Baroness Merron
That this House takes note of the first report from the Covid-19 Inquiry.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Merron) (Lab)
My Lords, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, published her report from the first module of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry in July. I thank her and her team for the work that they have done to this point, and for putting the bereaved at the heart of this inquiry.
I also thank everyone who has provided evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry thus far, which has made it possible for it to carry out its important work. There are clearly vital lessons emerging from before and during the pandemic that this Government will consider in strengthening preparations for future emergencies, and that will include increasing the resilience of our public services.
Module 1 of the Covid-19 inquiry is focused entirely on whether the UK was adequately prepared and had built the necessary resilience to deal with a pandemic between 2009 and early 2020. I know that your Lordships’ House will welcome this chance to debate the findings today.
Today, my thoughts, and I am sure those of all noble Lords across the House, are with the families and communities who lost loved ones because of the pandemic. Their grief is harrowing, and they lost loved ones too soon. It is heartbreaking to recall that many goodbyes were said through a screen, and many could not say goodbye at all. Many could not attend loved ones’ funerals, and everyone had their lives turned upside down by Covid.
I can only imagine the distress and disappointment that are felt as a result of this report confirming what many suspected—that this country was not properly prepared. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, was clear that
“the UK was ill prepared for dealing with a catastrophic emergency, let alone the coronavirus … pandemic”.
She found that “processes, planning and policy” across the entire country let our people down and that there were major failings in state services, while existing health and social inequalities made us more vulnerable.
Before the pandemic hit, our public services were already badly stretched. NHS waiting lists were already too high; too little attention had been paid to our infrastructure, and workers delivering public services were already under significant pressure. The status of the health and care system at the onset of the pandemic was its “starting point”, and a more resilient system could have reduced the impact of the pandemic on the system.
The report concludes:
“The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic”,
focusing too much on influenza and too little on other pathogens. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, also noted that there was a lack of leadership, oversight and challenge from Ministers and officials, which weakened resilience. This report does not make pretty reading.
Reference is also made to “fatal strategic flaws” in assessing risks and a failure to learn from prior emergencies and outbreaks of disease. The report concludes that a positive analysis of the UK’s preparedness sowed complacency among Ministers and officials and that too little attention was paid to how government could mitigate the most harmful consequences of a pandemic; for example, by setting up a test, trace and isolate system.
The report highlights the disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable in our society, including the elderly and those with existing health conditions. The Government asked many to shield for months, some families were stuck in overcrowded accommodation and workers in the gig economy and those on low incomes missed out on much support. We witnessed a shocking increase in domestic abuse during lockdowns, and young people’s education was severely disrupted. Those with access to online learning and IT could manage to a degree, but this was not the reality for far too many children. The lessons for the future are clear: resilience has to be for our entire society and everyone in it.
The report also tells us about the state of our public services. A nation’s resilience depends on the strength of its infrastructure and public services. These were simply not strong enough before the pandemic and they are not strong enough today. The NHS waiting list currently stands at more than 8 million, prisons are overcrowded, too many councils have been pushed to the brink and the Government have inherited a £22 billion black hole in the public finances which cannot be ignored.
We have already taken difficult decisions that will start to turn the situation around, but it will take time and it will take focus. It will be a long process and it is crucial that we get it right, because, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, says, it is not a question of if another pandemic will strike, but when. We are committed to learning the lessons of the pandemic and upholding our first responsibility: that of keeping our people safe.
I understand that the department was learning continuously throughout the pandemic, seeking to adjust its response with each lesson learned. Officials have identified five key lessons that can inform the approach to pandemic preparation, which are now being combined with the lessons we will be learning from the inquiry. I will now set out the five key lessons, which have already been shared with the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett.
The first is that responding to a range of threats needs flexible and scalable capabilities alongside plans. The evidence in module 1 has been clear that, given the unpredictability and range of possible future pandemics, it is unrealistic to try to create a specific plan for each possible new threat. Instead, there is a recognition of the need for future pandemic preparations to focus on developing a toolkit of capabilities which can flexibly pivot to address different emerging threats, and that will be backed up by sufficient resources so that they can be scaled up quickly.
