The UK is now worse prepared for a pandemic than it was when Covid-19 first swept the country, a former government health minister has warned.
Lord Bethell, an under-secretary of state at the department of health in 2020, told the Observer that in terms of identifying future threats, and handling any new outbreak, he believes Britain’s overstretched health system is now less able to respond to another major viral outbreak.
“Britain was poorly prepared for the pandemic,” he said. “We are waiting for important ‘lessons learned’ from the Covid inquiry and in the meantime our pandemic preparedness has gone backwards in key areas such as mass-testing, NHS resilience, global viral surveillance, Whitehall agility, vaccine supply and development, and the underlying health of the nation.”
This view is backed by leading scientists who have told the Observer there is little sign of new systems being put in place, as Lady Hallett’s inquiry continues to expose the chaotic initial response of the government to Covid.
Some believe the inquiry itself is acting as a brake on progress, with the government unlikely to act until after its final conclusions are published years from now – although initial reports on the country’s “preparedness and resilience” and on “core decision making” are due to be published next year. A final report is not, however, expected until well after public hearings conclude in the summer of 2026.
This point was emphasised by Prof John Edmunds, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). “Our surveillance is no better than it was in the beginning of 2020,” he said. “During the pandemic we set up an amazing surveillance system for tracking the disease and the virus variants that were causing it. Then, in 2022, as the pandemic was ending, the shutters came down and that stopped. Everything has gone back to where it was before 2020. The urgency has just dribbled away.”
Edmunds said the UK’s Covid-19 figures put it in the middle of the league for European nations for pandemic deaths. The country started disastrously with a lockdown that was delayed until there were about 100,000 new cases a day but pulled back because the public stuck to lockdown rules and the nation’s response improved.
However, two major features of life in the UK worked against it doing well in the battle against Covid-19. “The first was the widespread health inequalities that exist in this country and the second is the simple fact that our health service was stretched to the limit – and still is,” said Edmunds.
This point was backed by other LSHTM scientists. “If there was a new pandemic outbreak today, we would be back to the same situation we were in in 2020 – no matter how much scientific advice has been given or how much political preparedness there has been,” said Prof Martin Hibberd.
“We would face being overwhelmed again because the NHS is still being run with no room for slack, so only a relatively small number of cases of a new disease could threaten the system. In that sense, nothing has changed.”
Other scientists fear that the inquiry’s conclusions will come unnecessarily late. “We needed an inquiry far earlier than this,” said Liam Smeeth, the school’s professor of clinical epidemiology. “Autumn 2020 would have been an ideal time to have a thorough, rapid no-blame inquiry. Then its conclusions could have been implemented speedily. As it is, we may have to wait years for changes to be recommended and implemented. Meanwhile, the threat of a new pandemic remains ever present.”
Others who criticise the government’s failure to learn lessons from Covid point to the move to sell off the Rosalind Franklin Laboratory in Leamington Spa that was established during the pandemic to process Covid tests. The facility cost the taxpayer at least £455m.
Decisions like these have led the former head of the vaccine taskforce, Dame Kate Bingham, to warn that the UK is “not in a much better place to deal with a new pandemic” in contrast to other European countries that have increased their capabilities to face new viruses or variants of Covid. She said UK capabilities set up to tackle the Covid-19 crisis were now being “dismantled”.
