Covid-19 Inquiry

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests, in particular that I am the vice-chair of and a consultant to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which, despite its name, and although based in DC, has a global biosecurity programme that has a global reach and also draws on the expertise of global experts in biosecurity.

In my view, this report is measured, forensic but quietly damning. It identifies failures in the machinery of government and failures of co-ordination not merely between different departments but between central government and the devolved Administrations; a culture of complacency that regarded the existence of a decade-old strategy document as an adequate protection against a multiplicity of rapidly changing threats; and an absence of mechanisms for proper scrutiny that meant these failures went, all too often, unidentified and therefore unchallenged.

On page 22, point 2.25 of the report states:

“The last occasion on which the Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingencies sub-Committee”


of the National Security Committee

“met was in February 2017 … In July 2019, the sub-Committee was formally taken out of the committee structure … Ms Hammond”,

the director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat,

“accepted that it was, in effect, abolished. As a result, immediately prior to the pandemic, there was no cross-government ministerial oversight of the matters that were previously within the sub-Committee’s remit”.

All this happened because the sub-committee was released from its responsibilities on the instructions of the Prime Minister, Theresa May, to work on the preparation for an expected hard Brexit. Unfortunately, she was not the Prime Minister when that was seen not to be the case.

So why does the existence and dissolution of this otherwise obscure sub-committee matter and what was the result? As point 2.23 makes clear, the continuing role of this sub-committee was to provide

“the Prime Minister with an overview of the potential civil domestic disruptive challenges that the UK might face over the next 6 months”.

Point 2.24 goes further, asserting that this committee was

“important to the implementation of the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011”

and that its existence

“was necessary to ensure that important issues were acted upon”.

So we were left with a void where a properly constituted oversight body should have been. As a result, we were effectively unable to implement even the 2011 strategy which, even if you do not accept it was heavily flawed and outdated, had lost its implementation machinery.

In part, I raise the question of this committee because it also reflects the findings of chapter 5 of the modular report, specifically points 5.118 and 5.119, which suggest that a “lack of openness” weakened our response and that regular, sustained and well-informed parliamentary scrutiny is a critical component of an effective preparedness strategy.

I first raised the issue of the Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingencies Sub-Committee in your Lordships’ House on 4 June 2020. In reply, I was told that I was not entitled to any comment on the particular Cabinet committees and would not be told anything, but instead would have to be assured that substantial planning was in place in respect of pandemics. Nothing of the sort existed.

Pursuing further information via Written Questions, I received three responses to three separate Questions. The first did not deal with my Question but referred to the committee in the past tense, and the second explicitly conceded that the sub-committee no longer existed. My third Question asked why, given that the committee had been dissolved, the GOV.UK official National Security Council website still listed it as operational. In reply, I was told that the website accurately reflected the NSC’s workings—in effect, contradicting the purport of the previous two Answers I received. If the Government’s aversion to openness was so total as to render me unable to ascertain the existence of the committee—let alone its workings and findings or the regularity of its meetings—it is perhaps unsurprising that the report finds that an absence of scrutiny contributed to our failure in preparedness.

Something that surprised me was the fact that the UK Biological Security Strategy—published in July 2018, shortly before Parliament rose—was never debated at any stage in Parliament and not mentioned. In the overlapping mesh of protections that we believed were in place, the 2018 strategy was directly relevant to pandemic preparedness. It is perhaps instructive that the governance board set up to implement this strategy was supposed to be the threats, hazards, resilience and contingencies sub-committee, which, as we now know, was disbanded less than 12 months later. While strategies are vital to risk mitigation, institutional memory and structural consistency are no less important. If future approaches to resilience are to succeed, in all our interests, institutional memory must be retained.

It was an absence of co-ordination, not merely between departments and other administrative structures but between the devolved Administrations and the UK Government, that enfeebled our response to Covid-19. This applies particularly to the relations between Holyrood and Westminster. When Nicola Sturgeon gave evidence to the inquiry in January, she was confronted with the Scottish Cabinet minutes. Dating from June 2020, the height of the pandemic, the minutes show that Ministers

“agreed that consideration should be given to restarting work on independence and a referendum”.