Secondly, the underlying resilience of the system is essential to pandemic preparedness. High resilience means that the NHS, adult social care and public health will be more likely to cope effectively and respond to shocks of any kind, including pandemics. At the time the pandemic struck, the NHS had very little spare flexibility in the system, as it was already operating at high capacity. Waiting times for elective care had been steadily increasing even before the pandemic, and the adult social care sector had structural challenges which significantly impaired its resilience. The Government are looking at how we ensure built-in capacity in order to respond to emergencies.
Thirdly, there must be an ability to scale up quickly. This includes ensuring that there are plans quickly to increase levels of staff, medicines and equipment. All of that is needed to mitigate and control the spread of a disease. It will mean thinking carefully about the resources that can be put aside as investment against a future emergency.
Fourthly, diagnostics and data are crucial in a pandemic response. As my noble friend Lord Vallance put it, the UK was “flying blind” at the start of the pandemic and officials were taking difficult decisions based on stark scarcity of data. Finally, pandemic plans must consider all possible modes of transmission of communicable diseases. Respiratory pathogens remain the most likely to cause future pandemics. However, changes in our environment such as those caused by climate change mean that the risks of outbreaks through some other modes of transmission are increasing. Planning must prepare for the range of transmission modes, including oral routes such as contaminated food and water; sexual and blood routes—which include diseases such as HIV, syphilis and, more recently, mpox—contact routes in diseases such as Ebola; and vector routes such as insects, which include diseases such as malaria and bubonic plague.
It is helpful to look now at recent events. The World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency of international concern because of the rapid spread of the mpox virus strain clade 1. Although currently the risk to the UK population is low, planning is under way across government, the health and care system and with our local partners to prepare for this. The spread of mpox demonstrates that issues can escalate quickly, and it is important that we are ready as a country to respond to any national emergency that arises. To do this, we must prepare for all future threats, not just for pandemics.
The Covid-19 inquiry modules present a wide range of areas to assess and identify learning in order to inform the Government’s approach. This includes the impact of the pandemic on healthcare systems, patients and healthcare workers across the entire country; the development of the Covid-19 vaccine; the implementation of the vaccine rollout programme and vaccine safety; the procurement and distribution of key healthcare equipment and supplies, including PPE, ventilators and oxygen; the approach to test, trace and isolate; the impact of the pandemic on children and young people; and the economic response to the pandemic. There will be much to learn from these future modules.
It is important in all this that we recognise what more can be done to deal with health inequalities and to tackle and reduce socioeconomic health inequalities. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, planning had a focus on clinical health inequalities rather than the broader socioeconomic inequalities. The work done on identifying and addressing clinical inequalities in pandemic planning was vital to the Covid-19 response, and the department is committed to continuing with this. However, many of these clinical inequalities—for example, for those with heart disease, diabetes et cetera—are disproportionately more prevalent in some socioeconomic groups than others, and it is accepted that there was insufficient focus on these groups in the UK’s pandemic planning.
Pandemic planning must take account of all health inequalities. They must be tackled outside of emergencies so that when a pandemic emerges, the whole population is as resilient as possible and better prepared to withstand the consequences. The need to tackle heath inequalities in non-pandemic times is further necessary, given that it is impossible to predict and plan for what the unequal impact of a future pandemic might be.
It is also important to take a co-operative approach to resilience. To strengthen our national resilience in the long term, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is leading a comprehensive review of our national resilience against the full range of risks that the UK faces. He will also be chairing a dedicated Cabinet Committee on resilience to oversee that work.
Building resilience is a responsibility shared with the devolved Administrations, regional mayors, local leaders and local authorities. This is key to understanding the challenges that all parts of our society face and to delivering effective change to communities across the country. This is why the Prime Minister has already reset the relationships with these crucial partners to help achieve this. As we consider the recommendations from the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, we will work closely with all our partners to make our country safer and more secure. Resilience cannot be built through division—it will demand careful co-operation.
