The UK government has released £32m in emergency aid for the British overseas territories hit by Hurricane Irma and dispatched a military task group to the Caribbean after complaints of an inadequate response to the storm.

The task group includes the ageing ship HMS Ocean, carrying at least three helicopters, which will take 10 to 14 days to reach the area, and hundreds of marines and royal engineers who will be sent in RAF transport planes.

HMS Ocean is currently deployed in the Mediterranean and is due to be decommissioned next March before being sold, possibly to the Brazilian navy. It will work alongside RFA Mounts Bay, a landing ship, which had already been deployed to the region as a precautionary measure and is being sent to Anguilla.

The increased resources, and military hardware, came after an overnight assessment sent to the cabinet emergency committee Cobra concluded the devastation on the British overseas territories of Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands was worse than feared. Aid was increased from a planned £12m to £32m after Cobra met.

At least one person has been confirmed dead in Anguilla and there are concerns that another British overseas territory – the low-lying Turks and Caicos Islands – is in the line of the storm and likely to be battered. Evacuations have begun and tropical-force rains were expected to begin on Thursday afternoon local time.

Defending the initial government deployment of Mounts Bay, Sir Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, said: “These are our people and we are going to do everything possible to help them. It’s exactly the right type of ship for this, with its helicopters and its marines, and it’s already at work, helping the people of Anguilla, helping to clear roads, helping to restore power and get an accurate picture for the governor of exactly what’s happening on the island. So we’re there and we’re helping, but obviously this is a huge challenge.”

On Thursday morning, Theresa May spoke to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in a bid to coordinate efforts. She later said her “thoughts and prayers” were with all those affected.

France, which directly administers its Caribbean territories, has already sent a minister and hundreds of soldiers to the region.

The British prime minister said: “It’s the most powerful storm to hit the Atlantic. It’s brought devastation in its wake. It’s destroyed buildings and infrastructure, but it’s had such an impact on people’s lives because people have seen their livelihoods completely destroyed, and of course some people are missing, and some will have lost loved ones.

“We have taken action, we have moved swiftly. We have people on the ground, £32m has been released.

“We must not forget that there is a further storm on the way, and that the Turks and Caicos Islands still lie in the path of Hurricane Irma. But that won’t stop us from providing the assistance that is needed, and doing everything we can to help.”

The move to deploy HMS Ocean and increase funding came after Josephine Gumbs-Conner, a barrister from Anguilla, claimed on Thursday morning that the UK’s preparations for, and response to, the storm had been “sorely lacking”.



She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the UK government should have “done what the French did in St Martin … made sure that they had military on the ground so that the response given is timely”.

The island’s essential services, including hospitals and police stations, were in a “limping position”, she said, after the hurricane caused “nuclear bomb devastation”.

On Wednesday evening, Dorothea Hodge, a former UK representative to Anguilla, criticised the government’s response: “It’s absolutely disgraceful that it has taken the whole day for [international development secretary] Priti Patel to respond to the worst hurricane we have seen in a British territory since the 1920s.”

The French and the Dutch have permanent military bases in the Caribbean, but the British forces are kept at sea ready to respond to UK territories spread out across the region.

The foreign office minister Sir Alan Duncan said the island of Montserrat, a British overseas territory, had only been swiped by the hurricane but that Anguilla received its full blast.“The initial assessment is that the damage has been severe and, in places, critical,” Duncan told MPs. “The British Virgin Islands were also not spared the hurricane’s full force when it passed through yesterday morning.

“We must appreciate that this is a massive, perhaps unprecedented, natural disaster. We have not seen a hurricane on this scale in our lifetime, so we will have to assess the damage and respond as best we possibly can, knowing that this is a whopper.”

He refused to be drawn about the extent to which climate change was making hurricanes more frequent, arguing the focus had to be on the emergency rescue.

Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes in recorded history, made landfall on the islands of the north-east Caribbean on Wednesday morning, causing major flooding and damage to buildings. At least nine people are confirmed to have died and thousands more remain in shelters, their homes damaged or destroyed. In Puerto Rico, almost a million people are without power and 50,000 without water, according to the US territory’s department of emergency relief.



Travel association Abta said thousands of Britons are believed to be on holiday in the Caribbean.