Covid-19 Inquiry

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, one of my favourite sayings is that good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. The Covid-19 inquiry, chaired by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, found that the UK was ill-prepared and lacked resilience, having prepared for the wrong pandemic. Key findings from the external research included inadequate test, trace and isolate systems, as mentioned by the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Merron. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, admitted that the report confirmed that the UK was underprepared for the pandemic, with failures in process, planning and policy across all four nations. Jeremy Hunt, who served as Health Secretary during the early years leading to the pandemic, acknowledged the report’s sensible recommendations and admitted being part of a group- think.

I was fortunate to be able to participate in several ways during the pandemic. The first example was as chancellor of the University of Birmingham, a tenure I held from July 2014 to July 2024. When the pandemic started, we had lockdown in March. Soon after that, I was approached by Avi Lasarow, South Africa’s Honorary Consul for the Midlands and a fellow member of the Guild of Entrepreneurs, which is soon to become a livery company. He is CEO of a major testing company, Prenetics. He said, “The Premier League football season has been suspended. We have an idea that if we test the players, the coaches and everyone involved, without spectators, regularly, we will be able to resume and complete the season. The problem is that the Government are not listening. We have identified that the University of Birmingham has an expert in testing, Professor Alan McNally”—who went on to head the Nightingale labs. “If Professor McNally approves of our idea and endorses it, maybe the Government will listen”. So I made the introduction to the head of our medical school. The Government then listened, thanks to his recommendation. The Premier League season continued, being televised with no spectators. Everyone was tested on a regular basis. Anyone who tested positive was isolated and everyone else carried on and played the game. The season was completed by 1 August 2020. Other sports followed the system and throughout the whole pandemic we had the football season. I do not think many people are aware of what I have just told noble Lords. To me, it opened up the power of regular testing to pick up asymptomatic Covid cases.

I was appointed vice-president and president-elect of the Confederation of British Industry in June 2019. I was the first entrepreneur to be in that position, the first relatively younger president of the CBI and the first normally not grey-haired FTSE 100 chair to be president of the CBI. Little did I realise that I would be president through the biggest global crisis since the Second World War, the pandemic. I realised very soon that the CBI is wrongly described as a lobbying organisation. I have never respected that description. To me, it is about continually identifying problems, usually well before the Government are even aware of them, and then, instead of going to the Government with a begging bowl, finding and offering solutions that can be acted upon at speed: problem, solution, action. To me, that is the essence of what entrepreneurship is about.

It is also about collaboration, about government and business working closely together. The best example of that co-operation—I have to give credit to the Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson—was appointing Kate Bingham, now Dame Kate Bingham, to lead the vaccine task force in May 2020. With the first vaccination on 8 December 2020, the task force transformed the model of how government, industry, academia and the NHS can work collaboratively to accelerate innovation. This enabled the UK to become the first country in the world to sign an advance purchase agreement for the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.

The Government also supported the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, developed by Oxford University in partnership with AstraZeneca, based in Cambridge, which in turn collaborated with the Serum Institute of India, owned by Cyrus and Adar Poonawalla, good friends of mine and fellow Zoroastrian Parsis. That one company, SII, produced 2 billion doses of the vaccine. This was an example of cross-border collaboration.

Also hugely impressive was dynamic regulation: regulation at speed, with the MHRA approving vaccines in months when normally it would take years. The appointment of Nadhim Zahawi as Covid Vaccine Deployment Minister was crucial. I worked closely with him and saw how effective that appointment was.

But government does not always listen, and did not always listen. I learned about cheap and fast lateral flow tests—people could test themselves with results almost instantaneously—that were being developed in the United States. In August 2020 I started bringing that to the notice of the Government. Every time I made this recommendation, here in this House or in other interactions with the Government and the NHS, I was batted away. But, of course, as an entrepreneur you never give up.

I remember very clearly on 12 November, in a virtual Sitting of the House of Lords, asking the then Health Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, about Sir John Bell, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, who had initially been against lateral flow tests but now said that they were inexpensive and easy to use and, when used systematically, could reduce transmission by 90%. I said that these tests were picking up 75% of positive cases and 95% of the most infectious cases. I asked the Minister when we could have millions of these tests deployed by the NHS, care homes, schools, universities, airports, factories, offices, workplaces, theatres and sports grounds, so that we could get our economy firing on all cylinders again.

