Civil Service “groupthink”, Brexit and planning for flu rather than a coronavirus led Britain to be unprepared for the pandemic, the Covid Inquiry has found. The Telegraph has more.
Baroness Hallett, the inquiry’s Chairman, said Ministers “failed their citizens” by preparing for the wrong pandemic, which led more people to die from Covid,
The Government’s flawed planning was hampered by “groupthink” and bureaucracy, which Health Secretaries such as Jeremy Hunt failed to challenge, the inquiry’s first report said.
Lady Hallett said that the failure to plan properly led to more deaths and a greater cost to the economy.
She said the country suffered from a “lack of adequate leadership” in the run up to Covid and the country was “ill prepared for dealing with a catastrophic emergency, let alone the coronavirus pandemic that actually struck”.
“Had the U.K. been better prepared for and more resilient to the pandemic, some of that financial and human cost may have been avoided,” the report said.
The report also found that some recommendations to improve the Government’s response to a potential pandemic had not been implemented because the Government was focused on preparing for a no-deal Brexit.
It added that preparedness for a civil emergency must be treated in “much the same way as we treat a hostile state”.
More than 235,000 people died from illnesses involving COVID-19 up to the end of 2023, while the inquiry also recognised the terrible damage done by the pandemic to the economy, children’s education and mental health and to the NHS.
In the foreword of the 217-page report, the first since the inquiry was launched two years ago, Lady Hallett added: “There must be radical reform. Never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering.”
Identifying what she described as “significant flaws” in planning for Covid, Lady Hallett, whose inquiry has already cost £100 million, said “the U.K. had prepared for the wrong pandemic” and plans to deal with a flu outbreak were “inadequate for a global pandemic of the kind that struck”.
The report said that there was a “lack of adequate leadership, coordination and oversight” from Ministers who were not presented with enough options and “failed to challenge sufficiently” the advice they did receive from officials and advisers. …
She said there were “fatal strategic flaws” in assessing the risks and a sole pandemic strategy dating back to 2011 and based on influenza was “outdated and lacked adaptability”.
“It was virtually abandoned on its first encounter with the pandemic,” the report said. “It focused on only one type of pandemic, failed adequately to consider prevention or proportionality of response, and paid insufficient attention to the economic and social consequences of pandemic response.”
The 2011 strategy had not been updated to investigate the dangers posed by coronaviruses that had already struck in Asia including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
Summing up her findings, Lady Hallett said: “The Inquiry has no hesitation in concluding that the processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures within the U.K. Government and devolved administrations and civil services failed their citizens.”
Lady Hallett said the 2011 strategy was “beset by major flaws, which were there for everyone to see” and criticised Mr. Hancock for abandoning the strategy.
There was also a “damaging absence of focus on the measures, interventions and infrastructure required in the event of a pandemic” and planning was hampered by bureaucracy.
“Despite reams of documentation, planning guidance was insufficiently robust and flexible, and policy documentation was outdated, unnecessarily bureaucratic and infected by jargon,” the report said.
The report concluded: “The Secretaries of State for Health… who adhered to the strategy, the experts and officials who advised them to do so, and the governments of the devolved nations that adopted it, all bear responsibility for failing to have these flaws examined and rectified. This includes Mr. Hancock, who abandoned the strategy when the pandemic struck, by which time it was too late to have any effect on preparedness and resilience.”
The report also raises serious concerns about the use of lockdowns, which Lady Hallett said “should be a measure of last resort”, and accused ministers of a “failure adequately to consider proportionality of response” in imposing lockdowns.
The inquiry, which will look at the effect of lockdowns in later modules, said: “For as long as they remain a possibility, lockdowns should be considered properly in advance of a novel infectious disease outbreak.”
Making 10 recommendations, the report said that that the “potential disruption to social and economic life, and the cost as the result of a false alarm, may be disproportionate to the burden of an actual pandemic”, but it was critical for a Government “to steer a course between complacency and overreaction”.
Worth reading in full.
