Groupthink underpinned the flawed thinking behind the UK’s pandemic response, a succession of witnesses at the heart of government told the Covid-19 public inquiry.
The former prime minister and the former chancellor, David Cameron and George Osborne, admitted it; as did the current and former chief medical officers Prof Chris Whitty and Dame Sally Davies. The former health secretary Jeremy Hunt and the Cabinet Office minister Sir Oliver Letwin agreed.
By failing to challenge consensus views on readiness, such as Matt Hancock’s assertion “the UK was one of the best placed countries in the world for responding to a pandemic” – the four nations’ ability to react was weakened. It was, the inquiry chair, Lady Hallett, concluded, “an acute problem”, with scientific advice in particular “not subject to sufficient external challenge by either ministers or officials”.
Her prescribed antidote: a dose of “red teams”.
The term appears to have first been used during the cold war when US security officials would role play as the Soviet Union (the red team) against the US (blue team) in strategy games aimed at preventing military conflagration. The 13th-century Catholic church had a similar idea of appointing a designated dissenter (in this case to test the merits of canonising particular figures): the devil’s advocate. Boris Johnson’s former chief-of-staff, Dominic Cummings, is an avowed red teams fan, blogging that “they are practically nowhere in the formal structure of governments” and yet there is huge scope for an “extremely elite red team” operating above the Cabinet Office. It would cost “a few million that it would recoup within weeks by stopping blunders”, he said.
Red teams in the context of crisis planning, said Hallett, can spot “cognitive biases that can lead to errors of judgment”, including “optimism bias”: the human tendency to overestimate the likelihood of good things happening, while underestimating the bad. That is why she said red teams should be partly staffed with non-experts skilled in critical thinking and incisive challenge.
For example, the scientific advice on pandemic risks was overly weighted in favour of biomedical science, Hallett said. What about the social and economic consequences? There was also no “guard against the risks of conventional wisdom becoming embedded in the institutions responsible for emergency preparedness and resilience”.
The former Conservative minister Michael Gove described to the inquiry how government ministers tended to hunger for certainty where it might not exist.
He said: “We seek certainty but it’s often elusive, and it would be better if politicians and decision-makers were to say: ‘Tell me about the debate, what is the lead option within the academic community here, but what also are the alternatives?’”
Why, for example, did Public Health England, whose job was to protect the public from infectious diseases, only plan for a small scale outbreak (cases in the few hundreds) of a high consequence infectious disease? Perhaps there was insufficient challenge.
Jeremy Hunt, who was health secretary from 2012 to 2018 said there was “a strong sense in the civil service that they need to come to a consensus view and give ministers a recommendation of a single course of action, and that makes challenging groupthink harder”.
Red teams, by contrast, would also keep officials, scientists and experts on their toes in the knowledge the tyres of any plan will be firmly kicked.
Hallett concluded: “Red teams should be used far more regularly and systematically across government advisory and decision-making structures relating to emergency preparedness and their views conveyed to ministers. In this way, ministers, rather than an internal consensus, will determine emergency preparedness, resilience and response policy. Governments and their institutions should be open to potentially unconventional thinking.”
