The government “failed its citizens” with its insufficient and outdated planning for a pandemic, the first report from the Covid Inquiry has claimed.
The 217-page report has found that, despite planning for a flu outbreak, “our preparedness and resilience was not adequate for the global pandemic that occurred”.
The inquiry suggested the UK had been planning for the “wrong pandemic”, and said the former health secretaries – Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock – failed to fix flaws in contingency planning before the pandemic hit.
It also slammed the country’s “labyrinthine” emergency planning, saying the approach to risk assessment was “flawed”.
“The UK government’s outdated pandemic strategy, developed in 2011, was not flexible enough to adapt when faced with the pandemic in 2020,” the report claimed.
It added: “There was a failure to fully learn from past civil emergency exercises and outbreaks of diseases.”
Emergency planning “failed to put enough consideration into existing health and social inequalities”, according to the report.
It claimed there was a “lack of attention” to the systems that would help test, trace and isolate the disease, while policy documents were “full of jargon and overly complex”.
The report took aim at the ministers, too, saying they “often failed to challenge the advice they did get” while their advisers “lacked freedom” to express their differing opinions, often leading to “groupthink”.
Ultimately, it concluded: “If we had been better prepared, we could have avoided some of the massive financial, economic and human cost of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
It recommended a “radical simplification” of the civil emergency preparedness and resilience systems, and “streamlining the current bureaucracy”.
When announcing the report, the chair of the inquiry Baroness Hallett added that the “UK lacked resilience” in 2020.
She noted that the country had high pre-existing levels of illness and general levels of ill health at the time as well, making it more vulnerable to the outbreak of disease.
Hallett also noted that it is a question of not if but when the next pandemic will hit – and are we ready?
She said another pandemic would be “more transmissible and lethal” and likely to occur in the near to medium future.
The inquiry was launched in 2022 by then-PM Boris Johnson, and meant to examine the decision making across the country.
This report is the first of at least nine expected.
It’s not known how long the inquiry will last, as hearings are expected to continue until at least next year.