This sounds like it’s trying to have it both ways. Criticising Hancock for abandoning the 2011 plan while slamming the plan as inadequate. Saying we didn’t do enough, but then hedging on lockdowns and implying maybe we shouldn’t do them and they’re not really worth it (to be honest, we should be grateful there is any sense of that at all given how the hearings went).
The implication seems to be that had the plan been better for coronaviruses (as though SARS-2, an airborne respiratory virus, behaves so very differently from influenza, an airborne respiratory virus), then it wouldn’t have needed to be abandoned and lockdowns imposed because we would have happily followed the coronavirus pandemic plan. But this assumes there was something wrong with the plan, and that Covid is so very different from influenza.
In fact, of course, the 2011 plan was based on a review of evidence for non-pharmaceutical interventions such as gathering and travel restrictions which showed that most of them were insufficiently effective to be worthwhile and could even be counterproductive.
The problem wasn’t the plan, as Sweden showed by following it and having better outcomes. The problem was that it was ditched. Plus many of the panicked measures and protocols that were implemented were deadly for vulnerable people deprived of adequate and timely care. I suppose it would have been too much to expect Baroness Hallett to point this out.
Stop Press: A new report from the Taxpayers’ Alliance says the U.K. spent more than almost every other OECD country on trying to mitigate the impact of the pandemic as a percentage of GDP.
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Councils will politely tell the Minister to foxtrot oscar and carry on regardless. Nobody but the most gullible are fooled by these statements.
Agreed. They know they need only wait a few months for sir-kneeler to become PM. Then they’ll feel empowered to hire twice as many political commissars and hang the expense.
What an unpleasant prospect.
Quite, just another word salad straight out of the Rishi Sunak book of “words speak louder than action”. Or, as my mother would have put it: “Fine words butter no parsnips.”
It has been her party that has institutionalised wokery into every workplace in the country.
Don’t believe one word she utters, nor any of the Braverman, Patel, Mogg, Redwood, Davies, Anderson gang – they are all peeing in the same pot.
Too little too late. Tories failed for decades on all the big issues.
“Tories failed for decades on all the big issues.”
Now, now tof what Ms McVey is talking about is hardly a big issue, it’s pissing in the wind stuff. And knowing how councils work I can guarantee that away days for the “directors” will not disappear because Ms McVey has directed it to be so. This sort of expense will simply be filed under something reasonable and innocuous like ‘staff training.’ Now who could argue against staff training?
The real waste in council expenditure is Directors pensions which in the case of our local council is costing millions. If Ms McVey really wanted to achieve something useful for residents she would take a chainsaw to that largesse along with the numbers employed as ‘Directors.’
Quite frankly I believe McVey has insulted the electorate with this paltry nonsense. The cost saving apparently amounts to £67,000 per council – so what?
McVey needs to keep her head down because conning the public with faux cost-cutting measures will get her nowhere. The Tories are toast now anyway at the next election – if we have one – although it is difficult not to believe that their destruction is not being deliberately orchestrated.
Indeed just a sop to try and fool voters into thinking they are conservative. And McVey is one of the less bad ones.
“And McVey is one of the less bad ones.”
Aye, and she’s nice on the eye.
Redwood, Patel, Braverman, Davies, Anderson, Mogg, Anderson et al are all out the same fake mould. They all take the whip at the end of the day.
This may be true. But when each council, on average, employs 2 EDI people at an average salary of £33500/ year, these posts should certainly just DIE.
If we want to truly cut waste in all area’s of government and public sector this would be an extremely long response, and I’d still be typing on Monday.
But, just for starters, cut out all the BS related to Net Zero and Green energy, scrap the pointless Covid enquiry and commission a “proper” one, using a few notables from here for starters.
I have a life, so I’ll leave it at that for now!
I’m intrigued to read this report about local government spending.
https://www.tussell.com/regional-spending-report
I’m torn. Will it be a whitewash or a greenwash?
Apparently you can download it for free (which always makes me suspicious). If anyone gets the time, do share its contents.
Or the Government could just scrap (or amend) the Equality Act and make the whole nonsense stop completely.
But they’d rather posture.
Have Tory MPs been asleep for 14 years or are they desperate to save themselves from oblivion.
Both.