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’.”