The report by the National Audit Office (NAO) said the government lacked detailed plans on shielding, job support schemes and school disruption. The spending watchdog added that lessons needed to be learned.
The NAO said preparations for a flu pandemic or highly infectious diseases like Ebola were prioritised over diseases with similar characteristics to Covid.The watchdog said the UK government did not have specific plans to tackle a disease like Covid-19, which has a lower mortality rate than Ebola but has the ability to spread in communities with asymptomatic infected people.
The report suggests the government had some mitigations in place for a pandemic, like a stockpile of personal protective equipment, but it lacked preparation for âwide-ranging impactsâ coronavirus and other pandemic-inducing viruses can have on society and the economy.
The report also found that the Cabinet Office allocated 56 of its 94 full-time emergency planning members of staff to prepare for potential disruptions from a no-deal exit from the European Union, âlimiting its abilityâ to plan for other crises.
The watchdog found that the pandemic âexposed a vulnerability to whole-system emergenciesâ, suggesting there was âlimited oversight and assuranceâ of the plans in place. The report said the government missed the opportunity to learn from previous large-scale pandemic simulations it carried out as far back as 2007. One simulation, Exercise Cygnus, which ran in 2016, suggested the government should consider âthe ability of staff to work from homeâ.
However, at the beginning of the Covid pandemic âmany departmental business continuity plans did not include arrangements for extensive home workingâ, the watchdog said.
Labourâs shadow Cabinet Office minister Fleur Anderson, said the report showed âConservative ministers failed to prepare and they failed the publicâ.
Omah Iâd like to know which country in the world was fully prepared for a disaster of this scale. I donât think we did too badly on the whole, but a heap of poor decisions were made by the Government at the start. That is a separate issue to being prepared. As stated last year they could hold warehouses full of PPE but that would have to be binned every couple of years wasting millions ÂŁÂŁs. When was the last time it was needed on such a scale? Never.
The decisions made demonstrate the quality of our government, their advisers and the leadership of our esteemed colleagues in Downing st, but in terms of being prepared please let us know a country of similar complexity and population that did it better.
Itâs not a question of comparison - itâs a statement of incompetence.
The UK is an âadvancedâ country which had prior warning of such a pandemic happening and the resources to plan for and deal with such a situation but, as COVID-19 took over the world, BJ and his Tory government, failed, successively, to deal with known events and the UK ended up with an appalling COVID-related death-toll.
âThis pandemic has exposed the UKâs vulnerability to whole-system emergencies, where the emergency is so broad that it engages all levels of government and society. Although government had plans for a flu pandemic, it was not prepared for a pandemic like COVID-19 and did not learn important lessons from the simulation exercises it carried out.
âFor whole-system risks, government needs to define the amount and type of risk that it is willing to take to make informed decisions and prepare appropriately.â
I wouldnât say they failed overall. The original decisions made to carry on as normal and herd immunity were then replaced with a very cautious lockdown and control measures. So at the beginning they had poor judgement. Lifting mask restrictions now is another poor decision. But we were the first to rollout the vaccine extensively. So swings and roundabouts. Overall the deaths were brought under control and measures implemented.
It is a question of comparison because the whole developed world should have known better by these standards. All countries have made good and bad decisions on how to deal with the catastrophe with varying sucesses /failures. It is a world response that is needed and that is what should be measured.
Yes I know itâs a blame game now. This always happens in the UK and next time we are still just as complacent. Because the alternative is the swine flu debacle. So I can see that they were worried about crying wolf about yet another virus in China. SARs came and went without affecting us much. It greatly affected the regions around China but we would have been deemed stupid had we implemented pandemic type mitigation at the time (who knows perhaps plans were afoot). You can understand that plans are not laid because there is this blame game for every decision made.
