The UK’s pandemic planning had ‘fatal strategic flaws,’ which caused more deaths and economic costs than it should have. The first report from the UK COVID-19 public inquiry said the Government had ‘failed its citizens’ by overlooking the potential impact of the pandemic that claimed over 230,000 lives.
Lady Hallett, chair of the statutory inquiry said: ‘There were serious errors on the part of the state. Never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering.’
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This is the first of at least nine Inquiry reports, which will cover everything from political decision-making to vaccines. The report found that the Government had focused largely on the threat of an influenza outbreak even though coronaviruses in Asia and the Middle East indicated that such an outbreak in the UK was foreseeable.
Hallet said that a significant reason for the failed planning was because ministers and officials were guilty of ‘groupthink,’ which led to a false consensus that the UK was well prepared for a pandemic. She named Jeremy Hunt, who was the Health Secretary from 2012-18, and Matt Hancock, who took over until 2021, for failing to rectify flaws in contingency planning before the pandemic.
The report made ten recommendations to ‘avoid the terrible losses and costs to society that the COVID-19 pandemic brought’ and Hallet said she expected them all to be acted upon. The recommendations include a UK-wide pandemic response exercise to run at least every three years, a new whole-system civil emergency strategy be put in place and a leader or deputy leader of each of the four nations to chair a cabinet-level committee responsible for civil emergency preparedness.
The COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, representing about 7,000 families, welcomed the report as a ‘hard-hitting, clear-sighted and damning analysis of how and why the UK found itself to be fatally underprepared’.
Responding to the inquiry, the new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, said: ‘The safety and security of the country should always be the first priority, and this 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.’
The inquiry has not yet produced its report on political decision-making. Evidence will be taken in autumn this year on the impact of the pandemic on the health systems of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.