UK still doesn’t keep public safe from pandemics, experts tell Covid inquiry

The British government still does not keep the public “sufficiently” safe from pandemics, a leading expert in emergency planning and management has told the UK’s Covid inquiry.

On the third day of the inquiry’s first week of evidence, expert witness David Alexander spoke about the state of the UK’s approach to emergency planning. A professor in the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London, his evidence focused in particular on the period leading up to the Covid pandemic.

Alexander said the UK and its institutions had produced “good thinking” on the possibility of future risks and challenges the country may face. But the extent to which this thinking is used in planning and preparedness arrangements for such events “is a very different matter”.

“The bottom line in all of this is, if you think that the British government within the limits of its competency keeps the public safe, I fear my answer to that is ‘no’ or ‘not sufficiently’,” he said.

Alexander appeared alongside Bruce Mann, a former civil servant at the Ministry of Defence and Cabinet Office from 1979 to 2016 and a one-time director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, the body responsible for emergency planning in the UK.

The experts have produced a 321-page report for the inquiry that includes general recommendations on how the UK plans for emergencies as well as specific comments on the Covid pandemic. This first module of the inquiry focuses on how prepared the UK was for Covid itself.

“We are all responsible for our own safety, but government has an essential, fundamental and central role in providing safety to its population and I think it could do more and better in that,” he added.

Chief counsel to the inquiry Hugo Keith KC asked whether the experts’ report was suggesting there was “no single document, no single strategy, no single piece of paper” that presents a disaster reduction strategy for the UK.

“There is no document that sets out the way, we’re trying to get to know when we get there and what steps we will take along the way and, importantly, what resources we will apply to try to achieve that ambition,” said Mann.

Alexander added that the UK Government Resilience Framework, a document that sets out how the government proposes to build resilience to risks and crises – published in 2022 – made no mention of “gender, people with disabilities, of the elderly or of ethnic and cultural minorities”, “yet all of these are essential issues that need to be dealt with if resilience is to be created and maintained”.

Mann said that, even if the steps to strengthen resilience laid out in the government’s document were executed, the UK would not be in a better place to handle catastrophic emergencies. Asked by Keith if they would invite “a wholesale radical rewriting or writing” of the UK’s approach to building resilience to risks and crises, both Mann and Alexander said yes.

No-deal planning affected emergency preparedness

Echoing comments his opening statement made on Tuesday, Keith said Mann and Alexander’s report suggested that planning for a no-deal Brexit had had “inevitable consequences” on the UK’s systems for general emergency preparedness.

“It is not a political point, it is an administrative point,” Mann clarified. “There was an absolute need to prepare for exit from the European Union… there should have been capacity made available to continue to pursue preparedness planning in other fields.”

Summarising, Keith said the experts’ report suggested that important work, including work on healthcare provision, adult social care and refreshing the UK’s pandemic preparedness strategy from 2011 “was affected to some degree or another” by planning for a no-deal Brexit.

On Tuesday, Keith said planning for a no-deal Brexit from 2018 onwards had drained government resources and capacity that could have been devoted to emergency planning, including planning for a pandemic. It had “prevented some, or perhaps a majority, of the improvements that central government itself understood were required to be made to resilience planning and preparedness,” he said.

It has previously been claimed that preparations for a no-deal Brexit, in fact, aided Britain’s pandemic readiness by forcing the UK to practise for emergencies. Civil servants who had been trained up as a ‘Volunteer Emergency Response Team’ ahead of Brexit were called up when Covid hit to staff a similar team – but, as openDemocracy revealed yesterday, more than a third of these shifts initially went unfilled because the staff were too busy with their day jobs in other departments.

Learning from SARS and MERS

In the morning session, expert witness David Heymann, a former chair of the Health Protection Agency UK as well as a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, shared evidence on how Asian countries had dealt with outbreaks of SARS and MERS prior to the Covid pandemic.

Speaking generally about managing responses to outbreaks of infectious diseases, he said that surveillance, including a community or hospital reporting infections, was a better method of controlling initial outbreaks of infectious diseases than travel restrictions.

“It’s a false security to think the borders can stop infections,” he said. “The best defence against the spread of international infections is good strong national surveillance and detection mechanisms.”

The inquiry continues.

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