Ministers have swerved several key recommendations from the Covid-19 Inquiry’s first report, including the creation of a new UK-wide body for whole-system civil emergency preparedness and resilience.
The government yesterday published its response to the inquiry’s Module 1 report on the resilience and preparedness of the UK, which called for “fundamental reform” to civil emergency planning.
When the report was published in July, Covid-19 Inquiry chair Heather Hallet said the setting up of an independent statutory body was the "most important" of its 10 recommendations.
The inquiry said the body should provide strategic advice to government and make recommendations on its “planning for, preparedness for and building resilience to civil emergencies”.
In the government's response to this recommendation, ministers said they accept that independent strategic advice and assessment is an essential component for an effective UK wide civil emergency and resilience system. But they added that “the government will always remain responsible and accountable for policy and resource allocation decisions and we will spend further time working on the appropriate solution to deliver challenge, direction and strategic advice”.
Back in July, when the report was published, Baroness Hallett had said: "I expect all my recommendations to be acted on." In a foreword to the government’s response, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden said the government “broadly agrees with the chair’s recommendations” and has set out actions to “address all of them”.
However, ministers also rejected a recommendation to abolish the lead government department model for whole-system emergencies and give the Cabinet Office the leadership role.
The LGD model – under which the Department of Health and Social Care was in charge of the Covid response in the early days of the pandemic – was deemed “not appropriate” for whole-system civil emergency preparedness and resilience by the inquiry.
The government said it “agrees with the need for a greater Cabinet Office role for whole-system civil emergencies” but that this should be “in addition to the lead government department model which retains an essential role in preparedness and resilience”.
Focusing on risks with catastrophic impact, “to maximise and best direct the available resources to provide the most effective impact”, the government said it will retain the LGD model, but with a greater role for the Cabinet Office in driving work to improve preparedness and resilience.
Ministers were also non-committal on the recommendation to introduce external red teams to help with crisis preparedness.
The inquiry had called for each of the governments of the UK to introduce the regular use of red teams to scrutinise and challenge the principles, evidence, policies and advice relating to preparedness for and resilience to whole-system civil emergencies. It said the red teams should be brought in from outside of government and the civil service.
In its response, the government said it agrees that red teams are an effective means to scrutinise and challenge preparedness for and resilience to whole-system civil emergencies and that it will strengthen central HMG red teaming capability, and clarify the expectations on departments to use red teams in their risk preparations. But it did not mention bringing in red teams from outside.
The inquiry also recommended that a UK-wide pandemic response exercise should take place at least every three years. The government said it “agrees that regularly programmed exercises should test pandemic preparedness” and said a national pandemic exercise will take place this year – but it did not commit to doing this every three years.
The exercise, set to take place this autumn, will be “the largest ever”, according to the Cabinet Office, and involve all government departments, local resilience forums, and devolved governments.
The Module 1 report also said the government should publish results of all civil emergencies exercises within three months of the conclusion of the exercise (unless there are reasons of national security for not doing so), and an action plan setting out the specific steps that will be taken in response to the report’s findings within six months.
The government said it will aim to publish findings and lessons from all Tier 1 civil emergency exercises, except where there are justifiable reasons not to do so, such as national security concerns, within three months. It added that, for a Tier 1 exercise, the process of governance, debriefing, evaluating, disseminating and reviewing may take up to 12 months to make a report publicly available.
The inquiry also asked ministers to take “proper account of existing inequalities and vulnerabilities”, given vulnerable groups were disproportionately impacted during the Covid-19 pandemic
The government's most detailed response came in relation to the recommendation to establish new mechanisms to collect, analyse, securely share and use reliable data to inform the response to future pandemics. This recommendation also called for the commissioning of a wider range of research projects, including those that identify which groups of vulnerable people are hardest hit by the pandemic and why.
As part of its response to this recommendation, the government said the Cabinet Office and Office for National Statistics are building a new tool which will identify vulnerable groups who need targeted support.
The government tool can be instantly shared across departments and with devolved governments and “will improve the government’s understanding of where disproportionately impacted groups are ahead of and during crises, and enable targeted local support where required”, the Cabinet Office said.
Other recommendations in the Module 1 report included creating a UK-wide whole-system civil emergency strategy and developing a better approach to risk assessments.
On the strategy, the government said it agrees with the inquiry’s insights, "and they align with our own reflections". It said it is "therefore implementing a common strategic approach to preparing for and responding to whole-system civil emergencies, which will form part of a refreshed resilience strategy" to be published in the spring following McFadden's resilience review.
On risk assessments, the inquiry had criticised the government’s reliance on “reasonable worst-case scenarios” and called on the UK government and devolved administrations to develop “an approach that assesses a wider range of scenarios representative of the different risks and the range of each kind of risk”. Ex-cabinet secretary Lord Mark Sedwill told the inquiry in November 2023 that the government was slow to take decisive action in the early days of the Covid outbreak because it was too focused on the likelihood of a reasonable worst case scenario occurring, and not enough on what was likely to happen.
The government response says it "agrees with the need to continually improve its approach to risk assessment" and that government risk assessment and planning "should not be based in isolation on a single reasonable worst-case scenario". It said the government will "reference variations and additional scenarios more prominently in future updates to the NSRA, considering where these could be tested through national exercises". However, the government added that it "believes that a plausible yet challenging reasonable worst-case scenario is the appropriate benchmark for developing generic response capabilities, which can be deployed for any type or number of risks".
McFadden said: "We must learn lessons from the Covid pandemic, as we cannot afford to make the same mistakes again. But we will plan in a way that recognises the next crisis may not be the same as the last."
In a statement, Baroness Hallett said she will be "carefully considering" the responses of the UK government and the three devolved administrations in the coming days".
Back in July, when the report was published, Baroness Hallett said: "I expect all my recommendations to be acted on, with a timetable to be agreed with the respective administrations. I, and my team, will be monitoring this closely."
She said her recommendations represented "fundamental reform" of the way the government and devolved administrations prepare for emergencies.
"If the reforms I recommend are implemented, the nation will be more resilient and better able to avoid the terrible losses and costs to society that the Covid-19 pandemic brought," she added.