The Hallett Inquiry is already into its second month of hearings, to examine the UK’s response to and impact of the covid-19 pandemic, and learn lessons. This month and last it’s covering module one, on the resilience and preparedness of the United Kingdom. Was the risk of a coronavirus pandemic properly identified and planned for? Was the UK ready for such an eventuality?
The first witness was former Prime Minister David Cameron. Among witnesses in the first week were David Alexander, Professor of Emergency Planning and Management at UCL; and Katharine Hammond, who in August 2016 became the director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat in the Cabinet Office (CCS for short). She left in August 2020; the same job that Bruce Mann, from whom the inquiry heard the day before, held between 2004 and 2009.
She noted that in the national risk assessment, ‘a flu pandemic was judged to be the reasonable worst-case scenario’.
When asked by the Inquiry counsel Hugo Keith, she defined a hazard as having a non-malicious cause, and a threat has a malicious cause. Both threats and hazards give rise to risk, which is a combination of likelihood and impact. A threat, then, is with malice; ‘something addressed by the police: terrorism, cyber crime, a cyber attack or a CBRNE attack, a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or explosive attack’, as Mr Keith said. A ‘malicious threats officials committee of the national security council’ would meet regularly, even weekly.
Mr Keith asked, in terms of relative ministerial clout, where did civil emergencies, resilience and non-malicious hazards come in the general order of things? Katharine Hammond answered: “Well, in terms of clout, Cabinet Office ministers tend to have rather a lot of that. Sitting at the centre, close to the Prime Minister, they can wield a lot of influence. In my time in CCS, Cabinet Office ministers did use that clout in relation to civil contingencies.”
After her time at the Cabinet Office, the Civil Contingencies Secretariat was split into two parts: ‘the COBR, Cabinet Office Briefing Room unit, which went into what is called the National Security Secretariat’, and the Resilience Directorate. The role of the COBR unit is to respond when something has happened; ‘a Cabinet subcommittee that takes decisions quickly’, Hammond said.
Other CCS work included standards, ‘contribution to international standards on resilience and civil protection, and it meant development of the first set of resilience standards for use by local resilience fora in the UK’, she said. As for training, the Emergency Planning College at Easingwold in north Yorkshire, is managed by a private sector provider (Serco) and the contract managed by CCS.
The Inquiry came to a Cabinet Office document, titled ‘Responding to Emergencies … Concept of Operations’, dating from 2010. Hinting at a real-world problem of practitioners not having enough hours in the day to do everything they could, Hammond spoke of how ‘CCS owns a lot of guidance documentation, as you’ve identified. There is always a balance between spending time updating that and responding to incidents.’ Later, another document brought up by the Inquiry, a ‘Revision to Emergency Preparedness’, had 591 pages (another was yet longer). She also remarked on how legal duties might come second to what the political head of a ministry might regard as important, in the name of ‘pragmatism and resources’ (a phrase of Mr Keith’s). Ms Hammond said: ‘if you have a secretary of state who doesn’t consider this to be a priority, I am not entirely clear what difference the duty would make. Departments are having to make prioritisation calls all the time, and of course they’re going to listen to their secretary of state’. Also on the point of not everything getting done, she said that the CCS had ‘a fairly small standing response team,’ and ‘when you have a large number of emergencies which last for some time, of necessity some of the work is set aside.’ After 2016, that meant an ‘intensive period of work on a no-deal exit from the EU’.
Mr Keith asked if there were ‘an argument for culling this profusion of paperwork’, and Hammond agreed it was ‘a completely fair point’. As the Inquiry built up a picture of how the UK responds to ‘civil contingencies’, Mr Keith said ‘day-to-day control of national emergencies would be in the hands of government departments, but the local side, if it was a local emergency, would be, under the principle of subsidiarity, deferred to local resilience forums’. To state the obvious, covid was a healthcare emergency; although it would affect every part of society, it was left to health officials to plan for a pandemic. Mr Keith asked if that ‘lead government department model’ remains fit for purpose. Hammond replied ‘yes and no’. The questioning went on to the National Security Risk Assessment. As Mr Keith summarised, ‘because it’s impossible to identify in advance every single risk, and you can’t prepare and plan in any event for every single risk, the system is built on the idea of identifying a general risk, planning for the worst — the reasonable worst-case scenario in relation to that risk’. Hammond commented: “one of the things we learned from coronavirus is there perhaps needs to be another stage, which is: having worked out plans that would allow you to deal with your reasonable worst-case scenario, thinking about what are the differences in how a risk could materialise that would render those plans less effective, and then looking at how likely those differences are”. Mr Keith probed about whether many of the impacts seen in the Covid pandemic were ‘anticipated and planned for’, such as a national lockdown.
Mr Keith asked if we were ‘blindsided’ by coronavirus. Hammond replied: “I don’t think “blindsided” is the word that I would use. Certainly the pandemic that happened in 2020 was different from the reasonable worst-case scenario produced by experts which focused on a flu pandemic. That, of course, is built on statistical analysis of the past. We have had a number of influenza pandemics before. Coronavirus events have tended to be much smaller in scale; SARS and MERS you’ll be familiar with.”
The questioning went on to Exercise Cygnus about UK’s preparedness and response to a pandemic influenza outbreak, in 2016, early in Hammond’s time in post, a ‘command post exercise’. Hammond said: “It means that, rather than doing live play, if I can frame it that way, in the language of exercises, you’re essentially role playing what might happen, but not with real people, not having real individuals being treated in a hospital, for example’. Such an exercise is more than a ‘tabletop’; it’s sitting together round a table, to ‘talk about the decisions that might be facing them’. A conclusion after the exercise was that ‘preparedness and response, in terms of its plans, policies and capability, is currently not sufficient to cope with the extreme demands of a severe pandemic that will have a nationwide impact across all sectors’. Hammond recalled ‘we recognised there was a programme of work to be done. Eighteen months later, that work wasn’t complete’; and nor was it completed by the time covid arrived. Parts were ‘paused’ to work on Operation Yellowhammer, the cross-government planning effort for the impacts of a no-deal exit from the European Union.
