The complacency and irresponsibility of Tory governments have been slammed in the Covid report, but the role of austerity in degrading society must also be dealt with, argues Terina Hine

A failure of state. That was the conclusion of the Covid Inquiry report published on Wednesday. Every institute of state was unprepared and the minimal preparation that existed was for the wrong type of virus.

The Inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, highlighted two particular culprits, both Tory Secretary of States for Health: Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock. She fell short of naming George Osbourne and David Cameron, the two architects of austerity, although they were responsible for the dire state of the country’s public services in 2020 and the growth in health and social inequality experienced in the decade before COVID-19.

In 2011, we were told Britain was one of the best-prepared nations in the world for a pandemic. According to Hallett’s report, the complacency that came from that statement spread far and wide throughout the institutions of the state. What little preparedness that did exist was for the flu rather than the coronavirus epidemic.

The report tells us that just eight of the 22 recommendations from a 2016 pandemic exercise were implemented, and in the period 2018-2019, the main body responsible for pandemic planning failed to meet at all. Matt Hancock, Health Secretary at the time, failed to attend any of the meetings of its subcommittee. The Johnson government focused on a no-deal Brexit to the exclusion of all else.

The pandemic planning that existed completely ignored pre-existing health and social inequalities. It also failed to consider a ‘lack of adequate leadership’. Leadership however was not under the microscope at his stage of the inquiry: we have a year or two before we discover how adequate or not that proved to be (the Inquiry is due to conclude in 2026). However, given the hard-hitting nature of this first report, Johnson and his gang of charlatans may not be in for an easy ride.

The hubris of the government, as well as its advisors, witnessed in the early days of the pandemic is even more shocking in retrospect. Dr Jenny Harries, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, informed us at the daily press briefing on 20 March that we had ‘perfectly adequate’ supplies of PPE when it was apparent to all that we did not. Boris Johnson was so uninterested, that he went swanning off to his country retreat rather than attend Cobra meetings, managing to skip five such meetings in those crucial early days.

And why were we so focused on the flu? The Sars outbreak (another coronavirus) that occurred in East Asia earlier in the century was ignored on this side of the world. So, while South Korea and its neighbours responded by building effective test, trace and isolate systems, something we conspicuously failed to do at great expense, £37 billion give or take, here we learned nothing.

Austerity and irresponsibility

Jump forward to 2020 and British exceptionalism persisted. The government watched how other countries, in Asia and then in Europe, moved to contain the virus but refused to take similar action. They claimed there was nothing to be done but let the virus rip and gain herd immunity, regardless that such a policy could cost half a million lives.

The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group welcomed the report but noted it failed to go ‘far enough’ in addressing social and health inequalities and lack of capacity in public services. That austerity was not directly acknowledged is clearly a significant failure in the report: the desperate state of the NHS before the pandemic, the growth in health inequalities, squalid, overcrowded housing, all took their toll and were laid bare in the pandemic. They must now be urgently addressed.

The main purpose of the Inquiry is to learn lessons for the next pandemic and the report makes ten recommendations with a six-month timeline for an action plan. Hallett compared the pandemic preparedness system to a spider’s web, ‘labyrinthine in its complexity’. Hence, she called for a simplification in the government bureaucracy responsible for pandemic planning and the establishment of a single independent statutory body for this purpose. She recommended preparedness exercises to be conducted every three years and their outcomes made public and that all committees should be open and diverse, to prevent the sort of blinkered ‘groupthink’ witnessed in 2020.

Keir Starmer responded to the report with a commitment to learn the lessons, saying the safety and security of the county is a priority for his government. Let’s see. More than four years after the start of the pandemic, our public services and NHS are in a worse state than ever and the short-term sticking plaster solutions remain. If he wants to learn lessons, he must begin now, by addressing social and health inequalities, and rebuilding the NHS and our depleted welfare system. He must invest in adult social care (a reference to which was conspicuously absent in the King’s speech) and must address child poverty, not least abolish the punitive two-child benefit cap.

The next pandemic could hit at any time. All predictions are that pandemics will be more frequent than in the past, and the next one may be even more deadly. Already there are reports that avian flu is mutating in dangerous and unprecedented ways, infecting mammals: humans could be next. It is not just during a pandemic that governments must act fast and decisively, it must act fast and decisively now.

Terina Hine’s is the author of the recently-published A People’s History of Covid