‘Fatal strategic errors’: First report from UK Covid inquiry points to serious state failures

Britain’s pandemic planning was plagued by “fatal strategic flaws” and failed citizens around the world, a damning first report from the UK’s Covid-19 public inquiry has found, piling pressure on the prime minister to overhaul the nation’s civil emergency system.

Lady Hallett, chair of the statutory inquiry into the pandemic that has claimed more than 230,000 lives, pointed to “serious failures by the state” in the way it prepared for the risk of a pandemic. “Never again must a disease cause so many deaths and so much suffering,” she said.

Former Conservative health ministers Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock have been criticised for not better preparing the UK.

But while Hallett predicted that another pandemic, potentially more contagious and deadly, would emerge in the near to medium future, the health think tank Nuffield Trust warned that neither the NHS nor social care services were “in a much more resilient state and were weaker in some areas”.

Hallett said it was now time to treat system-wide emergency preparedness and resilience as a hostile state threat. She made 10 “far-reaching” recommendations to “avoid the terrible losses and costs to society that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought” and said she expected them all to be implemented.

In response, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said: “The safety and security of the country must always be the first priority, and this Government is determined to learn the lessons from the investigation and put in place better measures to protect and prepare us for the impact of a future pandemic.”

The recommendations include:

  • The leader or deputy leader of each of the four countries must chair a cabinet-level committee responsible for emergency preparedness.

  • There should be a UK-wide pandemic response exercise at least every three years and a new system-wide civil emergency strategy should be introduced.

  • External ‘red teams’ should regularly challenge groupthink on the principles, evidence and advice on contingency planning.

  • A radical simplification of the civil emergency response and resilience systems (the current system flowchart resembled “a plate of spaghetti”).

Hallett found that the government had largely focused on the threat of an influenza outbreak, despite the fact that coronaviruses in Asia and the Middle East in previous years had made a new coronavirus outbreak on a pandemic scale predictable. To overlook that was “a fundamental mistake.”

“It wasn’t a black swan,” she said in a 240 page reportthe first of at least 10 to emerge from the multi-part investigation that will last until at least 2026.

The report concluded: “The processes, planning and policies of civil emergency structures within the UK government and devolved administrations and civil services failed their citizens. Ministers and civil servants were guilty of ‘groupthink’ that led to a false consensus that the UK was well prepared for a pandemic.”

Hunt, who was health secretary from 2012 to 2018, and Hancock, who took over until 2021, were singled out by Hallett for failing to fix flaws in emergency planning before the pandemic. Hallett said the “harrowing stories of loss and grief” she had heard while gathering evidence “remind us why radical reform is needed”.

The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, which represents around 7,000 families, many of whom had called for an inquiry, welcomed the report as a “hard-hitting, clear-sighted and damning analysis of how and why the UK found itself fatally underprepared” and said it was “a huge milestone”.

Hallett said preparations for a no-deal Brexit were stalling work on pandemic preparedness. She touched on the impact of austerity, saying that in the years leading up to the Covid-19 outbreak “there had been a slowdown in improvements in health, and inequalities in health had increased, and public services were close to, or even over, capacity”.

But relatives said the conclusions “did not go far enough in setting out how we can address and improve inequalities and the capacity of public services”.

Thea Stein, director of the Nuffield Trust think tank, said the worrying reality is that more than four years into the pandemic, “short-term thinking and ad-hoc funding decisions” are still rife across the NHS and social care.

Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrats’ health spokesperson, said: “Today must be a moment for change. The country has been badly let down during the pandemic and this new government must ensure lessons are learned quickly.”

Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, described the report as a moment of truth. He said that austerity had left the UK unprepared and that “facing the greatest crisis since the Second World War, our defences have been weakened by severe cuts”.

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The key preparedness gaps Hallett identified included:

  • The UK is preparing for the wrong pandemic, focusing on flu.

  • The institutions responsible for emergency planning are ‘labyrinthine in their complexity’.

  • The government’s only pandemic strategy (for the flu, which dates from 2011) is outdated and cannot be adapted.

  • Failure to recognise the impact of the pandemic and the response to it on ethnic minority communities and people with poor health or other vulnerabilities.

  • No lessons have been learned from previous emergency exercises and disease outbreaks.

  • A ‘damaging lack of focus’ on systems like testing, tracing and isolating that could be scaled up.

On lockdowns, Hallett highlighted Hancock’s evidence that the 2011 flu strategy was not designed to prevent a pandemic from having a catastrophic effect, but “a strategy for dealing with the catastrophic effect of a pandemic”. The strategy did not consider legally mandated lockdowns as a response and Hallett said that in future they “must be properly considered in advance of an outbreak of a new infectious disease” alongside ways to avoid a lockdown.

She said all health ministers who adhered to the 2011 strategy, including Hunt, were responsible “for failing to investigate and address these shortcomings”.

“That also applies to Mr Hancock, who abandoned the strategy when the pandemic hit, by which point it was too late to have any effect on preparedness and resilience.”

Hancock had told the inquiry he believed the UK was one of the best-placed countries in the world to respond to a pandemic, and that he regarded the World Health Organization, which ranked the UK as a world leader, as an authoritative source.

Hallett said: “There were a great many ministers who could have done more by asking questions about it. Mr Hunt admitted that ‘collectively we have not put as much time, effort and energy’ into understanding the dangers of pathogens and challenging the consensus. This inquiry agrees with that.”

There was implicit criticism of George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016, for the Treasury’s failure to plan for non-economic shocks. Hallett said the Treasury “could have identified in advance important economic policy options that could have been deployed in the event of a pandemic”.

Osborne had told the inquiry that “there was no planning done by the UK Treasury, or, as far as I am aware, by any other Western Treasury, to keep the entire population at home for months on end”.

Hallett said that if the UK had been better prepared, some of the human and financial costs might have been avoided.

“Before the Covid-19 pandemic, there was no ministerial leadership within the UK Government and the devolved administrations that could consider strategy, guide policy and make decisions for the whole of government to prepare for and build resilience to civil emergencies across the system,” she said.

The Covid inquiry has not yet produced a report on political decision-making. This autumn, research will be conducted into the impact of the pandemic on the health systems of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

Next year, witnesses will be questioned about vaccines and therapies. There are inquiries into procurement, the test, trace and isolate system and the health sector. Future inquiries into children and young people and the economic response have been announced.

Hancock and Hunt have been contacted for comment.