Following the pandemic, the previous Administration did seek to take steps to improve pandemic preparedness, including changes to how government accesses, analyses and shares data, including with the public. There was also a change to the risk assessment processes and how the centre of government prepares for and responds to crises. As a new Government, we will review these changes, because good practices need to be built on and inadequate ones changed.
The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, proposed 10 recommendations as part of the Covid-19 Inquiry’s first report. These include improving how cross-cutting risks are managed by government and the devolved Administrations, as well as strengthening the leadership of Ministers and improving the oversight that they provide. The Government are carefully considering these recommendations and the associated findings, as well as recommendations from the Grenfell inquiry that impact on resilience planning. We will respond in full within six months, as requested by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett.
We know that, as Covid-19 exposed, pandemics never respect borders. Outbreaks of epidemic diseases are more likely to arise in and have greater impacts in lower-resourced countries. This makes global health security a bedrock that is essential to our own domestic health security, which is why the Government will get behind international drives to improve global health and pandemic preparedness. These international efforts will focus on strengthening health and surveillance systems, deploying resources to places in need and ensuring that the global health architecture is effective and responsive, while also ensuring there is sustained investment in research and development. For example, the UK has signed up to the 100 Days Mission, which is a global mission to have safe and effective diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines in the first 100 days of a pandemic. Contributing to this commitment is our UK aid investment through the UK Vaccine Network, which supports the development of vaccines to prevent and respond to epidemics in low and middle-income countries. The UK certainly has a lot to offer to the world, and we should also remember that it is in our national interest to step up to the plate.
The pandemic was a tragedy. Throughout it we witnessed remarkable service and sacrifice from front-line workers, not least those in the NHS and adult social care services, taking care of the most vulnerable in society. Volunteers repeatedly put their communities ahead of themselves, and we cannot thank the British people enough for coming together in extraordinary ways amid the tragedy of the pandemic. This Government are determined to learn the lessons from the inquiry so that we are better prepared for the future. It is our responsibility to the people who we serve, and it is a responsibility that we will meet.
Lord Frost (Con)
My Lords, I am glad that we have the chance to debate this first inquiry report, because there is a lot to say. We all have our own experience of the pandemic, and we have heard some earlier. My own experience is bracketed by two events. It was bracketed at the end by my own resignation from government. I think I am the only person in HM Government, either a Minister or official, to have stepped down in protest at pandemic handling, specifically against vaccine passports and the prospect of a further lockdown in December 2021. At the beginning, it was bracketed by having watched the near-collapse of the government machine in Downing Street in early 2020.
In my view, there has been much largely unreasonable vilification of Ministers’ and officials’ behaviour over the pandemic period and I want to put on record that personally I cannot forget the courage of those who turned up to work in those difficult days, believing at that time that they were risking serious illness or even death. Those people deserve commendation for doing everything that they could at that point to live up to their responsibility to the nation and keep the Government going.
Between those two points, while I was trying to run a trade negotiation, I saw a lot of the decision-making on the pandemic. I have not been asked about any of this by the inquiry; so be it. Like others, I am not particularly impressed by what I have seen of the workings of the inquiry so far, and I cannot share the warm words that I have heard earlier today. The inquiry’s conduct so far seems to have lacked something, both in seriousness and in real intellectual curiosity about the pandemic. I hope I am proved wrong as subsequent reports emerge, but I fear that this one rather bears out my concerns and I want to begin by saying why.
First, there is something unsatisfactory about producing a series of, in effect, interim reports rather than an overall judgment. Inevitably, the early reports will beg lots of questions. It is, after all, difficult to judge the first report without a clear understanding of what the inquiry’s view is on other important questions: the effectiveness of decision-making; the effect on the health service; the impact on the economy, and so on. Indeed, it is not even clear to me that we are going to get from the inquiry what we really need—a report on the costs and benefits of measures taken, factoring in the economic and social costs—and if the inquiry does not produce it, then the Government must.
