Former Governments failed their citizens and cost lives with “fatal strategic flaws” and other shortcomings to prepare for the Covid pandemic, according to a bombshell report.
London and the rest of the country were left vulnerable after ministers and officials planned for a massive flu outbreak, rather than the deadly virus which hit with such devastating force in 2020.
In a series of scathing findings, the Covid Inquiry’s first report concluded on Thursday:
- The UK prepared for the “wrong pandemic”.
- There were “fatal strategic flaws” underpinning the assessment of the risks faced by the UK, and how they could be addressed.
- There was a “damaging absence” of focus on measures to deploy against a pandemic, in particular a system that could be “scaled up to test, trace and isolate” Covid carriers.
- The Government’s only pandemic strategy, from 2011, was “outdated and lacked adaptability”. It was “virtually abandoned” when the pandemic hit.
- Institutions and structures responsible for emergency planning were “labyrinthine in their complexity”.
- Emergency planning generally failed to sufficiently consider pre-existing health and societal inequalities and deprivation. Poorer parts of London were particularly hit by the pandemic.
- There was a failure to learn sufficiently from past civil emergency exercises and disease outbreaks.
- In the years before the pandemic, there was a lack of adequate leadership, co-ordination and oversight. Ministers were not given enough policy options and failed to sufficiently challenge the advice they were given.
- Advice was often undermined by ‘group think”.
For all the updates and reaction from the first report from the Covid Inquiry visit our dedicated live blog.
The 217-page report stressed: “The primary duty of the state is to protect its citizens from harm.”
It added: “The Inquiry has no hesitation in concluding that the processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures within the UK government and devolved administrations and civil services failed their citizens.”
It highlighted that the pandemic had shown how investing in better preparations would have been money well spent.
“Had the UK been better prepared for and more resilient to the pandemic, some of the financial and human cost may have been avoided.”
Demanding ten major changes to better protect Britain, Covid Inquiry chairwoman Baroness Hallett said: “There must be radical reform.
“Never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering.”
More than 235,000 people had died with Covid in the UK by the end of 2023.
Recommendations covered how the Government should deal with a future pandemic, including the creation of an independent, statutory body responsible for system preparedness and response.
The Government should also hold a UK-wide pandemic response exercise at least every three years.
Independent experts should be brought in from outside Government and the Civil Service to guard against “groupthink”.
Ministers should also improve data collection in advance of a future pandemic and commission a wider range of research projects.
The report also focuses on the poor health of the nation prior to 2020 and how this aggravated the spread of the disease and the death toll.
“When the pandemic struck, many of those who suffered and many of those who died were already vulnerable,” it says, adding that the disease “had a disproportionate impact on vulnerable people”.
When the UK entered the pandemic, there were “substantial systematic health inequalities by socio-economic status, ethnicity, area-level deprivation, region, socially excluded minority groups and inclusion health groups”.
Covid “resulted in a higher likelihood of sickness and death for people who were most vulnerable in society”.
“Most plans did not define groups of vulnerable people, and those that did took a narrow definition of vulnerability based only on clinical groups… there was too much focus on clinical vulnerability and not enough on wider social and economic factors.”
The report also rejected the claim made by witnesses to the Inquiry that the Covid pandemic was a “Black Swan” event which could not be predicted.
“The recent experiences of SARs and MERS meant that another coronavirus outbreak at pandemic scale was foreseeable,” Baroness Hallett wrote.
“It was not a Black Swan event. The absence of such a scenario from the risk assessments was a fundamental error of the Department of Health and Social Care and the Civil Contingencies Secretariat.”
“The UK Government and devolved administrations could and should have assessed the risk of a novel pathogen with the potential to reach pandemic scale”.
Campaigners say that a failure to prepare for a pandemic led to the country having one of the worst death tolls in Europe.
The Inquiry has divided its investigation into eight modules, the first of which focuses on decisions made in the years leading up to the outbreak of Covid.
It has heard oral evidence from former Prime Minister David Cameron and ex-Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, as well as contributions from independent scientific experts and civil servants.
An expert report produced for the Inquiry by medical historian Claas Kirchhelle found that the Government’s austerity programme had “significant implications” for public health systems, with pandemic preparedness “negatively impacted” by budgetary pressures and a “loss of local public health infrastructures”.
Mr Kirchhelle said that decisions had been taken to reduce UK preparedness stockpiles from 2012 onwards, resulting in a “significant decline” of the necessary items. This included surgical masks and FFP3 respirators which were essential to control the spread of infection.
In a written witness statement, Mr Hunt admitted that the “shared belief” of ministers and officials was that a flu pandemic was the “most likely scenario”, meaning resources were “allocated to the preparation for that type of virus”.
Lord Cameron, who served as Prime Minister from 2010 to 2016, conceded it was a “mistake” for his government to focus too heavily on preparations for combating a wave of influenza rather than a coronavirus-like pandemic.
However, he dismissed suggestions that austerity had negatively impacted pandemic planning, saying “your health system is only as strong as your economy”.
Brenda Doherty, on behalf of Covid 19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said: “The publication of the module one report marks a huge milestone for bereaved families like mine.
“We know that for lives to be saved in the future, lessons must be learnt from the mistakes of the past.
“Sadly, nobody knows the true cost of the government’s failure to prepare as we do.
“From campaigning to bring about an inquiry, to hearing revelation after revelation regarding the ways in which our loved ones were failed, the years leading up to today have been draining. We know, however, that the inquiry’s recommendations have the potential to save lives in the future, if lessons have been learned from the loss of our loved ones.”
Professor Liam Smeeth, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), said: “The key lesson from the first UK Covid Inquiry report is that if the UK waits for the next pandemic to emerge, it will be too late.”
