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The UK “failed” its citizens in its response to coronavirus after planning for the “wrong pandemic”, with preparations for a no-deal Brexit diverting the state’s attention from potential public health crises, the Covid-19 inquiry has found.
Inquiry chair Baroness Heather Hallett said “significant flaws” in pandemic planning by the national and devolved governments since 2011 meant officials had focused too heavily on influenza and not learnt from other countries.
This “groupthink” strategy fell short when Covid struck in late 2019, Hallett found in her first report published on Thursday, saying it was “outdated” and “virtually abandoned on . . . first encounter with” the virus.
“The UK planned for the wrong pandemic,” she added in the 240-page report, which singled out former Conservative health secretaries Matt Hancock and Jeremy Hunt for insufficient preparation.
“Processes, planning and policy . . . within the UK government and devolved administrations and civil services failed their citizens,” she said, describing emergency planning structures as “labyrinthine in their complexity”.
Calling for “radical reform”, Hallett also pointed to the impact of what ministers in evidence referred to as the “reprioritisation” of resources in the years leading up to the pandemic.
In that period, civil servants put aside planning on potential public health crises to work on contingency arrangements for a no-deal Brexit.
Britain’s system of resilience and preparedness was “under constant strain” in the years before the pandemic, with officials forced to stop “work on one potential emergency to concentrate on another”, the report said.
The official Covid inquiry is examining the government’s response to the virus that shut swaths of the economy, upended social life and has so far killed about 230,000 people in Britain and infected many millions more.
It is due to run until the summer of 2026, and the first of nine modules was focused on how ready the UK was for a pandemic, and the resilience of its institutions and public health in late 2019.
Hallett rejected claims made by UK officials in evidence that the country was as well-prepared as anywhere in the world to deal with a pandemic before Covid struck.
“In reality, the UK was ill-prepared for dealing with a catastrophic emergency, let alone the coronavirus pandemic,” she said, adding that the government had committed “a fundamental error” in not learning from other countries’ experiences of coronaviruses in previous years.
In evidence 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 March 23, 2020, more than a week after senior advisers to Johnson recommended the move.
Thursday’s report found ministers in Johnson’s government did not
receive a broad enough range of scientific advice and failed to challenge the advice they did receive.
Had the UK had been better prepared, “some of the significant and long-lasting financial, economic and human cost of the pandemic” could have been avoided, it concluded.
Hunt and Hancock, who was in post when the pandemic struck, were subject to particular criticism. Hallett pointed the blame at all health secretaries who had relied on a flawed strategy conceived in 2011 to respond to a flu outbreak.
For a year under Hancock’s watch, between 2018 and 2019, the main body charged with pandemic preparedness had ceased to meet, she noted.
In the same period, Hancock did not attend meetings of the subcommittee of the National Security Council responsible for pandemic planning.
Hunt and Hancock were contacted for comment.
Hallett called for “radical reform” of preparedness planning, warning that it was “not a question of ‘if’ another pandemic will strike, but ‘when’” and that “never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering”.
Among 10 recommendations, Hallett said the government should create an independent statutory body responsible for “whole system preparedness and response” across the UK. She added that she expected “all my recommendations to be acted on”.
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