Civil Service “Groupthink”, Brexit and Planning for Flu Blamed for U.K. Pandemic Failures by Covid Inquiry

Civil Service “groupthink”, Brexit and planning for flu rather than a coronavirus led Britain to be unprepared for the pandemic, the Covid Inquiry has found. The Telegraph has more.

Baroness Hallett, the inquiry’s Chairman, said Ministers “failed their citizens” by preparing for the wrong pandemic, which led more people to die from Covid,

The Government’s flawed planning was hampered by “groupthink” and bureaucracy, which Health Secretaries such as Jeremy Hunt failed to challenge, the inquiry’s first report said.

Lady Hallett said that the failure to plan properly led to more deaths and a greater cost to the economy.

She said the country suffered from a “lack of adequate leadership” in the run up to Covid and the country was “ill prepared for dealing with a catastrophic emergency, let alone the coronavirus pandemic that actually struck”.

“Had the U.K. been better prepared for and more resilient to the pandemic, some of that financial and human cost may have been avoided,” the report said.

The report also found that some recommendations to improve the Government’s response to a potential pandemic had not been implemented because the Government was focused on preparing for a no-deal Brexit.

It added that preparedness for a civil emergency must be treated in “much the same way as we treat a hostile state”.

More than 235,000 people died from illnesses involving COVID-19 up to the end of 2023, while the inquiry also recognised the terrible damage done by the pandemic to the economy, children’s education and mental health and to the NHS.

In the foreword of the 217-page report, the first since the inquiry was launched two years ago, Lady Hallett added: “There must be radical reform. Never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering.”

Identifying what she described as “significant flaws” in planning for Covid, Lady Hallett, whose inquiry has already cost £100 million, said “the U.K. had prepared for the wrong pandemic” and plans to deal with a flu outbreak were “inadequate for a global pandemic of the kind that struck”.

The report said that there was a “lack of adequate leadership, coordination and oversight” from Ministers who were not presented with enough options and “failed to challenge sufficiently” the advice they did receive from officials and advisers. …

She said there were “fatal strategic flaws” in assessing the risks and a sole pandemic strategy dating back to 2011 and based on influenza was “outdated and lacked adaptability”.

“It was virtually abandoned on its first encounter with the pandemic,” the report said. “It focused on only one type of pandemic, failed adequately to consider prevention or proportionality of response, and paid insufficient attention to the economic and social consequences of pandemic response.”

The 2011 strategy had not been updated to investigate the dangers posed by coronaviruses that had already struck in Asia including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

Summing up her findings, Lady Hallett said: “The Inquiry has no hesitation in concluding that the processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures within the U.K. Government and devolved administrations and civil services failed their citizens.”

Lady Hallett said the 2011 strategy was “beset by major flaws, which were there for everyone to see” and criticised Mr. Hancock for abandoning the strategy.

There was also a “damaging absence of focus on the measures, interventions and infrastructure required in the event of a pandemic” and planning was hampered by bureaucracy.

“Despite reams of documentation, planning guidance was insufficiently robust and flexible, and policy documentation was outdated, unnecessarily bureaucratic and infected by jargon,” the report said.

The report concluded: “The Secretaries of State for Health… who adhered to the strategy, the experts and officials who advised them to do so, and the governments of the devolved nations that adopted it, all bear responsibility for failing to have these flaws examined and rectified. This includes Mr. Hancock, who abandoned the strategy when the pandemic struck, by which time it was too late to have any effect on preparedness and resilience.”

The report also raises serious concerns about the use of lockdowns, which Lady Hallett said “should be a measure of last resort”, and accused ministers of a “failure adequately to consider proportionality of response” in imposing lockdowns.

The inquiry, which will look at the effect of lockdowns in later modules, said: “For as long as they remain a possibility, lockdowns should be considered properly in advance of a novel infectious disease outbreak.”

Making 10 recommendations, the report said that that the “potential disruption to social and economic life, and the cost as the result of a false alarm, may be disproportionate to the burden of an actual pandemic”, but it was critical for a Government “to steer a course between complacency and overreaction”.

Worth reading in full.

This sounds like it’s trying to have it both ways. Criticising Hancock for abandoning the 2011 plan while slamming the plan as inadequate. Saying we didn’t do enough, but then hedging on lockdowns and implying maybe we shouldn’t do them and they’re not really worth it (to be honest, we should be grateful there is any sense of that at all given how the hearings went).

The implication seems to be that had the plan been better for coronaviruses (as though SARS-2, an airborne respiratory virus, behaves so very differently from influenza, an airborne respiratory virus), then it wouldn’t have needed to be abandoned and lockdowns imposed because we would have happily followed the coronavirus pandemic plan. But this assumes there was something wrong with the plan, and that Covid is so very different from influenza.

In fact, of course, the 2011 plan was based on a review of evidence for non-pharmaceutical interventions such as gathering and travel restrictions which showed that most of them were insufficiently effective to be worthwhile and could even be counterproductive.

The problem wasn’t the plan, as Sweden showed by following it and having better outcomes. The problem was that it was ditched. Plus many of the panicked measures and protocols that were implemented were deadly for vulnerable people deprived of adequate and timely care. I suppose it would have been too much to expect Baroness Hallett to point this out.

Stop Press: A new report from the Taxpayers’ Alliance says the U.K. spent more than almost every other OECD country on trying to mitigate the impact of the pandemic as a percentage of GDP.