In Full: Matt Hancock gives evidence to Covid inquiry

dated the 20th of April of this year is that right that's right yes could we have please on the screen one eight one eight two five and page 14 please at page 24 I think is the last page signed I think on the 12th of May therefore and uh it was accompanied by the usual statement of Truth Mr Hancock you were paymaster General and Minister for the cabinet office between the 11th of May 2015 and July 16th yes and during that time were you therefore responsible ministerially for an important part of this pandemic preparedness structure namely the National Security risk assessment process yes I was formerly the junior Minister responsible for uh for that both for the secret part and for the national risk register um I reported to Oliver letwin um and he in practice LED on those areas but nevertheless I had Junior oversight of them and is that because the senior minister in that regard is the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster which he was and you were the junior ministerial colleague as Minister for the cabinet office I was effectively the number two in the cabinet office yes and then did you become Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social care between the 9th of July 2018 when you took over from Jeremy Hunt MP and the 26th of June 2021 when you resigned yes my lady for the purposes of uh for those who may be listening to Mr Hancock's evidence I'm going to make clear that your appearance today is obviously concerned with the discharge of all functions as the minister for the cabinet office under Secretary of State in the Department of Health and Social care pre-pandemic yes we are concerned today only with the issues of emergency planning and preparedness and so Maya made clear that I will not be asking you questions about detail of non-pharmaceutical interventions lockdowns the government's response or the test and Trace or procurement or PPE issues which arose after the pandemic struck they will come in later modules just so they don't understand they will all be in nature modules particularly module two in the in the Autumn for which Mr Hancock has already provided a draft statement prr pandemic planning the functions of the Secretary of State Mr Hancock in relation to pandemic planning are wide-ranging and complex are they not there is quite a lot to be concerned with in this field um yes and that is in addition to the very broad responsibilities overall as Secretary of State you are responsible or were responsible in Broad terms for Health and Social care and that includes therefore Health protection Health Improvement the Healthcare Systems the social Care Systems although that's largely in the hands of local authorities and and most importantly perhaps the NHS so it's a very wide brief indeed I wouldn't say most importantly the NHS I'd say that there are many many areas of importance and actually one of the challenges of the job is to try to put your attention to the most important areas because it is so Broad is a vital function of the Secretary of State to deal with health emergencies absolutely and going into the job I had some experience at a more junior level of dealing with crises and emergencies and so I took my responsibilities as the um as the principal responder to a pandemic very seriously does dealing with health emergencies include dealing with infectious diseases yes of course and being ready to deal with them being ready to deal with the risk of infectious diseases absolutely so when concerned in the field of emergency preparedness resilience civil contingencies where there is a health emergency it is the Department of Health and Social care that is the lead government Department in effect it is the department in the driving seat yes and as Secretary of State I I felt keenly the responsibility as essentially the lead responder in the first instance to those sorts of Health emergencies and it was a it was a part of my day-to-day work because these emergencies happen from time to time were when you were Secretary of State risks prioritized in any way was there a grading system to prioritize those most important and and serious risks from those that were less so yes of course that's absolutely vital and one of the challenges in a system as big as the health system is making sure the decisions are taken at the right level because if you escalated everything to the Secretary of State they whoever they are they would be completely overwhelmed um yet it's vital to escalate the things that need to be seen by the Secretary of State to the uh to their desk was influenza pandemic prioritized as a tier one risk yes it was uh on I recall that on my first day I was given a briefing document about as big as this one and one of the elements of it was making clear my responsibility as a as the tier one National responder for a pandemic flu and for other infectious diseases I was already aware of this element of the role from my time at the cabinet office but nevertheless it was properly and formally brought to my attention and on day one I asked for more information on preparedness because I having been involved in previous crises for instance at the bank of England in before I went into politics I knew that when things go wrong things move quickly and you need to be as well prepared as you can at the highest level of the department was there a board known as the departmental board which looked at the highest level on the major risks confronting the department yes and the the role of the departmental board was to ensure that the department was structuring itself properly to deal with the different challenges that it faced may we have please two three one four two which is a copy of your Department's then high level risk register for a quarter three 2019 to 20. if you can go to the top of the page we will see there years 2019-20 quarter three high level risk register and if you go to the far left hand side of the page there will be a number of Road numbers if you could scroll down please to row 11 there are two names in the left in the uh the column second from the left Mr Hancock Emma Reed and Clara Swinson both of whom have been Witnesses before this inquiry the description major national infectious disease outbreak and pandemic flu and the risk identified for self-evident reasons is that the department fails to respond and mobilize adequately to a major national infectious disease Hazard such as pandemic flu or other novel infection and the approach taken the response on the part of the department is in the next column to manage the risk and likely domestic impact of a major pandemic flu or emerging infectious disease outbreak so the risk was identified in terms not just of the pandemic being a influenza pandemic but obviously the risk of an infectious disease outbreak in emerging infectious disease outbreak yes does its presence in that chart in that schedule Mr hanco indicate the seriousness with which the department took the risk of a major infectious disease outbreak or and or pandemic flu yes and the red rating demonstrates that the significance of the impact of this should It Strike could be very serious and the day-to-day life of a health secretary involves uh being aware of and from time to time being involved in managing the response to potential infectious disease risks which happen from time to time and I set out in my statement that over the Autumn of 2019 and there was a potential flu outbreak there was a what's now known as mpox outbreak then known as monkeypox and over this period we were also dealing with the Ebola epidemic in Western central Africa and the particular responsibility of the health department was to ensure that we were prepared should Ebola come to the to the UK so this was a this was not a theoretical exercise it was part of the day-to-day job of being Health secretary it is Apparent from the document that in relation to each risk identified on the left of the schedule a number of what's known as mitigations are put in place in order to manage the risk in other words the department sets out in Collins k l m n in respect of each risk what the department is doing to manage the risk to mitigate it to ensure that either that the risk does not eventuate it does not come to pass or to manage the consequences of whatever it is that the risk amounts to um well what it brings about and how the the consequences can be managed do you happen to know why in this risk register there is no mitigation set out in respect of that row 11 risk no I don't know um why those boxes are empty but I do know that there was significant activity underway both in the department and in public health England to make sure that um we were prepared um as prepared as then thought possible now come on to that because it's absolutely Central that question um and frankly um it was a it was a regular occurrence to deal with these sorts of Novel infectious diseases and threats um so it was it was something that happened all the time do you recall Mr Hancock any particular departmental board which presumably you attended at which the row 11 risk of a major national infectious disease and pandemic flu was actively debated no do you have any recollection of the debates surrounding this particular risk at departmental boards I mean obviously a great deal many points go across the Secretary of State's desk but but do you have any personal recollection of I don't at the