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The collapse of power-sharing in Northern Ireland caused by the row over Brexit contributed to the failure of the UK Government to prepare for and tackle the Coronavirus pandemic, a damning first report from the COVID Inquiry under Baroness Heather Hallett revealed on Thursday.
The report, which severely criticises leadership from both top civil servants and ministers across Whitehall to prepare for the crisis, highlights the additional failure under Prime Ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson to deal with the Irish border issue as contributing to a breakdown of communications during the pandemic between the two nations.
“Due to the suspension of the power-sharing arrangements, approximately 46 meetings of the North South Ministerial Council did not take place between 2017 and 2020,” the report states. “The Joint Secretariat and Cross Border Emergency Management Group continued to function during this period, but any areas that required ministerial decisions – for example, in relation to funding – could not be taken.”
The report is damning on the failure of the UK Government under three successive Health and Social Care Secretaries – Andrew Lansley, Jeremy Hunt, and Matt Hancock – to have a strategy to handle the Coronavirus pandemic.
The sole strategy set out in 2011 was to handle a severe influenza outbreak. As the report states, this amounted to “no strategy” when COVID-19 struck. There were cosmetic changes to update the strategy, when the Coronavirus arrived, but no consideration of any major changes required.
Lockdowns were not even contemplated. The strategy concentrated on reducing casualties.
Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland copied the English version of the strategy rather than developing their own.
Worse than this, the Department of Health and Social Care repeatedly said that it had taken account of an earlier severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003 in its planning which, unlike COVID-19, had limited transmission, and assured the Inquiry that it had a plan to cope.
“No UK-wide contingency plan for SARS, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), or any other high consequence infectious disease has been disclosed by the UK Government,” the Inquiry said on Thursday. “The Inquiry is not therefore satisfied that such plans ever existed.”
Alongside this failure to plan an adequate strategy, there was a parallel failure – during the period of austerity – to make any economic plans. The Treasury only planned for a financial crisis, rather than a pandemic, as former Chancellor George Osborne told the Inquiry.
“The Treasury was only involved in the civil emergency preparedness of other departments by the overall management of the economy and by setting budgets and applying spending controls as part of the day-to-day business of government,” the report states. “It therefore did not produce an economic strategy specifically for pandemics or the potential responses to a pandemic.”
The bill for the pandemic has been estimated at £376 billion and the report states that, in future, the Treasury, the Cabinet Office, and experts from the Department of Health and Social Care should jointly estimate what the cost of future pandemics could be.
Many projects which could have helped control a large pandemic were abandoned by Government.
The Department of Health and Social Care recognised that quarantining people could stop the spread of disease in 2016, but stopped work on how this has been done in East Asia.
Meanwhile plans to improve civil contingencies in Northern Ireland were halted leaving it “unfit for purpose” when the pandemic broke out.
The report is also critical of the myriad numbers of organisations within Whitehall handling the pandemic and the lack of coordination between them. The one committee that was designed to coordinate all matters – the Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingencies Sub-Committee in Whitehall – was disbanded in 2017.
“As a result, immediately prior to the pandemic, there was no cross-government ministerial oversight of the matters that were previously within the Sub-Committee’s remit,” the report states.
Senior people in charge, the report noted, suffered from “Groupthink”, but the system did allow top officials to receive a wide range of specialist advice.
Organisations at the local level were less coordinated when it came to preparing for a pandemic, with the report stating that “structurally, this created a gap when it came to addressing a public health emergency, with professionals in civil contingencies and public health not appropriately connected”.
“The directors of public health, the public health workforce and local government have a critical contribution to make to pandemic preparedness and resilience,” it added.
The report states six measures that were not taken, but must be, to tackle future pandemics. These are: a scalable system of testing and contact tracing; a practicable system of isolation; effective border controls and health security at the border; surge capacity in health and social care; stockpiling and distribution of personal protective equipment (PPE); and protecting vulnerable people.