Meanwhile, what we have is a report that tells us that much went wrong in pandemic preparation. Of course, the inquiry can reasonably reach that conclusion only if it is confident that deaths in the pandemic were worse than they might have been with better preparation. The report does not actually tell us that; it just assumes it. Perhaps the evidence will come later, in the future reports, but meanwhile we have the conclusions without any of the workings, and I find that methodologically quite unsatisfactory.
Let me turn to some of the conclusions and recommendations. I am going to be quite critical, but I want to begin with one important and positive aspect of the report: its criticism of groupthink and its recommendation about “red teams” in government. Groupthink was, as noble Lords have said, very obvious in some of these decisions. It is easier said than done to make red teams really effective, but I hope that new Ministers will take this recommendation seriously, and perhaps not only in this area of policy.
I have three concerns about the report’s conclusions and recommendations. The first, which has been touched on already, is its heavily reported conclusion that:
“The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic”.
The report uses those words in its executive summary but never repeats them in the main text, which makes one suspicious, of course, that they are there for popular consumption and not actual analysis. To my mind, and I am not the only one—I share my noble friend Lord Lansley’s reservations on this point—the report never makes clear why the inquiry has said this. It is certainly not obvious to me. After all, the 2011 strategy was expressly designed to address all respiratory viruses, and WHO advice from even this year says that Covid and flu
“spread in similar ways … Many risk factors for severe disease are common to both … Many of the same protective measures are effective against COVID-19 and influenza”.
So it is not clear why flu is in any way a bad proxy for the pandemic that we had.
To the extent that one can assess what is meant from the report’s verbiage, it is possible that what the inquiry means to say is that the Government were wrong to prepare for a pandemic of which the spread could only be mitigated and not contained or prevented. But the spread was not in the end contained or prevented, so it is still not obvious why the 2011 strategy was, in the inquiry’s view, such a poor one. Understanding this properly is crucial to future planning, and I am afraid that I do not think we do understand it properly on the basis of the report.
My second concern is about the recommendations for structural change. It is undoubtedly true, I fear, that, as the report says, Ministers and officials failed to learn from planning exercises or to implement their conclusions. I am afraid that is just normal life in Whitehall—a standard cultural feature and one we had to fight very hard to overcome when we were planning for a no-deal Brexit. But, of course, you cannot generally change the culture by just changing the structures. That is why I find it surprising that the inquiry focused so much on this in its proposal to scrap the lead department model and move responsibility to the Cabinet Office, a department widely recognised, I think, to be one of the least effective in government. I can see how people with little experience in public administration, such as most of those staffing the inquiry, might think that issues involving many government departments should be managed from the centre, but, after all, everything in government is cross-government, and not everything can be run from 70 Whitehall. I fear that the consequence of this recommendation will be to disempower departments which really have the expertise and the resources while producing no extra coherence or direction, only duplication.
For similar reasons, I also have concerns about the proposed independent statutory body that is recommended in paragraph 6.93. It is obvious that responsible Ministers need a good mechanism for consulting and remaining in touch with a wide range of experience in pandemic management—and, I would add, outside this country as well as within it—but I fear that the effect of creating what is, in effect, just another quango will in practice be to remove planning from politics altogether. We will have the same situation that we have in many areas now, when a quango makes recommendations which are just disconnected from the real choices that actual Governments have to make—choices about trade- offs on risks, about costs, about resource constraints—and yet Ministers end up by having no real choice but to accept those recommendations or be accused of overruling technical advice for political reasons. That is not satisfactory and will not help us get things right in future.
My third comment is on something the report does not say explicitly but which is quite obvious from reading it and certainly obvious to those of us who lived through it in government. That is that one major reason for complexity, duplication and uncertainty in the pandemic response was the complicating role of the devolved Governments. I doubt very much that anyone thought, back in 1998 when we created the devolved Administrations, that the devolution of public health as a competence would have the end result of travel bans between England and Wales, or Scotland operating, in effect, its own and different entry control system to third countries during the pandemic. The report hints at this problem by proposing that the new quango that I just mentioned should have “a UK-wide remit”. It understandably refrains from going into detail about why. I am not quite so constrained, and I think that proper management of public health in emergency conditions requires decisions to be taken at a national level for the whole country, that the Government should have brought in legislation to that effect in 2020 and that it should be made possible in future as soon as we can.