departmental board um but I also wouldn't have expected it to be debated at the departmental board um because the departmental board was focused on ensuring that there was appropriate resource in place for any of the different risks that the department faced um and the ensuring that the department was set up to respond not to do the responding it self it's an important distinction in terms of how the board operated and what its job was um and I was aware from the day one brief onwards of the work that was that was underway so there's no substantive reason these boxes should be empty and and uh I think it would be wrong to read from this um which I don't recall um myself um this implying that there wasn't work ongoing because as you can see from the other paperwork there was my question was in fact to ask you whether you recollected what was being done in terms of was there a debate about as you say the processes that needed to be put into place was there a debate about what needed to be set up to mitigate this risk at a departmental board level there was a departmental level there was not from my my recollection at the board but that I don't think the board would have been there would have been the normal place to have had such discussion well Mr ankle that that cannot be right can it because this is a schedule of the high level risks which were put before the departmental board and therefore it must follow that these are risks and mitigations which are debated by the departmental board that is what this chart shows the purpose of the board was to ensure that the department was doing what needed to happen rather than to debate the substance of it all right you've referred to the fact that the Department of Health and Social care was the lead government Department when it comes to dealing with planning and preparedness for a health emergency and also in relation to the necessary response as a secretary of state what did you understand that responsibility to consist of what what did lead government Department in the Civil contingencies field mean to you oh it means that if that risk it begins to materialize it is the Department's responsibility to appropriately it is also before that stage the Department's responsibility to have adequate surveillance to that sort of risk um and therefore as sector estate it was my responsibility to ensure as much as possible given all the other pressures um that there was adequate um oversight and did that oversight comprise matters such as ensuring that the department played its proper part in the risk assessment process yes owning to use a terrible phrase the risks for which the department was responsible dealing with capability the how to respond to risks eventuating contingency and emergency planning in response to again those risks and building up the Department's own resilience how it would cope with the impact of one or more of these risks yes and bringing all of that to the attention of the rest of government should action be needed elsewhere in government in addition indeed so focusing firstly please on one of those errors the risk assessment area when you joined the Department as Secretary of State you you wouldn't I think have been engaged in the nsra process the risk assessment process because one wasn't produced after you took office until 2019 correct when the nsra and NRA processors brought together but do you recall the detail of that process do you recall specific debate about the contents of that 2019 cabinet office produced risk assessment no I was not involved in those debates and there was an nsra and nrr published in 2015 just before I joined the cabinet office so when I joined the cabinet office with responsibility for that area a significant piece of work had just been concluded which have been led by Oliver letwin I of course was aware of and read those documents at the time but then was not aware of the next iteration of that work going on and as you say there wasn't a publication in that area um for a number of years and in any case the um the language in those documents as they were Revisited over the years was essentially the same which is that the category one top risk was of a pandemic influenza pandemic um pandemic influenza and then there was a also consideration of other infectious diseases and external external threats and um I know there's been significant discussion so far at the inquiry on the of the focus on influenza pandemic um I was told that the reason that was the category one risk is because it's the most likely uh pandemic but of course we were aware of other infectious diseases not least because we were actively involved in responding to Ebola and um to a lesser extent uh mpox and the and phe had a day-to-day responsibility for other infectious diseases that tend to happen in much smaller numbers likely genetic disease so um I was aware of it both from the work in the formal production of those risk assessments and in the day-to-day work of the department when you join the department you you were as you say provided with uh I think it's called a day one high level briefing yeah may we please have one eight three three three four on the screen and this pack first day pack included a briefing from the permanent secretary sir Chris wormald and a number of other senior officials in your department and a number of documents could we please have page one at e if you could highlight that please was one of the areas on which you were briefed Global and public health and that briefing was delivered by Clara Swinson then a deputy uh that's a director General director general of one of the directorates in the in the department page 10 there is the the section on global and Public Health if you could scroll down the page please to paragraph five the main work areas in the group are and then the first bullet point emergency preparedness and health protection director Emma Reed this directorate prepares form responds to emergencies including Cobra and works on the government's prevent strategy practices for terrorists or other threats such as pandemic flu or Ebola it ensures the delivery of a national immunization and screening programs it also runs a global Health security program supporting middle and low-income countries there was no reference there in that first day briefing pack to the level of risk that pandemic flu posed so there's no reference to tier one the risk that you've identified in relation to pandemic flu were you provided either on that day or later with more detail concerning the risk that pandemic flu posed did you in fact ask to be better briefed in relation to what the risks to the department were in relation to pandemic threat yes I I remember this document I remember reading it and on the first evening as health secretary I wrote on this particular paragraph to say more details please um as you can imagine I was going through this document working out which areas I needed to focus on um because you have to choose what to focus on and this was an area that I knew I needed to be across so you called for more information and a written response was provided by I think Emma Reid 184 105 please foreign to emergency preparedness resilience and response eprr and on that first page we can see in paragraph one a reference to the fact that the dhsc in conjunction with NHS England and public health England must provide a coordinated response to the challenge of risks set out in the National risk assessment such as natural hazards and of course natural hazards includes does enormous to Hancock the risk of pandemic flu yes and you can see their references to the department coordinating Health response to the incidents in in Salisbury and Amesbury if you could go further down the page please emergency preparedness above paragraph six this civil contingencies act 2004 outlines the national response to civil emergencies establishing roles and responsibilities for those involved in emergency preparation and response at the local level there is then a reference to the division in the act the bifurcation between category 1 and Category 2 responders and you as the Secretary of State were a category one responder were you not yes and then paragraph seven please category 1 responders are required to carry out exercises and training and staff in emergency planning the dhsc participates in a cross-government program of exercises and ministers will be invited to participate in tier one exercises and to participate in Cobra style meetings subsequently became aware of the fact that the had in 2016 in October of that year been an exercise exercise cygnus yes which was a exercise designed to test the United Kingdom systems to deal with pandemic influenza yes and Mr Hancock there's obviously ample material to show that you became aware of exercise cygnus yeah and and it was an important part of your departmental functions looking back are you surprised that in this more detailed briefing there was no reference to the fact that just a year before exercise cygnus had reported and in general terms had found that the plans and capabilities of the United Kingdom were not sufficient to deal with the likely demands of a severe pandemic but that's a good question I don't know why that's not written here I did I was aware became aware of um exercise sickness and the work that was being done to put its recommendations into I mean there's a bigger challenge with exercise signals which perhaps we'll come