No-deal Brexit planning ‘crowded out’ efforts to prepare for pandemic

Planning for a no-deal Brexit from 2018 “crowded out” government efforts to prepare for a pandemic and contributed to leaving the country unready, the first evidence session of the Covid public inquiry has heard.

UK government pandemic planning failed to show “proper foresight” and “even at this stage, before hearing the evidence, it is apparent that we might not have been very well prepared at all”, Hugo Keith KC, counsel to the inquiry, said.

As lawyers for the bereaved accused UK leaders of presiding over a “carousel of chaos” it emerged the former health secretary Matt Hancock had admitted to the inquiry a “lack of concrete preparedness plans”.

“On coming into post as health secretary, I was advised that the UK was a world leader in preparations for the pandemic,” Hancock has said in his statement. “It did not turn out to be the case.” He is due to give evidence later this month.

Brexit no-deal planning from 2018 onwards “prevented some, or perhaps a majority of the improvements that central government itself understood were required to be made to resilience planning and preparedness”, Keith said. No-deal Brexit planning “drained resources and capacity”.

Operation Yellowhammer, as the Brexit planning was known, caused the work of a new pandemic flu preparedness board to stall “because of the preoccupation with readiness for Brexit”, the inquiry heard.

“Few real changes were made … leaving government to largely make up the plan as it went along, once Covid arrived finally,” said Pete Weatherby KC, representing the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group.

As scores of bereaved families descended on the west London inquiry into a pandemic that claimed at least 226,977 lives, Keith told the inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, that evidence unearthed so far may show that not enough people in the UK government had considered the dangers of a coronavirus.

Oliver Letwin, a minister in the Cabinet Office from 2010 to 2016, has told the inquiry the UK was “much better prepared” for an influenza pandemic than Covid.

Dr Frank Atherton, the Wales chief medical officer since 2016, said: “The plans were inadequate for a two- or three-year shock to the system.”

This was despite the conclusion of the flu pandemic planning exercise Cygnus in 2016 that “the UK’s current preparedness … is not sufficient to cope with the extreme demands of a severe pandemic”.

Weatherby said there was a lack of transparency over pandemic planning and said Hancock was advised that publishing information about Exercise Cygnus, a 2016 flu pandemic planning scheme, “would lead to criticism of lack of preparedness”.

Bruce Mann, a former director of the Cabinet Office’s civil contingencies secretariat and an expert witness to the inquiry, will say in his evidence in the coming days that “UK preparedness was wholly inadequate”, the inquiry heard.

Weatherby said he expected evidence “to show little or no ministerial leadership, a chaos of committees, which led to poor planning, and ultimately a reactive rather than proactive response to the virus.

“If the last three-and-a-half years have taught us anything, proper planning, adequate resourcing and swift action saves lives,” he said. “From the families’ perspective, it appears that the UK had none of those three things. They want to know why. And they want it to change.”

Proceedings began with an emotional 18-minute video in which bereaved people described their loved ones’ deaths and their devastating aftermath. Hallett warned those present about its emotional weight and gave them a chance to step out. People spoke of losing loved ones in locked-down care homes, dying with Covid contracted in hospital and catching the virus while at work.

One woman, who described her anger at not being able to dress her deceased father because he was in a body bag, said: “In order for us to move on, we need to know lessons [have been] learned, and the future generations will be safeguarded from the heartache we’ve had so far.”

There had been planning for flu pandemics, but “fundamentally, in relation to significant aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic, we were taken by surprise”, Keith said.

He listed the need for decisions on shielding, employment support, managing disruption to schools, borders, and pharmaceutical interventions and the profoundly unequal impact of the pandemic on vulnerable and marginalised people.

“Few of those areas were anticipated, let alone considered in detail,” he said.

Doctors, represented through the British Medical Association, said the government’s 2012 health service reforms under the former health secretary Andrew Lansley “fractured the links between public health specialists and NHS” and the UK went into the pandemic with too few hospital beds. These failures were “brutally exposed by the pandemic and the systems are now in an even worse state.”

Keith indicated the inquiry would make a judgment on the effects of pre-pandemic austerity, as the Trades Union Congress has urged. “If you conclude that as a country, we were insufficiently resilient and that in future, different political and financial choices may have to be made in order to render us better able to [deal with the] shock, you will want to say so,” he told Hallett.

Meanwhile, lawyers for council directors of public health, who have expertise in handling infectious disease outbreaks, said they were “repeatedly excluded” by central government. The Department of Health and Social Care didn’t have an up-to-date contact list for them, and at the start of the pandemic they found out about new policies only through televised Downing Street 5pm briefings, the inquiry heard.

Lawyers for the Department of Health and Social Care will put their case on Wednesday when the inquiry continues.