I want to draw one broader conclusion. It is my concern that this report falls into the trap that so many inquiries fall into of believing that cleverer people, more information, more preparation, better planning, if done properly and rigorously, can solve problems; and that if those problems are not solved, that is, ipso facto, evidence of poor preparation. The report recommends, for example—some might think ambitiously—that:
“It should be a fundamental aspect of all risk assessment that the potential impacts on society and the economy are taken into account”.
You do not have to be a complete devotee of Hayek’s explanation of the knowledge problem to think it unlikely that even the most efficient Government are going to be able to foresee and respond to all “impacts on society and the economy”; there are limits to what planning can do.
Of course, we should do the best possible, but what is also needed is something else: an adaptive and a learning Government, one who can assimilate information, draw conclusions and alter course in the light of real-time developments. Unfortunately, we did not have that during the pandemic. Instead, I am afraid we had a culture of compliance and denial, making it impossible to learn from experience. When it decided to lock down in spring 2020, the machine kept doing the same thing on autopilot. It was not just unable to assess the trade-offs between lockdowns and the economy; it was unable to assess, assimilate and explain basic facts such as the fatality rate, the effectiveness of vaccines, their effect on transmission, the effect or lack of it of vaccine passports, the effectiveness of facemasks and much more. Above all, it failed to draw conclusions from the evidence and adjust its approach. Instead, until the whole Covid world collapsed in January 2022, the first and last recourse was always to lockdowns, like a brain-dead animal still moving with instinct as if it were still alive and thinking.
The Minister said in introducing this debate that the intention in future is to create a learning system which can respond. But unless you change the wider culture in society, that will be quite tricky. Plenty of individuals at the time resisted exactly that learning. The then responsible Ministers are some of them, but they were not the only ones. Most of civil society, trade unions and faith groups—including the Church of England—all pushed for the most risk-averse policies possible. All other political parties pressed for more and tougher lockdowns, more working from home, more public money and more debt. To take just one example, the current Prime Minister said in July 2021:
“Lifting all restrictions at once is reckless—and doing so when the Johnson variant”—
let us not forget that shameful use of language—
“is already out of control risks a summer of chaos”,
with “deadly consequences”. It never happened. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, he turned out to be talking nonsense.
But others advising the Government at the time must also take responsibility. The second lockdown was publicly justified through figures and charts which were simply wrong when presented and shown to be so immediately afterwards. They never learned. Even as late as December 2021, these advisers were predicting disaster. The then Chief Medical Officer said on 16 December that large numbers of Covid patients ending up in hospital was a “nailed-on prospect” and that the UK was facing “a really serious threat”. The then and current head of the UK Health Security Agency said that omicron represented
“probably the most significant threat we’ve had since the start of the pandemic”.
Anyone who looked at the data from South Africa, as has been said, knew that these statements were wrong. We certainly know it now.
This behaviour could persist because there simply was no free political debate about these issues. Many Governments leaned on social media and tried to terrify citizens into losing their faculties in support of their approaches. We were not allowed to discuss obvious things such as the plausibility that the virus emerged from a lab in China. We learned what happened from the Twitter files and from Mark Zuckerberg’s letter of 26 August to the House Judiciary Committee in the US, which said that
“the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content … I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today”.
As I keep saying, most disinformation and misinformation comes from Governments. That culture was set during the pandemic, and it needs to change.
That is why it is so important not just to avoid groupthink in government but to promote free debate more broadly. We in this country, in particular the Conservative Party, can be proud that in the end we broke through that cycle of risk-averse controls and repression. Debate in this Parliament could not in the end be stifled. We should be glad that Boris Johnson in the end reached his own judgment about lockdowns and refused to go with the flow. That decision broke the spell and the cycle of lockdowns. It showed the rest of the world that the control and prevention approach was fundamentally misconceived and that it would have been better to stick to the 2011 plan so criticised in this report. It showed that it was not necessary to keep repeating the same actions, expecting a different result. But by then the damage had been done. One thing that is surely clear, even from this quite unsatisfactory first inquiry report, is that we must never repeat it.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, and all who have spoken. It has been a timely and extremely interesting debate. I think we all feel for the grief of those who lost family and friends during Covid, for those who are still suffering from long Covid, for those who lost loved ones from other diseases because the health system could not cope, and for children and students who missed out on a proper education.