on to of course in your witness statement you say that um you ask for further yes briefings to be prepared having read this document yeah and you now recall what areas concerned you and what areas you asked to be addressed by way of further briefing materials yes I wanted to know about the Department's preparation and it's um it's planning processes and I asked for a so I asked for further information based on on this and I recall receiving a note in um I think it was in August 2018 um and continued to ask questions for instance one of the areas that I pushed hard on was the lack of UK domestic vaccine manufacturing given the importance of that a vaccine to responding to any pandemic and that was an area that I worked on intensively up to the up up up until the pandemic struck and obviously then thereafter so um this was a program of work for me which was um on which I iterated with the with the team I kept asking more questions and had um meetings on it um and the area that I focused on was on the vaccine manufacturing point and others alongside this I was also assured that the UK was one of the best placed countries in the world for responding to a pandemic and indeed in some areas categorized by the World Health Organization as the best place in the world so just to give context to these this the you know this interaction between me as the new sector as Satan my officials at the same time you haven't brought it up but in one of the documents I got very early on it stated clearly that we are well prepared and that wasn't the civil servants um own assessment that was the World Health Organization assessment of the UK and I know that Mr Hunt referred to that last week but you know when you become the secretary of state you think about the challenges in front of you in my case I had a background in technology in the NHS desperately needed better technology the NHS needed more people and we needed to be better at prevention of ill health across the board of course prevention of a pandemic is part of that but there's also a huge focus on for instance obesity I took those as my three priorities I continued the work on uh on the protection from these threats but it's important to um to focus and you can understand that when you're assured by the leading Global Authority that the UK is the best prepared in the world that is quite a significant reassurance that turned out to be wrong coming back to the internal briefing yes putting us to one side what what international authorities said about the United Kingdom's position you've told us that there was therefore a debate with your civil servants about vaccines that was one of the the issues yes you lost about when you were told however by your civil servants that the United Kingdom was well prepared yes what did they say when you asked them as you presumably did well in in what way are we prepared yes what did they say about the various other parts of the preparedness structure stockpiles yes diagnostic testing plans for quarantining or shielding or to deal with the impact of a pandemic or the supply of antivirals all of which are other aspects of the system of preparedness um what were you told I I was told that we had plans in these areas um so for instance on stockpiles I was told that we had a very significant stockpile of PPE and we did the problem was that it was extremely hard to get it out fast enough when the crisis hit I was told that we were good at developing tests and indeed we were we were we developed a test in the first few days after the genetic code of covid-19 was published the problem was there was no plan in place to scale testing that had any um that was that we could execute um on antivirals we had a stockpile of antivirals for a flu but not for a coronavirus on vaccines I was concerned that we weren't in a strong enough position because we were reliant on manufacturing vaccines overseas and I thought that in a pandemic scenario Force Meyer would mean it would be hard to get hold of vaccine doses if they were physically manufactured overseas no matter what our contracts said and so I insisted that we pushed on domestic manufacture and sought the funding to deliver on that a pro a plan was already in um early development to make that happen so in each of these cases there was a plan but the absolutely Central problem with the planning in the UK was that the doctrine was wrong and if I maybe I should set this out now in my I've written it in my written statement the attitude the doctrine of the UK was to plan for the consequences of a disaster can we buy enough body bags where are we going to bury the dead and that was completely wrong of course it's important to have that in case you fail to stop a pandemic But Central to pandemic planning needs to be how do you stop the disaster from happening in the first place how do you suppress the virus and I need to put on the record if I'm a my lady that my written statement I've got an update on my written statement having continued to look through the documents in Mr hankel will return if we may to correcting one or two parts of your winner statement okay later I'm aware that there are one or two errors that you want to say something more about in light of documentation which you've been provided with more recently can I bring you back please though to the debate with your civil servants about the state of preparedness yeah You observe to your civil servants or ask well there is a significant stockpile but it's only for flu well in the case of PPE the distinction between a flu pandemic and a coronavirus pandemic is really a second order um a respiratory disease pandemic requires very similar or in many many cases the same PPE irrespective of the virology what matters is the characteristic of the virus indeed did you ask whether or not the stockpile about which you received assurances would be adequate for a non-influenza pandemic um I don't recall whether I did or not but I also know that if I'd ask the question I would have been I hopefully would have been told it's adequate for other respiratory diseases as well because indeed it was because we used it did you ask whether or not the antivirals yes in the main a brand antiviral called Tamiflu yes which was supplied in was available in large quantities whether that was suitable for a non-influenza pandemic I don't know whether I asked or I was brief but I was certainly aware that that was only useful against a flu not a Coronavirus you ask or were you made aware that the testing the diagnostic testing which in place was on a very small order and of course was testing designed to deal with a limited High consequence infectious disease primarily one involving an outbreak in health settings yes I knew that the testing system was small and the the reason that I um explained the flawed Doctrine at this point is that by not preparing to stop a pandemic and worse by explicitly stating in the planning that it would not be possible to stop a pandemic um therefore a huge amount of other things that need to happen when you're trying to stop a pandemic didn't happen and we had to build them from scratch when the pandemic struck for instance large-scale testing did not exist and a large-scale contact tracing did not exist because it was assumed that as soon as there was Community transmission it wouldn't be possible to stop the spread and therefore what's the point in contact racing that was completely wrong and it in my view is the absolutely Central lesson is of course the difference between a flu and a coronavirus is important but it is a but it is not nearly as important as getting the doctrine right so in future we're ready to suppress a a pandemic unless the costs of lockdown are greater than the costs that the PA that the pandemic would bring perhaps we'll return to the issue of them or the doctrinal arguments about lockdowns a little later if I may the reason to bring it up is because it had consequences in all the areas you set out stockpiles testing antivirals contact tracing and and much more widely those were now the acknowledged consequences of the doctrinal failure Mr Hancock yes but why if you ask the questions which you say now you did about the fact that antivirals and the stockpiles of antivirals were only suitable for influenza that the testing was limited and suitable for high consequence infectious disease in the healthcare setting that the PPE was designed for flu although it had an application to hcids as well and that there was no debate about potential countermeasures mandatory quarantining shielding the impact on education or the economy if these were questions which were posed when you took office in July 18. why was the situation allowed to develop in which none of these matters were met addressed by the time you had to deal with the consequences of the pandemic in February 2020 when as you've rightly said you had to build in all these areas the entire system from scratch because I was assured that the UK planning was among the best and in some instances the best in the world and of course with hindsight I wish I'd spent that short period of time as health secretary before the plan pandemic struck also changing the entire attitude to how we respond to a pandemic and perhaps you know one of the reasons that I feel so strongly about the importance of this inquiry and why I'm so emotionally committed to making sure that it's a success with full transparency and total brutal honesty