Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 26
26
In addition to not tracking costs, government did not formally set out what it regarded...
Conclusion
In addition to not tracking costs, government did not formally set out what it regarded as successful implementation of the cross-border travel measures, nor its measurement of success.45 We therefore asked the Cabinet Office how it knew whether measures were effective and how it would determine whether they had been a success. The Cabinet Office recognised that measuring effectiveness was “one of the challenges of the overall covid response … [as] it is difficult to isolate the effects of one of a number of interventions from the other ones”. It told us that it had attempted to measure the impact of the controls and had identified 12,000 cases of people who tested positive in the MQS who had come from red-listed countries, which it asserted was “a lot of people who would have been going out across the UK, inflecting other people and spreading these variants of concern, which the public was protected from”. When asked if it considered this a success, the Cabinet Office told us that it was not possible to say that whether this was a unique impact of the cross-border travel measures, but that from the point at which restrictions were introduced, the additional impact of people travelling and spreading covid “seems to have been controlled”. It explained that the general view from health authorities was that the measures had been important in trying to slow down the spread of infections.46
Government Response
Not Addressed
HM Government
Not Addressed
1.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. 29 Recommendation implemented 1.2 Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, departments considered the efficacy of policies implemented, and those lessons learned continue to inform contingency planning and are considered across government, including looking ahead to future public health threats. 1.3 The government retained COVID-19 surveillance such as the Office for National Statistics survey, REACT and Vivaldi to enable early-warning mechanisms and be able to react quickly to potential future Variants of Concern (VoC). The overarching contingency strategy was set out to the House of Commons in March 2022, with the core of the strategy being the use of pharmaceutical interventions such as vaccines, rather than reintroducing restrictions. 1.4 Given the response to any VoC will be informed by the prevailing epidemiological conditions of the day, its intrinsic severity and the impact of pharmaceutical interventions, it is not possible to set out specific plans, but the Living with COVID-19 strategy set out the parameters of an initial response. Governance plans have also been developed with the UK Health Security Agency leading on health security threats such as COVID-19 alongside the Department of Health and Social Care, and the Cabinet Office supporting upstream planning through its resilience functions. In addition to COVID-19 preparations, the government is also due to publish an updated Biological Security Strategy later in 2022 and is developing a wider range of scenarios for future pandemic planning if needed, including respiratory (influenza and non-influenza), contact and vector-borne scenarios.