The governmentâs preparedness for the COVID-19 pandemic: lessons for government on risk management
The report sets out central governmentâs risk analysis, planning, and mitigation strategies prior to the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic
Background to the report
The Cabinet Office, through its Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS), is responsible for coordinating the governmentâs planning for, and response to, major emergencies. Individual departments and other public sector organisations are responsible for identifying and managing risks in line with their desired risk appetite, including relevant national risks allocated to them by the Cabinet Office. For example, the Department of Health & Social Care is responsible for planning for the health and social care impacts of health-related risks. All departments are responsible for planning for emergencies that would have significant consequences in their areas of remit
Scope of the report
This report sets out the facts on:
⢠the governmentâs approach to risk management and emergency planning (Part One);
⢠the actions the government took to identify the risk of a pandemic like COVID-19 (Part Two);
⢠the actions the government took to prepare for a pandemic like COVID-19 (Part Three); and
⢠recent developments (Part Four).
The report sets out central governmentâs risk analysis, planning, and mitigation strategies prior to the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the aim of drawing out wider learning for the governmentâs overall risk management approach. It does not cover local-level risk planning, wider aspects of resilience planning or top-level disaster response procedures. It also does not cover the governmentâs response to COVID-19 or how prepared it was for subsequent waves of the pandemic.
Report conclusions
This pandemic has exposed a vulnerability to whole-system emergencies â that is, emergencies that are so broad that they engage the entire system. Although the government had plans for an influenza pandemic, it did not have detailed plans for many non-health consequences and some health consequences of a pandemic like COVID-19. There were lessons from previous simulation exercises that were not fully implemented and would have helped prepare for a pandemic like COVID-19. There was limited oversight and assurance of plans in place, and many pre-pandemic plans were not adequate. In addition, there is variation in capacity, capability and maturity of risk management across government departments.
The pandemic has highlighted the need to strengthen the governmentâs endâtoâend risk management process to ensure that it addresses all significant risks, including interdependent and systemic risks. This will require collaboration on risk identification and management not only across government departments and local authorities, but also with the private sector and internationally. For wholeâsystem risks the government needs to define its risk appetite to make informed decisions and prepare appropriately so that value for money can be protected. The pandemic has also highlighted the need to strengthen national resilience to prepare for any future events of this scale, and the challenges the government faces in balancing the need to prepare for future events while dealing with day-to-day issues and current events.
All this was unexpected. How can any of us be prepared for something totally unexpected, knew nothing about, and had no way of knowing how long it would last?
Of course we didnât have masses and masses of surplus PPE going to waste, why would we?
Why would we have a vaccine for something we didnt know existed?
Why would we have Nightingale hospitals laying empty all over the country, just incase a new unknown pandemic struck one day?
It is so easy to criticise, any numbskull can do that, but unless those who constantly find fault could do miles better themselves, they might as well save their breath - they might be glad of it one day.
These inquiries seem to be a necessary ritual to psychologically appease the population that someone is being held to account for what went wrong. It never leads to a real change in the culture. Our response to the pandemic has had good and bad attributes. If anyone is to blame itâs Lansley and the health and social care act which decimated the NHS and created PHE.
Of course it wasnât unexpected - there had been reports, planning and exercises to investigate the possibility of a pandemic - there had been at least 2 âtrue-to-lifeâ movies which âpredicted a pandemicâ.
Nevertheless, the current government failed to learn the lessons from the reports, planning and exercises - indeed at one point, BJ was so busy with Carrie at Chequers that he âmissedâ 5 COBRA emergency meetings at the beginning of the âcrisisâ in January and February 2020 (but that will be covered in another report).
Wow ⌠is there much to be learnt from movies? Just about all of scripts come across someone, usually a single highly sought after individual, who is resistant and has antibodies, they snatch them into a lab and make a vaccine and the world is saved.
However, it is a good point about Boris been distracted with his divorce, his forthcoming nuptials and birth of his son âŚnot to mention Brexit.
But he always comes across a blustering humming and hawing buffoon , thatâs just his style.