and answering your questions to get to the bottom of this is because these because of these uh this huge era in the doctrine that the UK and by the way the whole Western World had in how to tackle a a pandemic and that that flawed Doctrine underpinned many of the problems that made it extremely difficult to respond and if I may say so I am profoundly sorry for the impact that had I'm profoundly sorry for each death that has occurred and I also understand why for some it will be hard to take that apology from me I understand that I get it but it is honest and heartfelt and I'm not very good at talking about my emotions and how I feel um but that is honest and true um and all I can do is ensure that this inquiry gets to the bottom of it and that for the future we learn the right lessons so that we stop a pandemic in its tracks much much earlier and that we have the systems in place ready to do that and because I'm worried that they're being dismantled as we speak well we'll come to that in a moment Mr Hancock so with with those words in mind why in July 2018 when you were made aware of the Lacuna in the system of preparedness the absence of stockpiled PPE for non-influenza pandemic the lack of antiviral the lack of mass diagnostic testing the massive contact Trace systems why did you not pursue those issues in the following 18 months before the pandemic struck the only answer I can give is because I was assured that we had the best system in place in the world um and because the system was working towards an approach to pandemic response that was wrong that's why it was built that way and that flaw that failure went back years and years and was embedded in the entire system response Mr Hancock forgive me that doctrinal error to which will come in a moment in the 2011 strategy explains why the position was as it was in July 18. my question to you though is why having been alerted to these serious issues was more not done over the following 18 months regardless of why you're in that position regardless of why the department was in that position regardless of the doctrinal foundation why were those practical considerations not followed through well there was there was no recommendation to resolve those problems that I was aware of there were recommendations to put into place the learnings from Project sickness um some but not all of which were taken forward I was assured that there was a program of work to put those in place um but there was there were no recommendations to build the testing system that I was aware of there was no recommendations to um change the stockpile although on that point the stockpile was effectively transferable from one respiratory disease to another um these these recommendations were not there because the system was geared towards how to how to clear up after a disaster not prevent it you were the Secretary of State yes it doesn't need a formal submission from civil servants for something to be done if in the course of this debate you asked your civil servants where are the antivirals for a non-influenza pandemic yes where is the stockpile for a non-influenza pandemic where are the plans for Mass testing they wouldn't have said Secretary of State well we can't do anything about that let's wait to see what submission we draw up recommends you could have ordered it to be addressed and you could have pursued and hurried them until something was done and of course had I known the pandemic was about to strike then I would have done that but if this was an unprecedented pandemic and the uh nobody was to know so I all I can explain is that when you're when you are when you become the secretary say when you are the Secretary of State new in post there are a significant number of recommendations of what needs to be changed um for instance Sally Davies came into my office and said we have to try to prevent more and prevent ill health and Tackle obesity that is the number one problem facing the country this was not regarded as a number one problem that needed to be fixed because we were regarded by external organizations that had been investigated our preparedness we were regarded as one of the best in the in the world that's the only answer I can give you I know I've repeated it but that's because it's true the 2011 strategy to which you refer was the 2011 influenza strategy document dealing as it says on its face with the strategy for a influenza pandemic yes there was only ever one strategy document wasn't there that was it that was the strategy document that I was aware of of course it was a whole load of underpinning and documents and further work but that was the strategy document yes and that's single strategy document identified no strategy for a non-influenza pandemic other than the hope that the plan for a influenza pandemic could be modified to deal with high consequence infectious disease that was not influenza that's right I would also say that any pandemic by its nature is a novel disease indeed and so you cannot have a plan precisely for the disease that comes and the things that matter are how long is the incubation period how transmissible is it how does it transmit and crucially who does it affect more than others what are the inequalities the consequences of this disease those are the factors that matter and and it would be far better to have a respiratory disease plan and a blood-borne pandemic disease plan and a vector I touch born a touch-borne disease plan um that was non-specific about the the virology of the pathogen because the because what matters is how the things transmitted and how um and how it affects people as much as the as the underlying virology as well so in effect the plan failed to provide for a range of scenarios it focused too much upon an influenza pandemic of course that's what it was called and although there was a reference in it Mr Hancock to the inherent unpredictability of respiratory viruses there was no detail was that of how given those inherent unreliable characteristics of of a respiratory virus we could be hit by a non-influenza pandemic which had different characteristics to influenza but could be no less catastrophic so that was the flaw wasn't it that was not the main floor that was a flaw and that was of course a problem um however we did we also knew there could be another um infectious disease and as I've mentioned we were dealing with a number of them and I was cognizant of that for instance when we did the work on uh on vaccine production the plan that was put together was a pandemic disease plan vaccine plan not an influenza pandemic vaccine plan so we were cognizant of that but I returned to my central point which is that to say that the main problem with that plan was that it was a flu plan and there was and we ended up with a coronavirus pandemic is of course a a flaw but it is not the central floor if we'd had a flu pandemic we would have had a massive problem because of the doctrinal failure of how to respond to it as well that was a much bigger error it was an error Across the Western world but it was a much bigger error and it is absolutely Central and I know that I keep stressing this point but it is Central to what we must learn as a country that we've got to be ready to hit a pandemic hard that we've got to be able to take action lockdown action if necessary that is wider earlier more stringent than feels comfortable at the time and the failure to plan for that was a much bigger flaw in the strategy than the fact that it was targeted at the wrong disease they were both major flaws in the strategy where they're not Mr Hancock just one floor you've identified now two major flaws in that strategy yes the point I'm trying to make is that the doctrinal floor was the biggest by a long way because if we if if we'd had a flu pandemic we still would have had the problem of no plan in place for lockdown no prep for how to do one no work on how best to lock down with the least damage I I no I understand deeply the consequences of lockdown and the negative consequences for many many people many of which persist to this day the problem that we faced was that the consequence of not locking down was much worse and we need to be able to be I think John Edmonds is excellent in his um in his evidence saying and Gus O'Donnell saying we need to have a way to calibrate as early as possible what would the damage be of this if we don't um I'm going to pause you there the issue of lockdown is as you know very well indeed something for module two and we are concerned now with your understanding pre-pandemic and what was being done pre-pandemic may I ask you please to focus on this strategy document which sets out at that time what the thinking was and I I understand that but if I just may say Mr Hancock will you allow me please in this forum it is vital for planning oh that's the point the question of course the 2011 strategy was never updated was it uh not the time no it wasn't no indeed the work stream which was due to be carried out by the pandemic flu Readiness board to update that strategy was itself paused was it not as I understand it yes yes there's been ample evidence to show that the work was not done to update this document this strategy but because of the diversion of resources to the necessary preparations for a No Deal EU exit is that your under that is correct yes all right were you told Secretary of State when you were secretary of state that the strategy was regarded as