Recommendation 10

The job of responding to the covid-19 pandemic has been made harder by insufficient attention being paid to establishing necessary capabilities ahead of time. The Cabinet Office’s Resilience Capabilities Programme is supposed to encourage departments to develop a “broad and generic set of capabilities” that will be “applicable across multiple risk scenarios”. However, some critical capabilities for a tier-1 security risk have either not been considered and/or focused on the needs of a specific risk scenario (an influenza pandemic). The most striking example of this is the UK’s ‘Detection’ capabilities. Despite the Biological Security Strategy emphasising the importance of ‘Detection’ and learning from health emergencies elsewhere, the Government failed seriously to consider how it might scale up testing, isolation and contact-tracing capabilities during a serious disease outbreak on UK territory. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the Government simply did not believe a novel disease other than influenza could circulate widely within the UK. To varying extents, the pandemic has also exposed vulnerabilities in the UK’s strategic supply chains for PPE and its social media communications capabilities.