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LONDON — Preparations for the possibility of a no-deal Brexit hampered Britain’s preparedness for a global pandemic, the U.K.’s Covid inquiry has found.
In a damning report focused on Britain’s pandemic preparations — the official inquiry’s first of several reports due in the next decade — the Covid probe said the U.K. government, civil service and devolved administrations had “failed their citizens” by not adequately preparing for a Covid-style pandemic.
The report took aim at “groupthink” among scientific advisers and blamed the government under various leaders for focusing on preparations for the “wrong” kind of pandemic.
Chaired by crossbench peer Heather Hallett, the inquiry pointed to Britain’s preparations for a no-deal Brexit, which were taking place around the time of a major government training exercise on responding to an influenza pandemic.
After the training operation — named “Exercise Cygnus” — in 2016, 22 recommendations were made to improve the U.K.’s response to a pandemic. Just eight of these were completed by June 2020, six months after the pandemic began — and the inquiry cites the competing demands of no-deal Brexit planning as a reason for this “inaction.”
Other avenues of preparation for potential pandemics were also paused due to “Operation Yellowhammer,” the codename for Whitehall’s contingency planning for a no-deal Brexit.
The existence of the Yellowhammer operation was leaked in 2018. It covered actions to be taken if Britain had crashed out of the European Union without a deal, identifying areas of risk.
“Several witnesses from the U.K. government and devolved administrations told the inquiry that a number of workstreams for pandemic preparedness were paused due to a reallocation of resources to Operation Yellowhammer,” the report states.
Elsewhere, the inquiry pointed to “several significant flaws” in the U.K.’s systems of building preparedness, including an “outdated” strategy, a failure to account for “pre-existing health and societal inequalities and deprivation” and a “lack of adequate leadership.”
The report particularly criticized the U.K.’s preparation for “the wrong pandemic” — pointing to a focus on the risks from influenza, rather than a more deadly Covid-type infection.
“I have no hesitation in concluding the processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures across the U.K. failed the citizens of all four nations,” Hallett said following the report’s release.
“There were serious errors on the part of the state and serious flaws in our emergency systems. This cannot be allowed to happen again,” she added.
