THE public was failed during the pandemic by the government’s “damaging absence of focus,” the Civil Service and a health service hamstrung by austerity, the Covid inquiry found today.
Inquiry chairwoman Baroness Heather Hallett found that Britain suffered from a “dangerously mistaken” belief that it was one of the world’s best-prepared countries to respond to a fast-spreading virus when it was anything but.
In her first report into preparedness for a pandemic, she called for radical reform — “it is not a question of ‘if’ another pandemic will strike, but ‘when’.”
She said the outbreak “was foreseeable,” but there was a lack of “a system that could be scaled up to test, trace and isolate,” planning guidance “insufficiently robust and flexible,” and policy documentation “outdated, unnecessarily bureaucratic and infected by jargon.”
“Public services, particularly health and social care, were running close to, if not beyond, capacity in normal times […] in the area of preparedness and resilience, money spent on systems for our protection is vital and will be vastly outweighed by the cost of not doing so,” she said.
Lady Hallett called for a new pandemic strategy to be developed and tested, at least every three years, with a country-wide crisis response exercise.
Government and political leaders should be properly held to account on a regular basis “for systems of preparedness and resilience” and external experts from outside Whitehall and government should be brought in to challenge and guard against “the known problem of groupthink,” she said.
TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said the report confirms that austerity left Britain underprepared for the pandemic.
“We owe it to those who lost their lives – and to those workers who put their lives at risk – to make sure this never happens again.”
The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group said that Lady Hallett did not go “far enough in setting out how we can challenge, address and improve inequalities and capacity of public services as opposed to just understanding the effects of these failures.”
Tim Bierley of Global Justice Now said: “This was a global pandemic, and international as well as national planning was at fault.
“Huge numbers of deaths could have been avoided with better global co-operation, and the UK played its part in this failure.
“Worse still, the UK has shown no signs of correcting these failings in the ongoing negotiations for a pandemic treaty, with the previous government hypocritically demanding countries share information on disease outbreaks while blocking measures for vaccine technology and know-how to be shared across borders.
“Keir Starmer’s new government must urgently rebuild trust on the global stage — starting with taking a new, productive approach to negotiations on the treaty that puts global health outcomes ahead of narrow corporate profits.”
Unison general secretary Christina McAnea said the report shows how austerity “was a reckless act of self-sabotage that fatally undermined the UK’s resilience and preparedness for a pandemic.”
British Medical Association chairman Professor Philip Banfield said the report reveals “in all its true horror how appallingly under-prepared the governments were for the pandemic.”