Do noble Lords know what the reply was? The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, said:

“As ever, I am inspired by the noble Lord’s passion for this subject. He has totally won the argument in this matter, because we are putting into the field millions of tests, as he recommended and continues to champion. The pilot in Liverpool is extremely exciting, and the tests themselves are proving both easy to administer and accurate in their diagnosis. We are working on ways of using these tests in a mass testing capacity. Universities and social care are two user cases that we have prioritised, and we are looking at using the lessons of Liverpool in other areas. In all matters, we continue to be inspired by the noble Lord”.—[Official Report, 12/11/20; col. 1261.]


My gosh, I shall frame that.

The reality is that the Government did listen, but it took several months before free lateral flow tests were eventually made available to all businesses and citizens. In fact, they came to be used so widely that we ran out of them in December 2021 and January 2022. Between April and June 2021, Oxford University carried out a study of 200 schools, covering 200,000 pupils and 20,000 staff. Half of them followed the “bubble rule”. If your Lordships remember, at one time there were millions of schoolchildren isolating. The other half regularly used lateral flow tests, with only those who tested positive isolating and everyone else carrying on and attending school, children and staff alike. It showed that less than 2% in each of those two cohorts were infected. The difference was that the ones who used lateral flow tests did not miss out on school, whereas the others had to go out in bubbles and miss school. I put it to the Government—I wonder whether the Minister agrees—that, had the Government listened in August 2020 and acted rapidly to introduce rapid lateral flow tests, perhaps we could have avoided lock- downs 2 and 3.

What is more, the cost of providing these tests, as I will prove, would have been minuscule compared with the £400 billion that the Government spent on saving our businesses and the economy, let alone people’s mental health. As the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, mentioned, we had children losing out on time in school, university students missing out, people missing out on operations, lives sadly lost, and waiting lists of millions that continue to this day.

As I have said, we experienced shortages of supply. The plan was to use millions of these tests. When they were rolled out, there were sceptics who said they would cause false positives. The reality was that they were sent off to laboratories to check against PCR tests and 89% came with the same positive result, so that was a false scare.

I do not think we could have avoided the first national lockdown, from 23 March to 1 June 2020. The world did not know what was going on; we were hit with a huge shock. But the second lockdown from 5 November to 2 December 2020 and the third from 6 January 2021 to 29 March 2021, I believe, could have been avoided along with all the implications that I have outlined.

What was the cost of these lateral flow tests? For the one-year period from April 2021 to April 2022, the cost was £16 billion. Now you can buy them at retail for less than £2 each. What is 2 billion tests provided at £16 billion compared with the almost £400 billion total cost of Covid-19 measures?

I will give one last example. My wife is South African; we have a home in Cape Town. Alan Winde, Premier of the Western Cape, the most successful province in South Africa, provided me with data throughout the pandemic. That data was way better than any of the data I received over here from the NHS. Why? Because they had experience of dealing with the AIDS pandemic earlier. They had some of the best epidemiologists and virologists in the world, including Professor “Slim”, Salim Abdool Karim, who has become a good friend of mine.

Top medical scientists in Britain came under fire for ignoring the expertise of these great South African scientists on the omicron variant when it was identified in November 2021. South Africa had highly sophisticated genomic surveillance capability for Covid, which is why both the omicron and beta variants were first identified in South Africa. But instead of listening to those scientists, we did not.

Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association, was among those who reported omicron as “very, very mild”. South Africa then angrily condemned the travel restrictions immediately slapped on it and other southern African countries. Professor Tulio de Oliveira of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation said:

“The UK, after praising us for discovering the variant, then put out this absolutely stupid travel ban”.


That is how we treated this. SAGE dismissed it. When I brought this to the notice of the Health Secretary at the time, he listened to me. I said, “Please don’t be scared by omicron. It spreads like wildfire, but it does not cause deaths”. The NHS scare meant we had a go-slow in December 2021 and January 2022. Christmas was ruined for hospitality; it was completely unnecessary, and the gloomiest predictions for omicron were shown to have been wide of the mark.

To conclude on the lessons to be learned—whether on vaccines, the Premier League carrying on, lateral flow testing, omicron or not listening to experts around the world—I hope that we learn lessons from the biggest global crisis since the Second World War: the Covid-19 pandemic.