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The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Ms Abena Oppong-Asare)
I thank the hon. Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) for giving us the opportunity to debate this important issue. I also thank you, Sir Roger, for chairing today’s debate. Happy new year, everybody. I also thank the hon. Members for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for Glastonbury and Somerton (Sarah Dyke), for West Dorset (Edward Morello) and for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) for their important interventions.
The Government’s first responsibility is to keep this country safe, which is why national resilience has been at the top of the agenda since we came into government. As the hon. Member for Honiton and Sidmouth rightly said, the covid and Grenfell inquiries have shown that we inherited a challenging situation. Let me explain the situation that we face. We are dealing with huge underinvestment, and the impact of covid-19 on our public services has been well documented. We know that there was underinvestment before the pandemic, and our public services are massively stretched. That is particularly true in the NHS, where key workers feel the burden and have been asked to go above and beyond. Society is less resilient than it was before the pandemic and, as the hon. Gentleman pointed out, our resilience has been eroded at a time when wider threats, including those from nation states, are increasing and global trends are making the risk landscape more volatile.
Therefore, since coming into office, we have taken immediate steps to strengthen national resilience by establishing a dedicated sub-committee of the National Security Council on resilience. As the hon. Member will know, the sub-committee is chaired by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. We are also looking at how we can improve our approach to national risk assessment, including greater external challenge, and we are designing a national exercising programme with guidance to improve exercising at all levels and help those on the frontline identify people who are vulnerable, which was a common theme from the covid-19 module 1 report. The Government have also adopted the 2023 biological security strategy in full, and we are committed to ensuring that we have the capabilities we need to protect the public from a spectrum of biological threats.
The hon. Member for Honiton and Sidmouth mentioned the particular need to look at the threats we face on a daily basis and ensure that we have a robust strategy, and we are looking at how we can strengthen those capabilities. The new floods resilience taskforce, of which I am a member, is doing vital work to finally speed up and improve the delivery of flooding schemes and stop communities going underwater. I know that that is an important issue to the hon. Member, whose constituents have suffered from flooding and its consequences across Devon.
In the year ahead, we are looking to build on that work, starting with the Government’s response to the covid-19 inquiry module 1 report this month—I hope that that answers the hon. Member’s question. We are also continuing our review of resilience announced by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in July last year. The review is a focused exercise, designed to rapidly identify what is working well and should be kept, what needs to be changed and what needs to be stopped. We are also considering a wide range of evidence, lessons learned, risk and organisational knowledge.
A particular focus for me has been to ensure that all relevant voices are heard. A common theme from both the covid-19 module 1 inquiry and the Grenfell inquiry is that certain voices were not engaged, so we need to move away from having conversations in echo chambers and group thinking. I am undertaking a programme of engagement with stakeholders across the public, private and voluntary sectors, including the devolved Governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. For example, just before Christmas, I held meetings with senior leaders from charities and representative organisations that support people at risk, who are so often disproportionately affected during emergencies. I also chaired a discussion in the autumn with 20 business leaders, where I emphasised the importance of Government and industry partnership.
This month, I will invite Members of both Houses to attend parliamentary drop-in sessions. I will hold two sessions where I will answer questions about the review and discuss its progress. There will also be an opportunity for Members to put on record anything that they think the Government should be looking at, so this debate has been particularly timely given the issues that have been raised. I will also meet members of the National Preparedness Commission to gather views on where our approach to resilience could be bolstered. Finally, I want to assure all hon. Members present that this work will be closely linked to our consideration of the covid inquiry module 1 report and the Grenfell inquiry final report, which the Government will respond to within the deadlines.
The hon. Member for Honiton and Sidmouth has raised important issues today, particularly on the future pandemic, food security and hybrid threats. The UK Government are aware of the risk around food security. We currently source around 60% of food domestically, so it is important for us to look into that. We are also addressing hybrid threats. I found the information mentioned by the hon. Member, particularly relating to his researcher’s findings when he went to Finland, really insightful and useful, so I will look into that.
I also share the hon. Member’s view on a whole-society approach. It is important not only to look at resilience at a Government level, but to get to a point where the whole of society plays a role in that. That is why, particularly through the resilience review, we are looking at how we can work collaboratively across Departments, and also why, through the work that I have been doing, particularly at a grassroots level, we are ensuring that we hear people’s concerns about what we can do to strengthen resilience and making sure that everyone is part of that conversation.
I hope that the hon. Member feels reassured that we are taking this seriously, particularly as we are conducting a review into national resilience. I look forward to working in partnership with him and other hon. Members here throughout the resilience review and making sure that we feed this properly into Government delivery, so that wider society benefits.
Question put and agreed to.