inaccurate and not up to date no not that I'm aware not that I recall on the contrary we were told that we were the best one of the best places in terms of preparation are you surprised now that you were not informed that the strategy was deemed to be and I quote a document from your own Department out of date unfit for purpose I was not aware of that note by July of 2019 an arm's length body I suppose one would call it or a stakeholder Public Health England was stating in its own minutes that there had been no word from the dhsc on the dhsc's pandemic strategy so they were concerned that they'd heard nothing from your department in relation to the updating of this strategy because it was obviously a matter of very real concern I don't recall that ever being raised with me and it highlights the problem of not having a body that was focused only on preparing to defend us against a pandemic since the health Protection Agency was abolished in 2012 and that was one of the reasons behind the organizational change I brought in later all right the pandemic influence of preparedness board was another important part of the Department's work was yes what was its main function as you saw it well it was a um official level board whose job effectively was to put into place the conclusions of sickness and to make sure that we were as well prepared as possible when you became Secretary of State presumably you were informed of the outcome of exercise cygnus and of the fact that the then Prime Ministers may had ordered the setting up of the pandemic flu Readiness board yes to put those recommendations into into place yes I found that reassuring I'd been reassured that essentially everything was in hand because there was a a structure a resourced structure to make it happen as it happens Mr Hancock many of the work streams which the pandemic flew Readiness board planned to carry out were for reasons we've we've discussed paused or ceased altogether so when you were Secretary of State to what extent were you informed that the recommendations from exercise cygnus about which you had been told were not in fact being implemented I don't know the answer to that question I I take full responsibility for the facts that in the face of brexit and the threats that disorganized brexit could do we took um the resources were moved across the department to focus on that threat including away from pandemic preparedness planning this was proposed to me by the parent secretary and the CMO and I signed it off I regarded the Secretary of State's job not to run the department in terms of resource allocation but to set the direction but I take this but I I signed off that decision the thing that the thing is that you face a lot of risks and threats but secretary Mr Tankard why didn't you say to your civil servants this was a major exercise in the United Kingdom's pandemic influenza preparedness it was one of the largest command post exercises ever held it made a number of important recommendations 22 in fact in all yeah across the whole Board of the United Kingdom's plans and capabilities and by June 2020 after the pandemic had struck of course the dhsc acknowledged that of the 22 recommendations eight had been fully addressed six have been partially addressed and worked to address eight more was still ongoing how could that have been missed how could those recommendations not have been put into place between July 18 when you took that post and 2020 when the chickens came home to roost well the answer to that question there's two ways of answering that question the first is that as a secretary of state you have a limited set of resources and you have to make sure that those resources are targeted at the threats that you face and one of those risks was a disorganized brexit and it was incumbent on the department to make sure that we were as well prepared for that as possible and the second way of answering the same question is that it isn't really about the the numbers of recommendations from cygnus it's about what those recommendations were and the problem with sickness is it did not spot the central problem in pandemic planning so I'm having looked through those recommendations that were not put in place I'm not sure they would have helped much when the chickens as you say came home to roost because we did because cygnus did not recommend that we should be prepared to stop the spread of a pandemic it made all sorts of recommendations for how to deal with the worst case scenario happening and the and and therefore I I am not at all convinced that we would have been much better place to face this pandemic had all of those recommendations been put into place um because because there was a much bigger error all right but those exercises take place for a good reason do they not yes but they still it still didn't spot the main problem are they important matters Mr Hancock of course and were recommendations made a number of them as a result of that exercise yes and did your department fail to implement all those records I'm not denying any of that I'm explaining firstly the different pressures that you have on resources and uh and and brexit was real um and a uh a pressure and I'm also explaining the consequences of those decisions and I'm I'm trying to articulate that there was a much bigger problem that we must and and the central lesson that I think we need to learn well we'll come to that in a moment the report into exercise cygnus was not published was it in July 17 when it reported no um could we have please five seven five one four and page two you were asked in May of 2020 of course after the pandemic had struck whether or not you agreed that the report into exercise cygnus from July 17 should be published yes we can see the top left hand corner of the page to number two SOS Secretary of State yes and if you could scroll back out please the issue is the issue identified in the submission was that a number of public parliamentary and legal requests for release of the report of exercise cygnus have been received it was a pandemic influencer preparedness exercise Paradise in 2016. to date we've declined to release this report based on a balanced assessment to the public interest and and you're invited in fact to agree that the time had come for the publication of that report yes do you know why in general terms the report why the decision was taken in July 17 not to publish the report and and why this only came to you for a decision in May 2020 I have no idea about the 2017 decision I know why it came to me for a decision in 2020 and that's because people were understandably asking to see it and I supported publication could we have a look please at page four paragraphs eight and ten thank you paragraph eight some projects had to be rescheduled in 2018 and 19 due to competing priorities in civil contingencies is that a partly concealed reference to the fact that work streams had to be stopped to deal with the necessary preparations for a No Deal EU exit yes there will also have been there were other civil contingencies for instance there was a crisis of human body parts being left in hospital car parks that the Civil contingencies team had to deal with um there were various other civil contingencies in that period but it so it is not purely a euphemism for for brexit it is a an accurate description of the pressures on the Civil contingent on the team Mr Hancock this is a document which is solely concerned with the publication of the report and exercise cygnus which was itself only concerned with emergency preparedness for pandemic influenza yes the reference to some projects in paragraph 8 yes is only a reference isn't it to the projects which came from exercise cygnus that's correct yes and the only reason that those projects were rescheduled by virtue of decisions of the pandemic influenza preparedness program board the pandemic flu Readiness board and your own Department was because the the diversion of resources to deal with the no dealed EU exit um I'm explaining that the competing priorities in civil contingencies of course included that but there are also other competing priorities the the context I'm trying to set explain for all of this is that in health you have a certain amount of resources and you have a very broad set of risks and whilst it's vital that this inquiry uses hindsight to learn the lessons we didn't have that at the time and we didn't know that a pandemic was about to strike could we have please the bottom of page five Communications and public confidence whilst this would not be a consideration for Freedom of Information purposes this isn't the context of courses of deciding whether the report should be published it is if you're considering going beyond your legal duties advice on Communications is below mitigation that is to say mitigation of Damage Done in the public sphere by virtue of the communications you should note that while work is ongoing there are no major gaps in our implementation of the lessons from cygnus that wasn't quite right was it um I think that the um officials writing this document have used the word major to explain that the central recommendations from cygnus um were implemented for instance cygnus recommended that we have a draft legal bill ready to go and that proved to be incredibly important in the early response to the pandemic and I made the point earlier that um the inquiry will be wrong to conclude that because not every lesson from