The UK Government and the civil service “failed” the public due to “significant flaws” in preparing for the Covid-19 pandemic, a public inquiry has found. In its first report into preparedness for a pandemic, the UK Covid -19 Inquiry said there was a “damaging absence of focus” on the measures and infrastructure that would be needed to deal with a fast-spreading disease, even though a coronavirus outbreak at pandemic scale “was forseeable”. The report found groups advising the government did not have sufficient freedom and autonomy to express different views and were often undermined by “groupthink.
” On Thursday inquiry chair, Baroness Heather Hallett, presented her report on how well the UK was able to face a deadly outbreak in the run-up to 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic swept across Britain. There were more than 235,000 deaths involving Covid-19 in the UK up to the end of 2023. In her foreword to the report, Baroness Hallett said lessons must be learned and “never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering”.
A major flaw, according to the inquiry, was the lack of “a system that could be scaled up to test, trace and isolate” people. The report added: “Despite reams of documentation, planning guidance was insufficiently robust and flexible, and policy documentation was outdated, unnecessarily bureaucratic and infected by jargon.” The inquiry said it had “no hesitation” in concluding that the “processe.
