Emergency alerts are for emergencies – not Andy Burnham telling Britain not to light a barbecue

Russia? Terror attack? Major incident? Chemical leak? Something nearby that means I need to get inside, get out or avoid a particular area? No. It was the government telling millions of Britons not to go out and commit arson.

I wasn’t planning on it. I suspect you weren’t either. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that most of the country had already successfully made it through the day without setting fire to a field, lighting fireworks in a drought or wandering into the countryside with a garden incinerator under one arm.

The warning itself was simple enough that there was a very high risk of wildfires, so don’t light disposable barbecues, fire pits, garden incinerators or fireworks. Fine. That is sensible advice.

But sensible advice is not the same thing as an emergency, and this is exactly where the Government got it wrong. The emergency alert system was sold to us as something reserved for genuinely serious situations, the kind of warning that cuts through everything else because there is a real and immediate threat to life. Instead, it was used as a glorified public information announcement.

That's important, because once you start using the loudest, most intrusive tool available for things that could just as easily be dealt with by normal warnings, you begin to destroy the very thing that makes the system useful.

The whole point of an emergency alarm is that you are not supposed to hear it very often. You hear it and you react because you assume something serious is happening. That is why the tone is so unpleasant, why the message takes over your screen and why the alert barges through the settings on your phone. It is supposed to command attention.

But if the Government starts treating it like another communications channel, one more way to nag the public about behaviour it would rather they avoided, then people will simply stop taking it seriously. That is not some abstract theory.

It happened to me in the space of a few hours. The first alert made me reach for my phone immediately. By the second I was wondering why I was getting it again. By the third I was annoyed. By the fourth, which arrived at around midnight, I was digging through the settings to find out how to switch the bloody thing off.

That is a catastrophic failure of what the system is supposed to achieve. I actually thought emergency alerts were a good idea when they were tested a few years ago. Used properly, they are obviously useful. If a dam bursts, if a major fire is heading towards homes, if there is a terror incident and police need people to stay indoors, then by all means make every phone in the area scream until somebody looks at it.

But “please don’t have a barbecue” (and then it seems only the disposable ones are bad?) is not the same category of message, however dry the grass is. There were dozens of other ways to communicate it, television, radio, weather apps, council alerts, fire brigade social media accounts, signs in parks, news websites, push notifications, local authority emails. Instead, somebody reached for the big red button, and then apparently kept pressing it.

The disruption was entirely predictable too. Parents who had finally got children to sleep suddenly had a siren going off beside the bed. Night workers were woken. Phones in bags, drawers and lockers started screaming. People who keep hidden phones for safety reasons risked having them exposed.

That last point is not minor. The Government itself has previously had to warn people in abusive relationships about emergency alerts because hidden devices can suddenly make a noise and give away their existence. If you are going to override millions of personal devices, the threshold should therefore be exceptionally high. It should not be “there is a risk of fire and we would prefer people not to light a barbecue”.

Then there was my mate in Shropshire, who received the alert in Welsh several minutes before the English version arrived, which meant his phone suddenly started screaming at him in a language he does not speak and he had to start trying to work out whether something genuinely serious was happening.

He lives in Shropshire. There is something almost perfect about that as a snapshot of the whole mess, an emergency system designed to provide clear, urgent information instead causing confusion, irritation and a frantic search to find out what the warning even says.

And this is what annoys me most about the whole thing. Governments love systems like this because they are powerful. They can reach almost everybody, instantly, without having to persuade people to tune in, open an app or read a notice.

But power like that only works if it is exercised with restraint. The moment it becomes a convenient shortcut for getting a message out, it loses its value.

You cannot condition people to expect that a screaming emergency siren might simply mean “don’t light a disposable barbecue tonight” and then be surprised when, one day, the same people assume the next alert can probably wait.

The people defending this will point out that wildfires can kill, and of course they can. That still does not mean every period of elevated wildfire risk justifies hijacking millions of phones. If that becomes the test, then where does it stop?

Heat alerts, icy roads, dangerous tides, poor air quality, fireworks night, a particularly dry bank holiday weekend? All of these things can, in the wrong circumstances, threaten life. The system becomes useless if every risk that can conceivably become serious is treated as if the emergency itself is already happening.

So by midnight, after receiving the same warning four times, I did exactly what the Government should be desperate for people not to do and I turned emergency alerts off. Not because I object to being warned about a genuine emergency, but because the system had already taught me that a screaming phone no longer necessarily meant there was one.

Thanks, Andy. I have managed not to start a wildfire for several decades without your help, but you did manage something else last night, you persuaded me to disable the system that is supposed to warn me when something genuinely dangerous happens. That is not responsible public safety messaging. It is how you train people to ignore the alarm.

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