National Resilience and Preparedness

Roger Gale Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Sir Roger Gale (in the Chair)]

Order. I suspended the sitting until 11 o’clock but, with the mover of the motion and the Minister present, I see no reason not to start. I will call Richard Foord to move the motion and then the Minister to respond. As is always the case with 30-minute debates, there is no opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up. Without further ado, I call Richard Foord.

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered national resilience and preparedness.

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir Roger. I have brought this debate to the House so that the people I represent can hear from the Government what they are doing to make the UK more prepared and resilient.

I was partly inspired by the Hallett inquiry into covid-19, and its module 1 report published in July, but I want to go beyond pandemics to think of the UK’s broader resilience and preparedness. At Cabinet Office questions last month, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster confirmed that the Government would respond to module 1 this month, and we look forward to hearing what the Government have to say. I want to focus on three areas: future pandemics, food security and hybrid threats.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this issue forward. It is important to have efficient contingency plans across the United Kingdom for all sorts of national crises and disasters, like those that the hon. Gentleman referred to. Local communities are encouraged to engage in activities, emergency plans and response units. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is more the Government can do to engage with the devolved institutions—in particular local councils—to ensure we have a joint strategy across the whole United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland?

[Sir Roger Gale (in the Chair)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman is an old friend and has been here a long time. We really must get out of the habit of reading into the record pre-prepared interventions. An intervention is an intervention, not a contribution to the debate.

[Richard Foord]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the civil contingencies legislation in this country puts a lot of the onus on the devolved institutions and a lot of the responsibility on local government. We cannot afford for national Government to therefore shed all their responsibilities and simply rely on local and devolved institutions.

Resilience is the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly; I suggest that the UK Government do not currently offer us that. The covid-19 pandemic exposed critical weaknesses in the planning and preparedness for large-scale emergencies. While the UK has made great strides in terms of our recovery—and we did after the pandemic—we may still lack the capacity to withstand other crises. Our vulnerabilities to emerging climate change, to food security risks and to hybrid threats from the UK’s adversaries leave us unprepared to endure shocks and unable to recover swiftly.

On covid-19, module 1 of the Hallett inquiry was a crucial call to action. The report concluded that the nation was “ill prepared” and that citizens were “failed” by the systems we had in place at the start of 2020. I think of how Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister at the time, was wandering around hospitals shaking hands while the national guidance proposed that we should do something completely different. The report revealed that the UK’s emergency planning was too much focused on influenza and failed to account for any other sort of pandemic.

One of the most critical failings identified was the “unduly complex and labyrinthine” nature of the UK’s civil emergency planning structures. Responsibility for pandemic preparedness was dispersed across multiple bodies, leading to inefficiencies and a lack of clear leadership. The inquiry also scrutinised the Government’s risk assessment processes, finding five major flaws that significantly affected the UK’s preparedness, including a lack of focus on prevention and insufficient consideration of interconnected risks, including economic and social vulnerabilities.

The 2016 preparedness exercise Exercise Cygnus, which simulated the impact of a flu pandemic, identified critical gaps in the UK’s preparedness, including insufficient capacity in the health system and a lack of essential supplies such as PPE. The recommendations from the 2016 exercise were not acted on, and when covid-19 emerged the same shortcomings persisted, with delays in the provision of PPE, inadequate testing, and healthcare services that became overwhelmed in some places.

Over 200,000 excess deaths have been attributed to covid-19 in the UK, many of which may have been preventable with better planning and better resilience. The pandemic also inflicted severe economic damage, with the UK experiencing one of the deepest recessions among the advanced economies. Businesses closed and jobs were lost. The strain on the public sector and on public services like our NHS is still being felt to this day.

The inquiry’s report set out key recommendations to overhaul the UK’s approach to civil emergency preparedness. The recommendations included regular pandemic response exercises and enhanced data sharing. Yet just last Thursday, Clare Wenham from the department of health policy at the London School of Economics stated:

“We’ve had the biggest pandemic of our lifetimes”

yet in 2025 we are

“we’re worse prepared than we were when we went in.”

When the Minister responds to the debate, it would be interesting to know where the Government are in relation to the World Health Organisation pandemic preparedness treaty. One of the 10 key recommendations from the covid-19 inquiry’s module 1 report emphasised the importance of enhanced data collection and data sharing. The emphasis on domestic resilience—the subject of this debate—has to be balanced with the obligation to co-operate internationally. Pandemics do not respect borders and require global solutions. The Government should act swiftly to implement the inquiry’s recommendations, engage with international frameworks such as the World Health Organisation treaty, and rebuild public trust in the nation’s ability to protect its citizens.

Covid-19 also highlighted some of the difficulties in other aspects of our resilience. We need only think about the supermarket shortages we saw and how people reacted: that was a reminder of just how vulnerable Britain is to food supply shocks.