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The UK has “failed” its citizens in its response to the coronavirus after planning for a “bad pandemic”, with preparations for a no-deal Brexit diverting the country’s attention from potential public health crises, a Covid-19 inquiry has found.
The inquiry’s chair, Baroness Heather Hallett, said “significant failings” in pandemic planning by national and devolved governments since 2011 meant officials focused too heavily on flu and failed to learn from other countries.
That “groupthink” strategy failed when Covid struck at the end of 2019, Hallett found in her first report published on Thursday to be “outdated” and “virtually abandoned on . . . first encounter with the virus.
“Britain planned for the wrong pandemic,” she added in a 240-page report that criticized “fatal strategic flaws” and singled out former Tory health secretaries Matt Hancock and Jeremy Hunt for lack of preparation.
“Processes, Planning and Policy . . . citizens have failed within the UK government and devolved administrations and civil services,” she said, describing emergency planning structures as “labyrinthous in their complexity”.
Hallett called for “radical reform” and also pointed to the impact of what ministers in evidence described as a “reprioritisation” of resources in the years before the pandemic.
During this period, officials put planning for potential public health crises aside to work on contingency arrangements for a no-deal Brexit.
Britain’s resilience and preparedness system was “under constant pressure” in the years leading up to the pandemic, with officials forced to stop “working on one potential emergency and focus on another”, the report said.
The official Covid inquiry is examining the government’s response to the virus, which has shut down areas of the economy, upended social life and so far killed around 230,000 people in Britain and infected many millions more.
Due to run until the summer of 2026, the first of nine modules focused on how the UK is prepared for a pandemic and the resilience of its institutions and public health in late 2019.
Hallett rejected claims by British officials as evidence that the country was as well prepared as anywhere in the world to deal with the pandemic before Covid struck.
“In reality, the UK was ill-prepared to deal with a catastrophic emergency, let alone a coronavirus pandemic,” she said, adding that the government had made a “fundamental mistake” by failing to learn from other countries’ past experiences with coronaviruses. flight.
Ex-ministers and current and former senior officials have painted a devastating picture of then-prime minister Boris Johnson’s ability to make decisions of vital national importance during the pandemic.
The UK entered its first lockdown on 23 March 2020, more than a week after Johnson’s top advisers recommended the move.
Thursday’s report found that Johnson government ministers had not
they were receiving a wide enough range of scientific advice and were unable to challenge the advice they were given.
Had the UK been better prepared, “some of the significant and long-term financial, economic and human costs of the pandemic could have been avoided”, the report concluded.
Hunt and Hancock, who was in office when the pandemic struck, were the subject of particular criticism. Hallett pointed the blame at all health ministers who relied on the flawed strategy created in 2011 to respond to the flu outbreak.
For a year under Hancock’s watch, between 2018 and 2019, the main body charged with pandemic preparedness stopped meeting, she noted.
During the same period, Hancock did not attend meetings of the National Security Council subcommittee responsible for pandemic planning.
Hunt, Hancock and the Conservative Party have been contacted for comment.
Calling for “radical reform” of preparedness planning, Hallett warned that “it is not a question of ‘if’ the next pandemic will strike, but ‘when'” and that “never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so much death and so much suffering”.
Among the 10 recommendations, Hallett said the government should create an independent statutory body responsible for “system-wide preparedness and response” in the UK. She added that she expected “all my recommendations to be followed”.
Labor Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the report confirmed “what many have always believed – that the UK was ill-prepared for Covid-19 and that the process, planning and policies in all four countries were failing UK citizens”.
“The security of the country should always come first and this government is committed to learning the lessons of the investigation,” he added in a statement.