The wonderful Covid wall on the other side of the Thames is, to me, a regular reminder of that dreadful time and today’s debate has rightly been touched with emotion. I was particularly struck by the speech from my noble friend Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie on the appalling experience of those with cerebral palsy. There is a lot to learn from such examples.
However, I would emphasise the point my noble friend Lord Evans of Rainow made in his opening remarks that most countries and the World Health Organization itself were ill-prepared for the devastation of Covid-19. I know that is something that my noble friend Lord Kamall would have said had he not been absent—assailed, I have to tell the House, by the prickles of a vicious sea urchin in the Indian Ocean, which means that he is not with us today for this important debate.
I will try to focus on the report but, first, I was sorry that in her critical introduction the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, did not give any credit for what the Government did right; for example, the success of the Vaccine Taskforce, which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria. The Government also delivered £400 billion of support—more than almost any other country—which protected jobs, businesses, livelihoods and our cultural and sports institutions. The legacy of this expenditure has been an economic challenge for Governments ever since and we need to learn lessons from that for the future.
I think we need to be open to challenging ourselves. I think that has been the spirit of this debate from all quarters, including from my noble friend Lord Hannan about Sweden and its positive comparative mortality figures and the need to be proportionate.
I am therefore glad that the report stresses the importance of learning lessons from experience and suggests, rightly, that government and the Civil Service do not always do this well. I was struck by the failure to follow through on the Korean and Taiwanese experience of MERS—that is in paragraph 5.27—following Exercise Alice in 2016. Their work on border restrictions, contact tracing and quarantining might have prepared us better. My noble friend Lord Lansley made a similar point and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, also referred, rightly, to that useful experience.
A chord was also struck with me by the inquiry’s comments on the deleterious effect of the Civil Service’s bureaucracy—that is in chapter 5, page 129. I very much recognise this problem of bureaucracy from my own experience as a Minister.
However, I want to demur from one term used in the inquiry’s summary. It states in terms on page 2 of the report:
“The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic”.
That statement gives an unfortunate and misleading impression, because readers will assume that the efforts made to prepare for an influenza epidemic were mistaken. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the experience of 1919 showed, influenza can be a terrible disease which leads to a substantial number of deaths, including among young people—unlike Covid—so let me offer a maxim: deaths of young people are even more devastating than those of old people. Hence preparing for an influenza epidemic was not wrong, as the inquiry suggests. It was right and it was supported by government and most of the scientists. However, it was not sufficient, as the inquiry reasonably goes on to suggest. More should have been done to prepare for different diseases by building, I would argue, on what had been done in Asia.
I was also concerned by some of the omissions in the report. In particular, there is very little on cost-benefit and its role in making the right choices in emergencies. Some of us on these Benches suggested during the epidemic that much more could and should have been done to make proper use of economic tools to determine policy, and to involve economists in the many expert groups. I was therefore impressed by the thoughtful speech of my noble friend Lord Frost, with the benefit of his inside view as a Minister at the centre of government. I hope that it will be studied by the inquiry. I particularly share the concern he expressed that we might not get a proper report on the cost and benefits of all the measures that were taken during the crisis. I hope that the new Government will think about that and respond positively.
There is also less than I expected in the report on the local aspects. I agree with the Minister in her admiration for the many volunteers who put communities ahead of themselves. This was my own experience in my home village of Chilmark. There were many heroes and a terrific role was played by local people, volunteers and local and health authorities of various kinds. Faith groups, mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, were also important, although personally I was very saddened by the closure of churches during the first lockdown. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, also made some useful points about the importance of such different bodies, both in a responsive and preventive capacity, in preparing for future pandemics. My conclusion from reading the report, and from that discussion, is that the inquiry model proposed for the future is too centralised.