cygnus had been implemented that had every lesson been implemented the response would have been that much better because cygnus was flawed in its Central assumption about how best to respond to a to a pandemic so you've referred Mr Hancock then to one particular work stream which was the drawing up of a draft pandemic Bill yes to justify your answer that there were no major gaps in our implementation of the lessons from cygnus what other work streams were completed as far as you're aware in addition to the drafting of a bill um were completed well I don't have that paperwork to hand but I'd be very happy to uh to supply page seven please paragraph 15 on the 7th of May the Guardian newspaper published the full report on its website with personal information redacted this was alongside an article highlighting that there was no evidence recommendations from the report around social care preparedness had been acted on that was right wasn't it yes one of the areas the important work streams which had not been concluded or even in part developed was to do with the capacity of the adult social care sector to be able to deal with that's not quite right the demands of a pandemic that as part of the work ongoing when I was Secretary of State preparedness in Social care was one of those work streams yes work was done wasn't it in order to try to see whether or not the department could make itself better informed as to the sheer number of people in the adult yes social care sector work was done on producing some policy papers that would be of use to local authorities who of course are primary responsible for the adult social care sector but no work was done was it in relation to Preparing the individual care homes for the necessary surge in numbers attendant upon a pandemic work was done in the first two areas you you mentioned this report the article was inaccurate however the responsibility for ensuring preparedness in Social care formally fell to local authorities and there was work required of local authorities to put in place pandemic preparedness plans when the pandemic struck and I was told that local authorities were required to have Pandemic preparedness plans I asked to see them and my my Minister for social care uh Helen weightly found that there were only two at which she saw and reported to me them to be holy inadequate one of the central challenges in Social care is that whilst I have the title Secretary of State for Health and Social care the response primary responsibility legal responsibility contractual responsibility for social care Falls to local councils in a national crisis this is a very significant problem because as I put it in my witness statement we I did I had the title I was accountable but I didn't have the levers to act and we didn't even have the data and this is the work that was ongoing before the pandemic which is why this statement here from the guardian reported from the guardian is inaccurate um there was work on going to try to find out even the basics of the provision of social care for instance how many Care Homes are operating right now in the UK that was a fact that we did not know at that time and I'm glad to say now there's far better data but that was that was one of the work streams and it you know it's it was it was very important and that work continued some work was done by the department to make itself better informed tickler in relation to the numbers of persons in Care Homes and the working Arrangements in the adult social care sector but the vital work directly concerned with the preparation of those Care Homes which was part of the work stream meant to be done by the pandemic flu Readiness board was not done was it that's not those two plans were all that there was on the local Authority side and The Surge planning in relation to the adult social care sector fell far behind that done for the NHS did it not that work that nevertheless was done um and being done and it is it is a in fact this discussion is an example of the challenge of why it's so hard for policy in Social care when the accountability Falls understandably to the Secretary of State but in this case pandemic preparedness was a legal responsibility at the local level and whilst we at the health department could require that the money for social care from central government goes through a different department um and so the requirement to produce those plans felt at local authorities and they were in very large part not concluded before the pandemic struck and that that is that is a major problem with how social cares run in this country the obligation to get ready did not rest solely on the local Authority did it the obligation for the policy rested with me the obligation for delivery uh are in Social care rests with local authorities they're the ones who contract individual Care Homes the Department of Health and Social care understood that an important line of work a work stream to be carried out by the pandemic free Readiness board and the pandemic influenza preparedness program board was ensuring that the adult social care sector was ready in terms of plans what would they do in the event of a pandemic and surge capacity how would they physically cope with the impact of a catastrophic pandemic yeah and deliverable obligations on the Department of Health and Social care and they were not completed were they they were to be delivered through local authorities which proved extremely difficult and that is a structural problem with how social care has been organized in this country since 1948. that may be so Mr Hancock but it was a responsibility that the Department of Health and Social care was aware of otherwise it wouldn't have directed that these work streams be drawn up at all absolutely right absolutely the NSC thlc the National Security Council threats has its resilience and contingencies committee was the committee to which you referred earlier the committee chaired by the then prime minister who had ordered the setting up of the pandemic flu Readiness board yes the terms of reference for that board required the Secretary of State for health to report progress to the National Security Council thrc committee on the work of the pandemic flu Readiness board could we have please 22743 I think if we're going to a slightly different topic Keith I think probably if that's convenient for you yes indeed and take regular breaks because we have a brave sonographer who coached us all but um very well I shall return at um 25 past a half past half past thank you about which you gave evidence earlier the NSC thrc meeting in February 17. the board and the discussion reaffirmed the government's commitment to ensuring the UK was prepared to manage the health effects of severe pandemic influenza as defining the reasonable worst case scenario and The Wider consequences since the demise of the pandemic flu implementation group there has been no dedicated group with responsibility for preparations for the cross-governed impacts of pandemic influenza this time called the pandemic flu Readiness board was co-chaired of course by your then department dhsc and the cabinet office but it was the the only board which provided oversight for a program which will deliver the plans and capabilities to manage The Wider consequences of pandemic influenza and then on page two please paragraphs five and six roles and responsibilities of members the membership of the board is intended to reflect the breadth of the government's responsibility for the potential consequences of an influenza pandemic on the nation members of the board will represent the interest of their Department and then at six the board will report progress to NSC thrc that's the committee the ministerial committee which set up the board via the Secretary of State for health and Minister for the cabinet office who will receive regular progress updates in parallel it is obvious that the Department of Health and the cabin office regarded it as essential that the work been done by this sole cross-government body the only body dealing with cross-government pandemic influenza preparedness provide regular updates to the ministerial committee which set it up there were two NSC thrc that's the overarching committee to such committee meetings attended by officials how many of those overarching meetings NSC thrc meetings did you go to in order to inform them of those regular progress personally personally none that I can remember I attended the National Security Council from time to time when the agenda included areas that I was responsible for I was not a standing attendee um but I don't recall ever being asked to attend a report on this did you know of the existence of the NSC thrc the minister overarching ministerial committee to which you were expected to report yes I attended it that's essentially the National Security Council no the NSC thrc the threats hazards resilience and contingencies committee yes that's just a subcommittee that one is the subcommittee of the National Security Council how many of those subcommittee meetings did you attend I can't recall did you attend any I may well have attended none but I can't recall have you seen any piece of paper that suggests you did attend nope why not I have no idea because the department for health was not responsible for the agenda of that uh that committee or indeed The Wider National Security Council the attendance of ministers in the Department of Health was