The very longstanding status quo of the United Kingdom cheaping out of prudent preparation for likely disasters appears to continue undisturbed, an expert witness has testified before inquiry, and this despite the experience of Coronavirus which saw an unprepared and panicking government bounced into an authoritarian lockdown.
A new national disaster preparedness plan was published in December 2022 but is, according to the claims of subject experts given to the Covid Inquiry chaired by Baroness Hallett, “inadequate” and needs rewriting.
Speaking to the inquiry on Thursday, former Civil Servant Bruce Mann — who formerly directed the government’s civil continencies secretariat and has been previously described as “one of the most experienced emergency planners in the world” — said the government already knew its pandemic preparedness plans was poor years before covid. “The overall preparedness for the pandemic was inadequate”, he said, and the new plans were “not a strategy” but rather a series of “good ideas” without any unifying plan.
Furthermore, it is “almost silent on resourcing”, he said, or in other words is totally unfunded.
This lack of fore-planning may pile on concern for those who have protested the China-style authoritarian lockdowns and restrictions on liberty seen in the Coronavirus era which appear to have been reached in a panic informed by uncertainty and bad modelling. Sensible preparations and emergency planning could eliminate the lawmaker panic factor in future, but could add risk of authoritarianism if Coronavirus era practices are adopted as standard practice rather than learnt from as a mistake.
Mann’s comments came alongside those of Professor David Alexander, who said he did not believe the government kept the public safe and that the ‘new’ plan was actually just ‘tinkering’ around the edges, reports The Guardian.
The pair made specific reference to a 2016 pandemic planning exercise which turned up flaws in the UK’s response but was never acted upon. Mann said it was known from previous exercises that the health system would be overwhelmed by a pandemic, saying: “That was the clear advice not only from the Hine Review in 2010, appears in the report of Exercise Cygnus, it appears in officials’ advice to ministers… that they would be overwhelmed, which has to raise serious questions about whether the plan would have worked.”
Breitbart News has reported on the lessons not learnt from this exercise, and others, before. In 2020, it was found the government had failed to follow its own advice and prepare for pandemic disease, with a report noting: “We are astonished by the government’s failure to consider in advance how it might deal with the economic impacts of a pandemic.”
That 2016 exercise was reported as:
…a major exercise as recently as 2016 to practice readiness for a health emergency did not consider the impact of such an outcome on the economy. The Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy was not even told the exercise was taking place. Because of this lack of preparedness in the Treasury, the government was left creating policy from scratch as lockdown began in March.
Important schemes of support for the economy — including the furlough scheme, one of the most significant interventions by the UK government ever — had never been considered, war-gamed, or pre-planned, and were created on the spot, the report found.
Despite the government knowing and saying pandemic disease is the highest risk to Britain, the report found the government held no meaningful stockpile or reserve of personal protective equipment, despite telling the public it did, that 2020 report also found. Later testimony continued this theme, with Dominic Cummings revealing his discovery in the early days of the pandemic just how unprepared the government was. It was reported:
…he revealed the utter dumbfoundment he felt in the early days of the pandemic when it was revealed the government’s pandemic plans didn’t actually exist in any meaningful sense, and what did was scattered haphazardly among different departments and had no central coordination — despite a government body existing to do just that.
Cummings told the inquiry: “I thought many of the plans seemed, to me, to fall very fall short of what was actually needed. A lot of things are just powerpoints, and they lack detail… This country spends tens of billions of pounds on national security, but we don’t spend anything nearly like the right amount of money or engage the right kind of people who should be involved.”
He quoted top civil servants who expressed their own amazement at their own department’s total lack of preparedness, who said in 2020: “I’ve been told for years there’s a whole plan for this. There is no plan, we are in huge trouble”.
Mann has spoken out on the impact of lockdowns before. In unusually frank remarks made in interview in the very early days of lockdowns in 2020, the Civil Servant warned about the negative impacts of “draconian” measures, and said the single factor of Coronavirus that worried him most was “the economy and employment”. He said in 2020:
I didn’t expect [lockdowns] to be so draconian. We will need to track lockdowns over the coming weeks to see if they can be maintained. Aside from people getting bored, there are known side effects in terms of mental health and people’s safety and well-being. The economic damage of total lockdown will be significant… Economists are already forecasting a significant reduction in GDP in the UK, even before accounting for the knock-on impacts from a prolonged lockdown across most industrial nations.
The United Kingdom not investing in emergency preparedness is a very long-term trend. At even the lowest-end of intensity, it is one of the only developed countries on earth that doesn’t have a Civil Defence establishment, with gaps in that provision filled by the military instead. Professor Alexander spoke to that in his remarks to the inquiry on Thursday, saying the present UK plan relies heavily on the military and “I think that is a very bad thing”.