Recommendation 3

We recognise the Government’s significant efforts during the covid-19 pandemic to scale up the UK’s detection and containment capabilities—in the form of test, trace and isolate systems. However, that task was made harder by a failure to consider how these critical capabilities might be scaled up ahead of time, including detection checks at the border and pre-assessing the availability and adequacy of national laboratory infrastructure for large-scale testing. It is regrettable that these capabilities were not covered in any large-scale testing exercises since the classification of pandemics as a ‘tier-1’ security risk was made in 2010.