“Everyone will have the food they need.” — Michael Gove
“On stockpiling, [Matt] Hancock says it’s “really important” that people don’t start hoarding because it’ll make the govt’s task much harder.” (reported by Sebastian Payne of the Financial Times on Twitter)
“It is categorically untrue that the supply of fresh food will be unaffected under a no-deal Brexit.” — British Retail Consortium
Is it worth stockpiling for Brexit?
There has been a lot of talk about whether it is worth stockpiling food and other essential items for Brexit — not at a country-wide level but on an individual basis. It’s an excellent question because the answer is likely to depend, in several different ways, on your personal circumstances.
1. Do you have the space?
If you’re living in a shared household or a tiny flat then you may not have the space to stockpile a lot of bulky food. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the concept altogether, but you may not be able to store everything you would like to be sure of having after the UK leaves the EU. You should prioritise the items that you specifically need and perhaps consider pooling resources with others; can you cooperate with others in your shared house, for instance by turning some of the shared space into a storage area? See our Sharing the Load discussion for more about this.
2. Can you afford to stockpile?
We are not quite yet at the point where the question would be “can you afford NOT to stockpile?”… not quite. If you are living close to your limits in terms of spending on food and essentials then you may not feel you can consider buying items you don’t immediately need. That’s obviously fair enough, although as the saying goes, “every little helps”… even a couple of extra basics-level cans might come in useful further down the line.
3. “But it’ll never happen anyway!”
Perhaps not. However, we’re only just over three months (at the time of writing) from the (third) point at which anything that is going to happen, will happen. If nothing happens (update: or if it happens (even) later than was originally thought) – fine, then we have some food that we can eat at our leisure. Or we can donate it to food banks, as we’ve been fairly careful to only buy items with long expiry dates and that can be stored without any special considerations. It certainly won’t go to waste!
4. “But we’d need so much…”
Unlike many of the hardcore “preppers” online, we are not necessarily considering stockpiling enough for many months without supplies. For one thing, almost nobody living in towns or cities in the UK would have space to keep enough resources to cope with that. We are (currently) considering keeping enough food and other resources to cope with a hopefully-temporary supply disruption lasting perhaps a few weeks at most, and not necessarily affecting every single item. (Whether this is unduly optimistic remains to be seen.)
Food – Medications and Toiletries – Pets and Wildlife – Sharing the Load – Rotating Your Stocks – Other Resources