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Evidence investigated by Nafeez Ahmed and Rupert Read shows UK pandemic planning broke the ‘precautionary principle’.
An official Government document published in January 2020 confirms that, by delaying action in response to the Coronavirus, officials breached their own internal cross-government standards concerning risks to “human, animal or plant health”.
In the wake of an investigation by the Sunday Times, followed by an unprecedented Government response, the release of this document raises a number of urgent new questions about the Government’s COVID-19 strategy.
“The Government followed scientific advice at all times”, according to its written response to the Sunday Times, which added that “claiming that there was scientific consensus on [the threat] is just wrong”.
However, according to the Government’s own internal guidance on assessing risks to health, the demand for scientific consensus or certainty sets the bar too high. In a situation where there is a potentially severe threat, the ‘precautionary principle’ indicates the need for a determination to act rapidly in taking far-reaching precautions against a threat.
The document is a guidance note published on 17 January 2020 by the Regulatory Policy Committee (RPC), a non-departmental public body (a body that has a role in the processes of the Government but is not a Government department) sponsored by the Government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. The RPC supports the Government in ensuring that evidence underpinning policy-making is robust, particularly in terms of how regulation can impact business.
According to the RPC document, its goal is “to provide policy-makers and analysts” across Government with “a concise tool to assist them in presenting evidence that will be relevant to the department’s application of the precautionary principle and is appropriate to their specific circumstances.”
This document states from the outset that:
“… the purpose of the precautionary principle is to allow a policy decision to be made notwithstanding scientific uncertainty about the nature and extent of the risk.
The… precautionary principle should be applied only when:
there is good reason to believe that harmful effects may occur to human, animal or plant health, or to the environment; and
the level of scientific uncertainty about the consequences or likelihoods is such that risk cannot be assessed with sufficient confidence to inform decision-making.”
In other words, the document provided clear advice to the Government about the conditions that necessitate precautionary planning – conditions which clearly applied (and in many respects still apply) to the Coronavirus.
The document went on to specify that:
“The [Inter-departmental Liaison Group on Risk Assessment] guidance acknowledges that ‘…the precautionary principle was originally framed in the context of preventing environmental harm… [however] it is now widely accepted as applying broadly where there is threat of harm to human, animal or plant health…’ (p. 5). The principle is therefore applicable across a wide range of policy areas.”
The document proceeded to set out that invoking the precautionary principle is appropriate on the following key counts: If there are “irreversible harmful effects” – this condition was clearly satisfied by the pote