Civil unrest

The card is the shortest in the set and its instructions are the right ones: stay home, car off-street, doors reinforced, never risk yourself over property. This adds one legal fact worth real money and one behavioural one worth more.

The compensation nobody knows about

The Riot Compensation Act 2016 lets you claim for riot damage from the local policing body where your insurance does not cover it, or does not cover it fully.

That matters because some policies exclude or limit riot damage, and because uninsured households have no other route at all.

The critical detail is the deadline. Claims must be made within a short statutory period, currently 42 days from the incident. That is far shorter than people expect from any dealings with insurers, and it is easy to miss while dealing with the aftermath.

So, if it happens:

1. Photograph and film everything before clearing up, exactly as in the flood card.
2. Get a police reference number.
3. Claim on your insurance first, and get the position in writing, including anything they decline or cap.
4. Check the statutory route immediately, because the clock is running from the incident and not from your insurer's decision.
5. Keep every receipt.

Verify the current deadline and cap when you need it, since statutory figures change. The point of this section is that the route exists at all, which most people do not know.

Do not go and look

The commonest way an uninvolved person is hurt in British disorder is by going to see it, or by standing at the edge of it filming.

• Crowds are a physical hazard regardless of anybody's intentions. Crush, surge and being unable to leave are dangers that have nothing to do with violence or politics.
• Onlookers are routinely caught up. Bystanders are not a protected category once something is moving.
• Filming makes you a participant in the eyes of people who do not want to be filmed.
• Posting it, live, from your street, tells everyone where you are. Post afterwards if at all, and never with a location.

The card's phrase is stay grey and it is the whole strategy. Nothing about the house should announce anything: no flags, no signs, no political display in the window, no lights blazing behind open curtains, no conversation at the front door. This is not about anybody's views. It is about not being a landmark.

Stay off the streets, and off the balcony. Watch the news rather than the window.

The hour before, if there is one

Disorder is usually visible coming, on the news or locally, hours or a day ahead. That hour is worth using.

1. Get the car off-street, into a garage, a drive, or several streets away in a quiet residential area. Vehicles on the street are among the most commonly damaged things.
2. Bring everything in. Bins, garden furniture, tools, bikes, anything loose that can be thrown or burnt. Wheelie bins are the classic.
3. Fill up with fuel, cash and food if any of that is short, and then stay in.
4. Charge everything, and make sure the family card is current.
5. Close curtains and blinds before dark, per the home defence companion.
6. Check the door hardware. Long screws in the strike plate, which is the cheapest security measure there is, and the door bar on at night.
7. Agree the code word and the room, so a household that has to move upstairs quickly does so without discussion.
8. Tell the neighbours you are in, and find out who is not, and whether anybody needs collecting or checking on.

Then treat it like a storm. Stay in, keep the routine, let it pass. The card's last line, it passes, is the accurate one: British disorder is characteristically localised and short.

Children, and what to say

This scenario frightens children more than most, because it is people rather than weather, and because they will hear about it from other children.

• Say what is true and short. Something is happening in town, we are staying in, it will be over soon, and we are safe here.
• Do not have it on in the room. Rolling coverage repeats the same footage, which children read as it happening again and again.
• Give them something to do, which is the family-specific page principle: a job beats reassurance.
• Answer what they ask and no more. Children ask one question at a time and are usually satisfied by one answer.
• Do not make it about a group of people. They will repeat what you say, at school, to somebody it is about.
• Keep bedtime normal. Routine is the treatment, exactly as in every other page of this app.