determined by whether they were invited Mr Hancock your own Department's committee the board which you co-chaired with the cabinet office new full well that you were expected to report to the NSC thrc with updates on the board's work can you think of any reason why you didn't attend those meetings why you weren't told about the meetings while you weren't informed of the expectation that you attend those meetings the only explanation I can give is that the team faced a significant number of different threats and challenges and they chose during the a relatively short period I was Secretary of State before the pandemic struck to focus on other issues that they felt to be appropriate I mean my experience in government both as Secretary of State for Health and Social care and before was was that the officials who handle and are responsible for um the National Security Council and its subcommittees are exceptionally diligent extremely hard working and have the highest integrity and that goes for all of the officials I work for in the department I worked with in the department for health and and social care um all I can say is they would have known and it would have been incumbent on them to consider all threats and make decisions as to the agenda according to what's necessary may we have please 180188 this is a a document relating to the officials subcommittee okay of the NSC thrc in fact the NSC t h r c o meeting o for officials yeah and it's dated the 19th of December 2018 so after you took office in July 18. if we could go to page three paragraph two EU exit planning the cabinet offers updated members on the Civil contingencies Secretariat prioritization work in the lead-up to EU exit they plan to move into the operational mode of EU exit planning in early January CCS stressed the capacity will may be maintained to continue normal preparedness activities and ensuring that part two of the CCA is refined if required in discussion members raised the following points as part of normal preparedness activities would continuity of Crisis management continue the cabin office advisor would be maintained but some elements will be prioritized some departments still wish to provide feedback and then there was a debate about would hostiles state activity exercises exercises continue the chair summarized that officials should continue to brief ministers on what level of business as usual activities departmental responsibilities could continue following a move to the operational mode of EU exit planning so in the Autumn of the winter of 2018 over a year before the pandemic struck at this officials meeting of the National Security Council thrc committee there was debate about the fact that the EU exit planning was starting to have an impact or would be likely to start to have an impact on preparedness planning because of the prioritization of work and there's a clear reference there to ministers being briefed as to what levels of business as usual activities would continue notwithstanding the necessary prioritization of work towards a No Deal EU exit when were you briefed in the autumn and winter of 2018 as to what was coming well I was of course aware that brexit was a significant part of the national debate and the in the department we needed to be prepared for it and the so that briefing was ongoing um and as we discussed earlier um there was a moment at which we had to move resources on to prepare for um that um in the summer I think of 2019 um and um we did that within the department the plans to do that were drawn up by the by the team and I signed them off but I returned to my broader point which is the professionalism and diligence with which the Civil Service team uh looked at all of the different challenges and threats that were faced was exemplary could we have 57430 please this is a memo from within your department to Professor sir Chris witty the current CMO of course you you know very well and I think he was a former departmental Chief Scientific Advisor correct the department dated the 27th of March 2019. and it concerns the reallocation of work paragraph one to Sir Chris witty you are aware that following reorganization and re-prioritization of dhse work due to EU exit No Deal planning pan flu preparedness and high consequence infectious disease policy has moved to your portfolio of responsibilities on a temporary basis page three a paragraph three X Co what is xcode that's the executive committee of the department for Health and Social Care chaired by the permanent secretary that's the committee that effectively runs the department on an executive basis but subject to the supervisory role of the departmental board which you referred earlier about yes and of course um working two ministerial priorities and decisions agreed that the department would need to do less work in some areas in order to free up resource for EU exit preparations as a result Emma Reid and Clara Swinson agreed a range of work related to pan flu and hcid that would be scaled back or paused before this policy area transferred across to you Annex a summarizes the work areas that are continuing and those of which are on hold so this paragraph makes plain that at the highest level in your department subject only to the supervisory review of the board and yourself not just that there was a prioritization across government in favor of EU exit work but that a range of work related to pan flu and hcid would be scaled back or paused that was a policy decision of great significance was it was a policy decision I would query whether it had great significance as you can see from the numbers on this page the numbers of people working in this area the numbers of move movement is small and my second observation is that this work was following a wrong the wrong approach and I'm not sure it would have been any use in the pandemic and that's my judgment from having been the man in the you know the person in the in the hot seat when the pandemic struck do you recall that debate before xco and yes I recall the debate because I discussed it with the permanent secretary because whilst he was responsible for the running of the department he of course would then check with me that I was content with the proposals that he put together and there were many other areas of work that had to be stopped in order to prepare for brexit as well I mean this wasn't the only area there were a whole series of them so you were aware and you agreed that a range of work relating to pan flu and hcid would have to be scaled back or paused yes and I I wasn't enthusiastic about it but I signed it off and the reason that I signed off the overall reshaping of the department is because we had a very real and material threat should a disorganized brexit happen that we needed to be prepared for and it comes back to the point about context that there are many many bad things you have to prepare for when you're of the in the health department moving forward eight months to the eve of the pandemic in November 2019 23089 [Music] the minutes for the pandemic flu Readiness board the pandemic flu Readiness board has not met since November 18 due to re-prioritization in 2019 to plan for a potential No Deal EU exit so the sole cross government body set up by direction of the Prime Minister did not meet at all did it between November 2018 and the 27th of November 2019. that's what this paper said were you aware Mr Hancock that for a whole year the board did not even meet I do not recall being aware of that note but also I but I do know that work under the board's guidance continued because I was engaged in some of the workers we've discussed um especially but not only on vaccine manufacturing page five paragraph seven and eight okay the pfrb had committed to meet every six to eight weeks until the key outputs of the work program were delivered proposed that in 2020 it meets every three months this will ensure the progress can be communicated to key planning partners through updated documentation where appropriate so it was understood wasn't it that although it had committed to meet every six to eight weeks failure to meet for a whole year fell very far short of what it had apparently committed itself to doing that's what I understand too from reading these papers yeah NH any uh it says NHS t-h-r-c it should be n s c t h r c under the pfrb's current governance Arrangements the board reports on progress to the NSC thrc the board which you the the subcommittee which you you cannot recall attending due to EU exit pressures NSC thrc were not updated at the end of year two March 19. so it didn't not just not meet it wasn't even updated at the end of year 2 March 2019 the second full year of its operations was it evidently from reading these papers I wasn't aware of these papers at the time and then of course after the pandemic struck inq 23114 on the 15th of January 2020 pandemic influenza Readiness board works stream updates last updated the 15th of January 2020. the healthcare work stream progress has slowed for a number of reasons two Community Care progress on the Community Health Care site has slowed for a number of reasons and then over the page please or further down the page excess deaths that was one of the work streams on which work was completed wasn't it you referred earlier in your evidence to the fact that you were aware that was a work streamer which worked was done work was done I'm not sure that it was completed because we had to