Covid inquiry: The key government failings from Baroness Hallett’s first report

The Covid inquiry has published its first report into the UK’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic today, slamming the Conservative government’s planning and preparedness.

The inquiry, led by Baroness Heather Hallett, heard from 69 experts and politicians last year, with former prime ministers Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson and former health ministers Matt Hancock and Jeremy Hunt all giving evidence.

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In his evidence, Mr Hunt admitted to the inquiry that the government should have been paying more attention to countries in Asia who were managing to deal with the outbreak more effectively.

This was in part thanks to the lessons learned from the Sars outbreak which severely impacted countries like Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea.

Lady Hallett’s report is wide-reaching, spanning 240 pages and making a number of criticisms and recommendations. She gave a briefing of key findings after it was published, in which she called the belief that the UK was properly prepared for a pandemic “dangerously mistaken”.

Here’s an overview of the other key government failings found in the Covid inquiry report:

A crucial error in the UK’s pre-pandemic preparedness was planning for the wrong kind of disease, Lady Hallett writes. She reveals that while officials had long planned for a flu-related pandemic, the preparations for a respiratory disease were inadequate.

“The significant risk of an influenza pandemic had long been considered, written about and planned for,” says the report.

“However, that preparedness was inadequate for a global pandemic of the kind that struck.”

Speaking to the Covid inquiry last year, former prime minister David Cameron said he had been “wrestling with” this issue, adding: “But that’s where I keep coming back to is, so much time was spent on a pandemic influenza and that was seen as the greatest danger – and we had very bad years for flu so it is a big danger.”

In an indictment of Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, Lady Hallett singled out the leadership as a key issue during the handling of the pandemic.

“Ministers, who are frequently untrained in the specialist field of civil contingencies, were not presented with a broad enough range of scientific opinion and policy options,” she writes, adding that they also “failed to challenge sufficiently the advice they did receive from officials and advisers.”

In another critique of the government’s professional culture, Lady Hallett says that experts were hindered from sharing their opinions due to not wanting to challenge the received wisdom.

“Advisers and advisory groups did not have sufficient freedom and autonomy to express dissenting views and suffered from a lack of significant external oversight and challenge,” she writes.

“The advice was often undermined by ‘groupthink’.”

Giving evidence to the inquiry last year, former health secretary Jeremy Hunt admitted being part of “groupthink” when he was health secretary, leading to a “narrowness of thinking” that failed to expand UK pandemic preparedness beyond planning for a flu outbreak.

The “recent experiences of Sars and Mers meant that another coronavirus outbreak at pandemic scale was foreseeable. It was not a black swan event,” reads the report.

“The absence of such a scenario from the risk assessments was a fundamental error of the Department of Health and Social Care and the Civil Contingencies Secretariat.”

The Independent uncovered a document in 2021 that was published after the Sars outbreak in 2002, but was ignored by the government. In it, many similar measures to those eventually taken by the government were recommended.

According to the report, there were “fatal strategic flaws” in the assessment of the risks facing the UK, including a future pandemic.

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, “there was no exercising of measures such as mass testing, mass contact tracing mandated social distancing or lockdowns,” it says.

The scenario of an emerging infectious disease reaching pandemic scale and requiring contact tracing as a first step to controlling its spread “was not considered”.