Exercise Pegasus 2025

Baroness Finn Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My noble friend is right that my statistics may not be someone else’s statistics. We should always interrogate the data that is being put in front of us.

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, we welcome the scale and ambition of Exercise Pegasus. Simulating crisis events in this way is clearly vital if we are to strengthen national resilience and avoid the shortcomings exposed during the Covid pandemic. However, the exercise was conducted on discrete days over several months, with breaks in between. A real pandemic is relentless, cumulative and exhausting for systems and decision-makers alike. Can the Minister explain how the Government ensured that this sense of sustained pressure, operational fatigue and compounding risk was adequately captured within the exercise design, despite the staged nature of the simulation?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Baroness raises an important point about how realistic we can make exercises. Some of this is about making sure that the processes and people are all in place and that they know each other; that was one of the fundamental factors that that did not necessarily work during the pandemic. We sought to use focus groups and other mechanisms to ensure that the environments were as realistic as possible and to try to stress-test what was going on. We will continue to do that as the exercise continues into this year, and I look forward to seeing the initial findings report imminently.