About 3.1 million households in the UK cannot afford the cheapest food stockpile that would meet the government's "Be Ready" emergency advice, according to an estimate by the think tank Verdant, whose co-director James Meadway said on Friday that the guidance was "bordering on irresponsible".
Verdant, a Green Party-linked think tank founded in March, says the households contain 6.4 million people, including more than two million children. It puts the figure at nearly one in nine households, or 11 per cent.
The estimate bears on a campaign the government launched on 22 October, asking every household to keep three days of supplies, including food that needs no fridge or cooking and three litres of drinking water per person per day. Ministers have already faced questions about whether people on low incomes can follow it.
Mr Meadway, an economist, told The Independent: "When you have so many people who can barely afford one day's worth of food, it is bordering on irresponsible to say you need to be prepared, but we aren't necessarily going to help you out".
He said: "The problem is the government has an individualised approach to dealing with actually a big social problem, which is our increasing exposure to big failures happening in the rest of the world, and perhaps happening here."
Verdant's figure comes from its own model of UK households and has not been independently checked. The think tank counts a household as unable to afford the stockpile if its savings are below the cost of the stockpile and its income after housing costs is below the poverty line.
Priced at the cheapest third of prices the Office for National Statistics collects in shops, Verdant says a bare-minimum stockpile costs about £12 per adult for three days. That figure covers food only and excludes items such as a torch, batteries or a wind-up radio.
"The checklist assumes that people can afford it," Mr Meadway wrote in the research, published on Verdant's website late last month. "This is close to the 9% of households the DWP already finds food insecure."
The research says a third of council tenants and a quarter of housing association tenants cannot afford the stockpile, against 4 to 5 per cent of homeowners. In Glasgow, it says, more than one household in five cannot afford it.
The government has said, as reported by the BBC, that people do not need to buy everything at once. Prime Minister Andy Burnham defended the campaign at a wildfires resilience summit in Liverpool the day after it launched.
"It is just having those supplies in the house to get you through those moments. So we are having that conversation about resilience," he said.
Treasury minister James Murray told BBC Breakfast at the time: "I'm not going to pretend I've followed all that advice myself yet."
Defence Secretary Wes Streeting, who fronts the campaign, told BBC Newsnight last month: "It's encouraging that people are taking practical steps to be ready."
Retailers have reported sales rising since the launch. Iceland reported a 40 per cent rise in tinned products over the weekend after the campaign began, and Robert Dyas a 160 per cent week-on-week rise in radio sales, according to figures obtained by Newsnight.
Ruth Patrick, a professor at the University of Glasgow, told the BBC last month that the guidance "will appear at best tone deaf and at worst almost insulting" to households facing poverty.
Mr Meadway also argued for a return to national food reserves. "We used to have, until the early '90s, a stockpile of essential foods in this country," he said. Verdant's research says Britain has held no national food stockpile since the mid-1990s and that Sweden is building up its reserves.
The government has not responded directly to Verdant's figures.
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