This feeds on to some messages for the inquiry as it moves forward with at least eight—yes, eight—more modules. Let us take its new approach: while I agree with the need for better use of experts, feeding back to them properly on the use of their advice and having less groupthink, it is wrong to try to construct a system with so little ministerial input. The inquiry appears to have a degree of distaste for the political process. My own experience is that Ministers—and spads, who are barely mentioned in the report—must work closely with experts. Ministers have to make trade-offs; you cannot expect them easily to accept what are possibly very costly recommendations from an independent statutory body, as proposed by the inquiry. This is especially the case since all experience shows that it is Ministers who bear the brunt of any criticisms. Ministers must be accountable and in control. I also agree with those who have underlined the importance of accountability to Parliament, including the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, the noble Lord, Lord Reid, and others. In my own experience as a Back-Bencher during Covid, it was very difficult to get Parliamentary Answers and replies out of our Ministers, so I obviously need to take some lessons from the noble Lord, Lord Winston.
On devolution, I agree that there should be a unified system for dealing with serious emergencies, but the UK Government have to take the lead. I am afraid that the inquiry is rather naive here; it assumes that relations between the four Governments ought to and can proceed smoothly, with no indication of how such a happy state of affairs might be brought about. In particular, it ignores the political grandstanding that was evident during Covid in certain parts of our country. I hope that the inquiry and the Government will pick up what has been said in the debate today in this important area.
The inquiry also needs to be more aware of the cost it has run up. The Library’s best estimate is £162 million so far, with £108 million of that by the inquiry itself. There is also the opportunity cost of the top civil servants involved. This needs tackling—budgets need to be spent on solutions. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, might agree with that.
I was pleased to see the readiness of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to build on what has already been done by the previous Government. We did many things right if you compare our management of Covid-19 with that of some other countries. I think this is because of the strategic decision taken by Ministers to press ahead aggressively with the investment in and the rollout of vaccines—and, indeed, to bring lockdown to an end, in the teeth of opposition from the party opposite.
Since then, as a Government we developed the 2022 resilience framework and the 2023 UK Biological Security Strategy, both of which were widely welcomed. In the wake of Covid we made improvements to data handling and cyber risk in research, and to our assessment of pharma and non-pharma interventions. We established a national situation centre in the Cabinet Office, and strengthened our resilience directorate and training operations. We undertook emergency exercises involving all the key players, learning from the military and business. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, made a good point about detailed preparation on kit, testing and so on. The lead department approach is vital in answering that important question.
It is vital that all of this is carried forward. Is that the Government’s intention, or does the review of our national resilience that the CDL has announced presage a completely different approach? That is my first question to the Minister this evening. Secondly, what does the Minister think about the inquiry’s proposal for a statutory independent body for whole-system civil emergency preparedness and resilience? I am, frankly, wary of this, because it could undermine essential ministerial accountability.
The report brings out well the sheer complexity of the multilateral system of providing advice to government on health, science, resilience and preparedness for emergencies. It contrasts with large international companies of the kind I have worked in. It is wasteful and inefficient, and it reduces the productivity of the public sector—a concern which I look forward to debating in the House next month. The report rightly calls the institutions and structures responsible for emergency planning “labyrinthine” in their complexity. This carries huge risks. Thirdly, then, what is the Government’s plan to tackle this spaghetti junction of complexity—so well-illustrated in the report’s complicated government department maps?
If the Minister is not able to answer my three questions, I hope she will agree either to write or to a meeting. She will know from discussions we have had before that I am keen to get things right for the future before the next pandemic arrives. Like the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, I have dealt with several, both in the agricultural area and in the medical human area, in my business career. It is really important to learn and implement the lessons of the past so that the future is better. Those who have lost loved ones deserve resolution and to know that we have learned lessons for the future from this devastating pandemic. We need to be challenging and open-minded with ourselves. This report and this debate today have made a very useful start.