The UK Covid-19 Inquiry’s core participants wanted many more recommendations to be made to better prepare the country for the next pandemic. In the end, Baroness Heather Hallett chose 10 she wants to see implemented in a “timely manner”.
The first module of the public inquiry – Resilience and Preparedness – examined “if the pandemic was properly planned for and whether the UK was adequately ready for that eventuality”.
The answer was an emphatic no.
The fact that if the question was asked again today the answer would remain the same should send a shiver through the public.
Academics have already said it is a question of “when not if” another pandemic will hit, so it is hoped that recommendations, if implemented, could put the UK in a better starting place to face a new and unknown disease – known as Disease X.
Opposition parties said the same shortly after the Inquiry published its first report on Thursday. The UK “is in an even worse position to deal with a pandemic today” than it was four years ago because of the state of the NHS, the Green Party claimed in response to the damning findings. The waiting list for non-urgent treatment in England was 4.4 million going into the pandemic. It is now 7.6 million.
North Herefordshire MP Ellie Chowns said: “As this report lays bare the awful truth is that many of those deaths, and the subsequent lengthy lockdowns we had to endure to bring cases down, would have been avoided if better preparation had been in place. We simply can never allow these failures to be repeated.
“The grim truth is that the UK is in an even worse position to deal with a pandemic today than it was at the start of 2020. With our NHS overstretched, lengthy waiting lists and a demoralised workforce.”
Ms Chowns called on the Government to match her party’s pledge to invest £30bn more a year in the NHS by 2030, to ensure the country has the right infrastructure, workforce and equipment in place.
“The cost is miniscule compared to what will be required if another pandemic strikes whilst our health service is in its current state,” she said.
Dame Jennifer Dixon, Chief Executive of the Health Foundation, said the failure of strategic planning for a major health emergency was compounded by the lack of resilience within public services.
“The NHS went into the pandemic struggling to keep up with growing waiting lists, following a decade of low spending growth and chronic staff shortages. Between 2010 and 2019, if UK health spending per person had matched the EU14 average, then the UK would have spent £40bn higher than actual average annual spending,” she said.
“Lack of capacity limited the NHS’s ability to deal with a surge in demand, which led to too many people going without the care they needed and many died as a result. In England, support for the social care sector, which was already thread-bare, was too slow and limited, resulting in inadequate support for people using and providing care. The consequences of this were devastating.”
To address this, Baroness Hallett’s 10 “far-reaching recommendations” centre on a “radical simplification” of the civil emergency preparedness and resilience systems; calling for a new approach to risk assessment that provides for a better and more comprehensive evaluation of a wider range of actual risks.
A new UK-wide approach to the development of strategy, which learns lessons from the past and from regular civil emergency exercises and takes proper account of existing inequalities and vulnerabilities – must also be implemented.
Baroness Hallett also called for the holding of a UK-wide pandemic response exercise at least every three years and the publication of the outcome.
Her final, and most important, recommendation is the creation of a single, independent statutory body responsible for whole system preparedness and response.
If this structure had all been in place in early 2020, the UK would have been in a much better position to deal with the Covid pandemic and the likelihood is that far fewer than 235,000 lives would have been lost to the virus.
Inevitably, a great deal of time and extra investment is needed to carry out the report’s recommendations and the Labour government has been non-committal so far in terms of how much extra money it is willing to invest in the NHS, let alone the infrastructure Baroness Hallett has called for.
In response to the report, all Sir Keir Starmer would say is that his government is “committed to learning the lessons from the inquiry and putting better measures in place to protect and prepare us from the impact of any future pandemic”.
No government was going to make promises until the Covid Inquiry began publishing its reports – and at least nine more are to come.
However, the country will soon want to see firm commitments from the Prime Minister before too long that lessons have indeed been learned and the nation will not have to suffer in the way it has over the past four years.
The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK said “failure to prepare is indefensible” and called for the creation of a dedicated minister to oversee preparedness for a future crisis.
“We ask for the Government to produce a plan to address health inequalities, and in its first 100 days conduct a cross-departmental audit into pandemic preparedness,” a spokeswoman said.
The lessons of the “catastrophic failure” in preparing for the coronavirus pandemic must be “learnt swiftly”, the Liberal Democrats said.
The party’s health spokesperson, Daisy Cooper, said: “Our hearts go out to all those who lost loved ones during the pandemic, yet sadly these findings of systematic and political failings will provide little comfort for thousands of grieving families.
“Today must be a moment for change.”