Recommendation 31

There are many other parts of the vaccine programme, including GPs and pharmacies, external contractors, volunteer schemes, local authorities and temporary staff, that are central to the delivery of the programme and that need timely confirmation about what funding will be available.77 The Directors of Public Health told us the commissioning process for vaccination had been unnecessarily complex, top-down and inflexible, and that the lack of confirmed and recurrent funding had hampered their ability to plan for the long term and led to missed opportunities.78 It is self-evident that, where organisations do not know if funding will be available in the near future, they may take suboptimal decisions, for example to cancel activities that are beneficial and should continue. Specifically for the Taskforce, an added complexity is that it receives funding from both the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the latter to boost domestic manufacturing capacity.79