Covid-19 Inquiry

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted that the Government have found time for us to debate this very important first report from the Covid-19 inquiry chaired by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett.

I chair the National Preparedness Commission. This was conceived before Covid struck. Its gestation was dominated by national lockdowns, physical distancing and mask wearing—all overshadowed by nearly 250,000 Covid-related deaths, to say nothing of the toll on physical and mental health across the population.

The report from the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, necessarily focuses on national pandemic preparedness, but what her report says has a much wider salience. She reminds us that:

“The primary duty of the state is to protect its citizens from harm. It is, therefore, the state’s duty to ensure that the UK is as properly prepared to meet threats from a lethal disease as it is from a hostile force. Both are threats to national security.


That same point applies to most of the other 89 acute risks in the national risk register and the other slow-burn chronic risks that are considered separately by government.

The noble and learned Baroness concludes that there must be “radical reform” as the existing arrangements and structures failed. Her indictment is harsh: the UK was too complacent about its strength in pandemic preparedness. It was boosterism: we were the best in the world, or the second best in the world. We had plans and protocols, but that is not the same as having working systems, particularly if those plans are untested, outdated and over-specific to the wrong kind of pandemic. She says that there was a failure to appreciate long-term risks and an inadequate assessment of cascade and compound risks. Improvements in resilience arising, for example, from previous exercises, were routinely deprioritised. There was a poor use of experts and, in particular, no mechanism for challenging assumptions.

The report draws an important distinction between whole-system preparedness and preparedness for single-domain risks. There are linked and compounding risks that require a cross-government approach. What we need is much stronger systems thinking within government. Departments need to think beyond their own responsibilities and the centre of government must take a grip on the complex nature and interconnectedness of so many of the hazards that we face. But that will only tell us what we face; even more important is that the nation’s resilience and its preparedness to respond to all these different hazards must become a much higher priority.

A resilient and secure nation is the necessary foundation on which all the Government’s missions must be based. To govern is to choose. However, some duties of government are of overriding priority: safeguarding the nation and protecting our citizens from harm. The reality is that those duties must override, where necessary, other shorter-term political choices and objectives. Yet there are practical and institutional biases that have made it difficult for preparedness and resilience to be prioritised, particularly when alternative actions are more visible, provide more immediate gratification and are superficially more crowd-pleasing.

When things go wrong—and I say this to my noble friends who are current Ministers, just as I would say it to those who were Ministers in the past or hope to be Ministers in future—the subsequent inquiries, such as this one or tomorrow’s into the Grenfell fire, always ask what went wrong or why it was not prevented. Looking again at Ministers and former Ministers, I ask: why did those with responsibility not regard the risks as important or pressing enough? Why did they not have the information they needed—or did they fail to ask? Worse still, did they not want to know?

It is not easy for decision-makers, Ministers and civil servants, who have to balance their immediate priorities against longer-term preparations to deal with what is frankly unpredictable and uncertain. There is, of course, the prevention paradox: the more successfully risks are prevented, or handled if they happen, the less people notice. We live in a democracy. We all find it difficult to respond to novel risks, or to protracted and complex challenges. There is an optimism bias and groupthink, as has been referred to several times today, as well as confirmation bias. We should never forget that unlikely events happen and the cost of putting things right is several orders of magnitude greater than earlier preventive action.

Proper resilience and preparedness are likely to be expensive. It will usually be impossible to prove that the actions taken have prevented something or will do so, particularly if that hypothetical event is at some indeterminate time in the future and long after the decision-maker’s term of office is forgotten. But it is still necessary. As a nation, we have been poor at long- term planning to mitigate threats.

So what would make a difference? I have already mentioned systems thinking, but we also need much better horizon scanning and foresight. There needs to be more diversity of thought, a point picked up by several noble Lords—again, recognised in the inquiry—and there is a need for much more external to government advice. I suspect that we also need to have new ways of accounting and valuing resilience and preparedness expenditure. Treasury Green Book rules should be adjusted to ensure that long-term requirements for preparedness and resilience are given due weight rather than being discounted out of the picture.

We also need to change the wiring at the centre of government. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, suggests a single Cabinet-level committee responsible for whole-system civil emergency preparedness and resilience, and she quotes a former Prime Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, as saying that this needs to be led by a strong Cabinet Minister with the

“ear of the Prime Minister”

so that there is

“the full weight of government behind their decisions”.

That political leadership is vital, but we also need the Civil Service support structures to be in place, perhaps with a new Permanent Secretary for preparedness and resilience, effectively the nation’s chief resilience and risk officer, whose task would be to ensure that issues are pursued systematically and across government. We also need a robust system of parliamentary oversight, as my noble friend has already said.

Then we come to what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, described at the report launch as her most important recommendation, which was

“a statutory independent body for whole-system civil emergency preparedness and resilience”

to provide independent strategic advice, consult widely, especially with the voluntary and community sectors, assess the state of planning for preparedness and resilience, and make recommendations. It would be a sort of Climate Change Committee on steroids. I know that some people perhaps do not like the idea of a Climate Change Committee on steroids, but for national preparedness and resilience it is essential.

I would go further and suggest that we need a national resilience Act, again perhaps modelled on the Climate Change Act, placing a legal duty on government departments and public bodies to take account of and prioritise the need for preparedness and resilience in all their actions, requiring government to report on baseline resilience, setting targets for improvements needed and reporting annually on progress. The compelling reason for investing in resilience and preparedness is safeguarding the world that our children and grandchildren will inherit. What the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, has proposed in her report, perhaps along with a national resilience Act, is a necessary condition for a system that encourages and supports preparedness and resilience.

Ultimately, society as a whole must be behind the change of approach needed. That will require mature political leadership and I am confident that we have that. We live in an increasingly turbulent and uncertain world; we must be prepared for whatever may arise. Every part of society and every part of government needs to be prepared and resilient, with a whole-of-society approach and a whole-of-government approach. I hope that when my noble friend responds she will promise precisely that because, if we fail to invest adequately in preparedness and resilience and if we fail to adapt appropriately for the long-term challenges of the future, that will have been a grotesque abnegation of our obligations to our children and future generations. We must not let it happen.