Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 18 November 2020 to Question 113045 on Exercise Cygnus, for what reason his Department determined that the publication of the Exercise Cygnus report might negatively impact the response to the covid-19 outbreak.

When assessing the public interest in publication of the Exercise Cygnus report, the Department sought advice from across Government on whether any part of the report was being used to develop policies to respond to COVID-19 or contained detail that might, if released during current pandemic, introduce uncertainty relating to our COVID-19 response.

Based on this advice, the cross-Government decision was made that publication was in the public interest and the full report of Exercise Cygnus was published on 20 October 2020.