The UK government and the devolved nations “failed their citizens” with their response to Covid causing more deaths than it should have says the first report from the Official COVID Inquiry
Austerity left the UK underprepared for the pandemic with the capacity to respond to the pandemic was “Constrained” by funding Negatively impacted by “severe staff shortages” and
Infrastructure that was “not fit for purpose”
“There is 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” adding that
“There had been a slowdown in health improvement, and health inequalities had widened…Public services, particularly health and social care, were running close to, if not beyond, capacity in normal times”
The chair of the Inquiry Baroness Heather Hallett said that in 2019, the belief that the UK was one of the ‘best-prepared countries in the world’ to respond to a pandemic was ‘dangerously mistaken’
One of its conclusions stated that “If we had been better prepared, we could have avoided some of the massive financial, economic and human cost of the Covid-19 pandemic”
Despite planning for an influenza outbreak, our preparedness and resilience was not adequate for the global pandemic that occurred
The report found that emergency planning was complicated by the many institutions and structures involved and that the approach to risk assessment was flawed, resulting in inadequate planning to manage and prevent risks, and respond to them effectively
The report also said that the government’s outdated pandemic strategy, developed in 2011, was not flexible enough to adapt when faced with the pandemic in 2020 and that emergency planning failed to put enough consideration into existing health and social inequalities and local authorities and volunteers were not adequately engaged
There was, they say, a failure to fully learn from past civil emergency exercises and outbreaks of disease and there was a lack of attention to the systems that would help test, trace, and isolate.
Policy documents were found to be outdated, involved complicated rules and procedures which can cause long delays, were full of jargon and were overly complex
Ministers, who are often without specialised training in civil contingencies, did not receive a broad enough range of scientific advice and often failed to challenge the advice they did get while advisers lacked freedom and autonomy to express differing opinions, which led to a lack of diverse perspectives.
Their advice was often undermined by “groupthink” was another conclusion
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