains electricity for medical equipment. Oxygen concentrators, powered beds, some feeding and dialysis equipment.
- Anybody who cannot easily leave, or who would not hear an alarm.
- Families with very young children, and anybody heavily pregnant.
- Anybody who has just come out of hospital.
Then agree who checks on them, by name, so it is somebody's job rather than everybody's assumption. In a cold snap, a power cut, a heatwave or a flood warning, that check is what this whole page produces.
Tell them what you are doing rather than doing it about them. "If the power goes off, I'll knock" is welcome. Being on a list you never agreed to is not.
Priority Services Register: energy and water suppliers run a free register for people who would be particularly affected by a supply interruption. Anybody who qualifies should be on it, and telling a neighbour it exists is a genuinely useful thing to do.
What a street already has
Most people have no idea what is behind the doors around them.
You do not need a register. You need to have had enough conversations to know roughly who does what, and for them to know the same about you.
Being the one who offers
The practical entry point, because waiting to be asked produces nothing.
- Offer first, and offer something small. A charged power bank, a flask of hot water, a lift to the shop, help moving something.
- Offer specifically. "Let me know if you need anything" is polite and produces nothing. "I'm going to the shop at four, do you want anything?" produces an answer.
- Be the one who knocks in a power cut, a cold snap or after a storm.
- Do not make it a project. People are wary of anybody who arrives with a scheme, and completely fine with somebody who lends a ladder.
- Accept help too. A relationship where you only give is not a relationship, and letting somebody do you a favour is often what establishes it.
The practical arrangements
Small, concrete, reciprocal things worth agreeing before anything happens.
- Hold each other's spare keys. Safer than any hiding place, and it means somebody can get in and turn the water off.
- Know where each other's stop tap and consumer unit are. A neighbour with a key who cannot find the stopcock is watching a flood.
- Take each other's post in when away.
- Agree a check-in for a power cut or a cold snap: who knocks on whom.
- Share a freezer when somebody's power is out and yours is not, or vice versa.
- Know who has off-street parking that could take an extra car in a flood.
- Agree a street meeting point for a fire or an evacuation, the same way a household has one. See meeting points and a household plan.
- A street group chat is genuinely useful and it works right up until the network does not, which is why the physical arrangements above matter more.
Sharing without being the shop
The awkward question, and it deserves an honest answer rather than being avoided.
A household that has prepared and a street that has not is a real situation, and it is worth having thought about before it arrives.
- The best answer is that fewer neighbours are unprepared, which is what all of the above quietly produces. A street where several households have water, a torch, a radio and a plan is a different place from one where a single household has everything.
- Encourage without lecturing. Mentioning that you keep a few days of water because of the last burst main is a conversation. Presenting a doctrine is not, and it makes people avoid the subject.
- Skills and information are the cheapest thing to share, and they cost you nothing. Showing a neighbour where their stopcock is, or that they can text 999 if they register, gives away nothing and helps enormously.
- Decide in advance what you would share, roughly, and with whom. A decision made calmly is better than one made on the doorstep with somebody you have known for ten years.
- Recognise that generosity is also protective. A household that has helped its street is a household its street looks after. That is not sentiment; it is the observable pattern.
Groups that already exist
You do not have to build from nothing.
- Community Speed Watch, Neighbourhood Watch and similar, which vary a great deal locally in how active they are.
- The parish or town council, many of which have an emergency plan, a designated rest centre and a list of volunteers, and most residents do not know it exists.
- Flood action groups, where relevant, which are often the best organised local groups there are.
- Churches, mosques, community centres and village halls, which have space, kitchens, and lists of people.
- Allotment associations, which combine ground, tools, skills and people who talk to each other.
- Local resilience forums, which coordinate at a county level and publish community emergency plan templates worth reading.
Ask your parish or town council what the plan is. Frequently there is one, and frequently it needs volunteers, and that is a quick way to be usefully connected.