Brexit preparations hit UK's pandemic planning: inquiry report

FE Team | Published: July 26, 2024 20:37:05

LONDON, July 19 (AFP): Preparations for a possible no-deal Brexit contributed to the UK's lack of readiness for a global pandemic, a public inquiry into the government's handling of Covid-19 concluded on Thursday.
Retired senior judge Heather Hallett, who chairs the inquiry, laid out a string of damning criticisms about the UK's response to the global health emergency, and said citizens had been "failed" as a result of under-preparedness.
Her 217-page report -- the first of a series -- found that UK ministers and officials had been too focused on a flu outbreak, leading them to prepare "for the wrong pandemic".
The bodies responsible for emergency planning were "labyrinthine in their complexity", advice to government was often "undermined by 'groupthink'", and advisers were not given enough freedom to "express dissenting views", it added.
Witnesses told the inquiry "that a number of workstreams for pandemic preparedness were also paused due to reallocations of resources to Operation Yellowhammer" -- the Conservative government's contingency plan to prepare for it crashing out of the European Union without a deal.
The UK suffered one of the worst Covid-19 death tolls in Europe with more than 128,500 fatalities recorded by mid-July 2021.
Criticism levelled at the government of Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson at the time ranged from it failing to take the threat seriously in the early stages of the outbreak to failing to have enough protective equipment for frontline medical staff.
Ten key recommendations of the report included a "radical simplification" of civil emergency preparedness, a UK-wide pandemic response exercise at least every three years and the creation of a single body to oversee the whole system.
- Warning -
Speaking after the report's publication, Hallett warned that another pandemic was a question of "when" not "if" and that unless the UK was better prepared it would bring "immense suffering and huge financial cost" that would hit the must vulnerable hardest.
She said it had been widely believed in 2019 that the UK was one of the best-prepared countries but this had been "dangerously mistaken".
"In reality, the UK was ill prepared," she said, highlighting "serious errors".
The inquiry hearings were held in London in June and July 2023.
Witnesses included politicians including Johnson and former health minister Matt Hancock, scientists, civil servants and relatives of some of those who died.
The report did not criticise individual ministers or civil servants but said that in the years running up to the pandemic there had been a lack of "adequate leadership, coordination and oversight".
It added that "Ministers ... were not presented with a broad enough range of scientific opinion and policy options and failed to challenge sufficiently the advice they did receive from officials and advisers."
UK public inquiries are government-funded but have an independent chair. They investigate matters of public concern, establishing facts about what happened, why and what lessons can be learned.
They do not rule on civil or criminal liability, and any recommendations are not legally binding.
"The UK failed the citizens of all four nations (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland)... This cannot be allowed to happen again," Hallett said.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer, appointed two weeks ago after his Labour party's general election win, said: "Today's report confirms what many have always believed -- that the UK was under-prepared for Covid-19, and that process, planning and policy across all four nations failed UK citizens."
Later phases of the inquiry will focus on how the UK health service coped with the pandemic, vaccines and therapeutics, government procurement and the impact on the care sector.