Fatal strategic flaw: First report from UK coronavirus inquiry points out serious country failings | Coronavirus inquiry

The UK’s pandemic response suffered from fatal strategic flaws and failed citizens everywhere, according to the first report from the UK’s Covid-19 public inquiry, putting pressure on the Prime Minister to overhaul the national civil emergency system.

Mrs Hallett, who chairs the statutory inquiry into the pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 people, has singled out serious failings in the way the state prepared for the pandemic risk. She said a disease causing so much death and suffering could never happen again.

Former Conservative health secretaries Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock have been criticised for failing to do a better job of preparing the UK for the pandemic.

But while Hallett predicted another pandemic, more contagious and potentially deadly, was likely in the near future, the Nuffield Trust health thinktank warned that the NHS and social care services were not particularly resilient and were vulnerable in some areas.

Hallett said it was time to treat preparedness and resilience for system-wide emergencies as if they were threats from hostile nations. She made 10 broad recommendations to avoid the horrific toll and costs to society that the Covid-19 pandemic has taken, and she said she hopes to see all of them implemented.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said: The safety and security of our country must always be our top priority and this Government is committed to learning from the inquiry and putting in place better measures to protect and prepare us for the impact of any future pandemic.

Our recommendations are as follows:

The leaders or deputy leaders of the four countries should chair a cabinet-level committee responsible for civil emergency preparedness.

We must conduct pandemic drills across the UK at least every three years and develop a new system-wide civil emergency strategy.

An external red team should regularly challenge groupthink regarding the principles, evidence, and advice of emergency planning.

We have radically simplified our citizen emergency preparedness and resilience system (the current system flow diagram looks like a bowl of spaghetti).

Hallett found that the government had focused primarily on the threat of influenza, despite the fact that coronaviruses had been circulating in Asia and the Middle East in recent years, making another coronavirus outbreak of pandemic proportions predictable. This oversight was a fundamental error.

She said in a 240-page report that it was not a black swan event, the first of at least 10 pages from a multi-pronged inquiry that will continue until at least 2026.

The report concluded: The processes, plans and policies of the UK government, the devolved administrations and the civil service have failed citizens. Ministers and civil servants are guilty of groupthink, which has led to a false consensus that the UK is well prepared for the pandemic.

Hunt, who was health secretary from 2012-18, and Hancock, who was in charge until 2021, were singled out by Hallett for failing to fix flaws in emergency planning before the pandemic. Hallett said the heartbreaking stories of loss and grief she heard during her evidence-gathering were a reminder of why radical reform was needed.

The Covid-19 Bereaved Families Justice Group, representing around 7,000 families (most of whom demanded an inquiry), welcomed the report as a powerful, insightful and hard-hitting analysis of why and how the UK was so fatally unprepared. It was a huge milestone.

Hallett said work on pandemic preparedness had stalled as preparations for a no-deal Brexit were being made. She cited the impact of austerity policies, saying health progress had slowed in the years leading up to Covid-19, health inequalities were widening and public services were at or over capacity.

But the bereaved families said they were not given a sufficient explanation of how the conclusion unfolded. [to] Address, improve and enhance inequities and capacity in public services.

The worrying reality, says Thea Stein, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust thinktank, is that more than four years after the start of the pandemic, short-termism and ad hoc funding decisions are still rife in the NHS and social care sector.

Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman, said: “Today must be a moment of change. This country has been badly let down during the pandemic and this new government must ensure that lessons are learned quickly.”

Paul Novak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, described the report as a moment of truth. He said austerity had left Britain unprepared and that deep spending cuts had weakened our defences as we faced our biggest crisis since World War II.

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The major flaws in preparedness that Hallett discovered were:

Britain was preparing for the wrong pandemic by focusing on flu.

The agency responsible for emergency planning is so complex that it is almost a labyrinth.

The government's sole pandemic strategy (the 2011 flu strategy) is outdated and unadaptive.

Failure to adequately recognize the impact of the pandemic on ethnic minority communities, people with poor health, and other vulnerable groups, and to respond to it.

Failure to learn lessons from previous civil emergency drills and disease outbreaks.

The lack of focus on scalable systems like testing, tracing, and isolating is detrimental.

On lockdown, Hallett highlighted Hancock’s evidence that the 2011 flu strategy was not about preventing a catastrophic pandemic, but rather dealing with the catastrophic impact of a pandemic. The strategy did not consider legally mandated lockdowns as a response, which Hallett said should be considered in advance of a new outbreak, along with ways to prevent lockdowns.

She said all health ministers who stuck to the 2011 strategy, including Hunt, were responsible for failing to investigate and fix the shortcomings.

Secretary Hancock was one of them, who abandoned the strategy when the pandemic hit, by then too late to have any effect on preparedness and resilience.

Hancock said the survey had convinced him that Britain was one of the best countries in the world in its response to the pandemic, and he viewed the World Health Organization, which rated Britain a world leader, as an authoritative source.

Hallett said: Many ministers could have done more by asking questions about this. Mr Hunt accepted that we have not collectively put in as much time, effort and energy into understanding the risks of pathogens and challenging the consensus. This inquiry agrees.

George Osborne, who was chancellor from 2010-16, was implicitly criticised for failing to prepare the Treasury for non-economic shocks. Hallett said the Treasury had been able to identify key economic policy options available to it in the event of a pandemic.

Osborne told the inquiry that neither the British Treasury nor any Western treasury he knew of had any plans to ask entire populations to stay at home for months.

Hallett said some of the human and financial costs could have been avoided if Britain had been better prepared.

She said that before the Covid-19 pandemic, there was no ministerial leadership within the UK government and the devolved administrations to consider strategy, direct policy and make decisions across government to prepare for civil emergencies and build resilience across the system.

The Covid-19 inquiry has yet to report on its political decision-making, and evidence on the pandemic’s impact on health systems in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales will be collected this autumn.

Next year, witnesses will be questioned about vaccines and treatments. Inquiries are underway into procurement, testing, tracking and isolation systems, and the treatment sector. Future inquiries into children and young people and economic responses have been announced.

I asked Hancock and Hunt for their opinions.

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