As my researcher said—I use this unapologetically, but I credit him—that is like reacting to an uncontrollable fire starting in your kitchen by devoting an afternoon to considering whether to remove your partner’s name from the title deeds to the house. More seriously, it shows that time and attention were being diverted from the Covid pandemic in Scotland towards narrow political manoeuvring. Asked whether the relationship between Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson had broken down, Sturgeon’s chief of staff, Liz Lloyd, told the inquiry that the phrase

“broken down … overstates what was there to break”

in the first place. That is hardly a promising basis for co-operation and partnership in facing the most significant public health crisis of modern times.

The manoeuvring was not one-sided. The inquiry heard that, ahead of the then Prime Minister’s trip to Orkney in July 2020, Michael Gove produced a briefing paper entitled State of the Union. This briefing suggested that the risk to the union was the “greatest challenge” facing the UK Government aside from the pandemic and that, in the lead-up to the Scottish elections of 2021,

“protecting and strengthening the Union must be a cornerstone of all that we do”.

The strength of my commitment to the cause of unionism in no way diminishes my belief that this paper, and Boris Johnson’s speech on that Orkney visit extolling the “sheer might and merit” of the union, suggest that priorities had gone severely awry in both Holyrood and Westminster.

While this first report from the inquiry makes significant criticisms of both the “labyrinthine … complexity” of emergency planning infrastructure and the groupthink that affected both Ministers and the advice on which they rely, it is important to retain a clear focus on leadership—and, all too often, its absence—as a factor in our pandemic failures. Structures will not and cannot make people like and work with each other if they do not wish so to do. This is not to detract from the inquiry’s recommendations around the machinery of government—particularly recommendations 1, 2 and 8—but to draw your Lordships’ attention to the flaws outlined on pages 2 and 3. In particular, I was struck by the penultimate entry in what is an unsurprisingly long list:

“In the years leading up to the pandemic, there was a lack of adequate leadership, coordination and oversight. Ministers, who are frequently untrained in the specialist field of civil contingencies, were not presented with … enough range of scientific opinion and policy options, and failed to challenge sufficiently the advice they did receive from officials and advisers”.


There is only a limited amount that structural changes can do in preventing future lapses of leadership and in mitigating against decisions made with imperfect, incomplete or simply inadequate levels of knowledge—but the best protection is scrutiny.

I have often had occasion to criticise them, but the last Government’s commitment to provide an annual resilience statement to Parliament was welcome. As point 5.120 of the inquiry’s report suggests, I believe that this commitment should be deepened and that a full analysis, complete with recommendations to improve preparedness, should be published on an annual basis.

My final observations today focus on the war-gaming exercises—Cygnus and Alice in particular—designed to stress-test our institutions and identify possible shortfalls in resourcing and preparedness that might hamper our ability to respond to a pandemic. It took repeated FoI requests from an NHS doctor to get the previous Government to admit that they had undertaken Exercise Alice in 2016, which was designed to recognise the challenges should a coronavirus hit our shores. The report, redacted when published, revealed shortages of PPE, no plans for pandemic-related travel restrictions and a failure to have a working contact-tracing system—all of which we had to improvise when Covid hit.

Equally, Exercise Cygnus, undertaken in 2016, identified three key issues, including

“the restriction of movement of non-essential workers, different scenarios in pandemic planning that looked at the potential characteristics of pandemics, and other more radical measures to control transmission”.

None of those was included in the future work plan of the pandemic flu readiness board, let alone addressed. It is imperative that future exercises are followed by the establishment of specific and measurable pieces of preparedness work that directly address the challenges that are identified, not merely those that are the easiest or cheapest to engage.

Of course, all this wisdom is hindsight. Mistakes were made by Governments in the run-up to the last pandemic and, given that even Labour Ministers are very occasionally fallible, I do not even expect perfection from them. But history is there to be learned from, and I trust that this first report and its successors will be greeted in that spirit.