British English has many phrases for keeping something in reserve.
Belt and braces: Using two safeguards where one might do. Braces are straps that hold up trousers.
To save for a rainy day: To put money aside for hard times.
To hedge one’s bets: To keep more than one option open.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket: Do not let everything depend on one plan.
Ne’er cast a clout till May be out: Do not put away warm clothes until the end of May. A clout is an old word for a piece of clothing.
“Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry!” The line is widely credited to Oliver Cromwell. Its earliest known appearance is in a poem, “Oliver’s Advice,” by William Blacker, published in 1834. The poem imagines Cromwell addressing his army during the invasion of Ireland.
Historic Royal Palaces, which looks after the Tower of London, writes: “It is said that the kingdom and the Tower of London will fall if the six resident ravens ever leave the fortress.” The Tower keeps more than six. “There are seven ravens at the Tower today,” the charity says, “the required six, plus one spare!”
Each new British prime minister writes four identical letters by hand, one to the commander of each of the country’s nuclear-armed submarines. The letters say what the commander should do if the government has been destroyed. When the prime minister changes, they are destroyed unopened and replaced.
An old aristocratic saying holds that a family needs “an heir and a spare.” The second son ensured that the inheritance stayed in the family if anything happened to the first. On 10 January 2023, Prince Harry published his memoir under the title Spare.
Section 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 is headed “Duty to assess, plan and advise.” It requires the public bodies listed in the Act to “maintain plans for the purpose of ensuring that if an emergency occurs or is likely to occur” they are able to carry on their work and deal with it.
The Green Book, HM Treasury’s guide to appraising public projects, states: “Practitioners should explicitly adjust their appraisals for optimism bias.” It defines optimism bias as “the proven tendency for appraisals to be over-optimistic about key assumptions.”
Supplementary guidance explains what the adjustment means. “Explicit adjustments should therefore be made to the estimates of a project’s costs, benefits and duration.”
In September 2021, the government published its Covid-19 plan for autumn and winter in England. Alongside the main approach, Plan A, it set out a contingency, Plan B, for use “if the data suggests the NHS is likely to come under unsustainable pressure.”
On 8 December 2021, after the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, the prime minister “confirmed that England will move to Plan B.”
“Yellowhammer is a codename used by the Government relating to no-deal planning.” In September 2019, the government published a Yellowhammer document. It set out the assumptions behind its plans for a reasonable worst case if the United Kingdom left the European Union without a deal.
In the years before the Second World War, the British government developed a plan, first devised in 1935, to add capacity for aircraft production. New factories were built and run “in parallel under direct control of the motor industry business,” for a management fee. They became known as shadow factories.