do further work on it when the pandemic struck that's why I was pausing to try to recollect and express that correctly over the page sector resilience there's been no further work on this work stream a statements of preparedness are finalized it was agreed that the sharing of the business checklist should be paused as a result of the need to communicate other risks including EU exit what is sector resilience Mr Hancock well sector resilience is ensuring that there is resilience especially of Supply chains in this case pharmaceutical in particular but also non-pharmaceutical Goods required for Health and Social care sector Health and Social care sectors within the department that would have been the purview yes um cross-cutting enablers all England Clauses and supporting documentation complete including explanatory note and assessment of impact is that a reference to the drafting of the bill to which you made reference earlier um the um um it's a it appears so that's what four nations bill was used as the shorthand yes there's a reference to the pauses and supporting documentation so that appears to be that appears so on the previous one on number four of course the work that was intended to be prepared for a no deal brexit was itself important incredibly important when it came to the pandemic so this paper doesn't quite capture capture it it captures the planning and uh is that a reference to the fact that work was done on securing and safeguarding medicinal Supply chains correct to deal with a No Deal EU exit yes but that issue of Supply chains Mr Hancock was just one wasn't it of a very much larger number of areas in which work was required across the health sector and the adult social care sector it not unimportant but it was just one of the areas wasn't it where work was required I wouldn't put it like that and if I may the way I'd say it is that the work done for a No Deal brexit on Supply chains for medicines was the difference between running out of medicines in the peak of the pandemic and not running out we came extremely close within hours of running out of medicines for intensive care during the pandemic it wasn't widely reported at the time and I think the only reason that we didn't run out is because of the work that Steve Oldfield and his team did which they did during 2019 in preparation for a No Deal brexit but became extremely useful in Saving Lives during the pandemic at the point at which the pandemic struck because of the No Deal brexit work we knew nut more about the pharmaceutical supply chain in the UK than at any time in history and we had relationships with the pharmaceutical suppliers and the data to know exactly who had what available and where and the extent of that information was the difference between running out and not running out of of drugs in intensive care in the pandemic now that of course wasn't the intention of the work but it was the consequence of the work so when it comes to the question of the overall impact of brexit absolutely the paperwork is very clear that some of the preparation work was stopped and a small number of people were moved off that work on the other hand we were better prepared in terms of Supply chains who knows the overall impact and which of those balances in the scales is greater I'm I'm I'm afraid it's impossible to know Mr Hancock whilst that may well be right that there was valuable work done in an important area of preparation namely medicinal Supply chains this chart and particular row four sector resilience makes plain that across the swathe of the healthcare and social adult social care sectors important other areas of work of which there were many more than the single issue of medicinal Supply chains were paused or interrupted that is the point isn't it and that is one point I agree and and a further but the further point is of significance which is the most significant and it's impossible to know whether one was more significant than the other than the others whether the reduction in the number of people that as demonstrated by the paperwork on um pandemic preparedness whether the impact the negative impact of that is outweighed or is not outweighed by the positive impact of the supply chain planning as I said the number of um uh activities is not as important as their consequence and because operation sickness which was guiding this work itself was flawed in conception I'm not convinced that there would have been that much help even if all of these things were done of course it would have been better if they had but I simply have no idea how helpful they would have been were you told at secretary of state that the pfrb had not met for a year and that as this document shows by January of 2020 in a number of important areas work had paused I was aware that some work had paused I don't recall being aware that the board hadn't met there was another board the pandemic influenza preparedness board again to which you've referred earlier do you recall that it was in the the nature of that board's work to prepare annually a risk register setting out in the field of influenza preparedness what the greatest risks were do you recall that I don't I don't recall that but I'm not surprised all right but one from one year to another I doubt it would have changed much you know this again the central failing of that sort of risk register was not to learn the lessons from MERS and SARS as has been discussed and as I've made um clear in my submission not to have the right plan to deal with a pandemic would you agree that in 2016 the risk register for that Central dhsc LED board showed a risk that supplies of face masks respirators and gloves could be below the optimum requirement in the event of a pandemic and that the Health and Social Care Systems would be unable to cope with an extreme surge in demand for services in the event of a pandemic I wasn't aware of that no that in 2017 the following year countermeasures were still a risk issue the supply of face masks respirators and gloves could be below the Autumn requirement and an extreme surge in the NHS and social care system was still an identified risk that's 2017. yes if I may say so my recollection was being reassured that we had a huge stockpile of PPE of course it's possible to write that it may be below the optimum because the optimum may be an absolutely enormous quantity which is exactly what we needed so it can be perfectly true to say it's below the optimum and at the same time reassure that it's huge the Health and Social care system may be unable to cope with an extreme surge in demand that was an identified risk in the PIP risk register in 2017. and by 2018 the 24th of September the following risks were still being identified issues with face masks respirators gloves below the optimum requirement plans for the surge that would be required in the Health and Social Care Systems were not fully tested there was a risk in relation to the Health and Social Care Systems being unable to cope in the event of a pandemic remains in the event of a pandemic and that risk remains so for two and a half years those risks having been identified by the PIP board were not mitigated by virtue of being addressed they remained did they not they certainly did and we had to deal with them when they materialized indeed but that is a board and a program which was led by your department so the next question Mr Hancock is how can that have been allowed to happen with the inevitable consequence Mr Hancock that you yourself of course had to deal with the consequences of those risks not being mitigated when you yes so that was the pandemic in January 2020 absolutely the inability to get the PPE out fast enough was a very significant problem one recommendation I have for the future is that every Health and Social care setting should be required to have its own stockpile of PPE and that should be paid for by the by this by the government because in the early days getting it out fast enough when there was a sudden increase in demand just as explained there that was incredibly difficult so yes I totally accept that under a pip paper a pandemic influenza preparedness program board paper dated October 19 on the eve of the pandemic may we have 23070 page one paragraph one the paper reminded the board of the pan flu program re-prioritization that took place at the end of 2018 and set out progress made on those areas of work that continued and new priorities that arose a paragraph three there's a reference to an Annex perhaps we could have a look at that Annex please go back up please to the start of the annex thank you thank you Annex a pan flu program reproditization at the end of 2018 work areas pan-free bill that's a reference to the draft Bill to which you referred permanent secretary meetings on pan flu continue perm secretary written updates on pan flu continue quarterly Finance meetings continue moral and ethical Advisory Group membership and recruitment stop UK pandemic influenza strategy refresh stop Healthcare search largely compete D.A The Vault Administration engagement to develop plans outstanding stopped adult social care largely complete for the pandemic flu Readiness board but CMO actions outstanding stop pfrb paper on the updating the NSC stop Toms stop Benchmark NHS Readiness internationally stop engagement in the clinical encounter measures board stop and so on yeah were you told of the extent to nature of the stock categories well um I'm I'm absolutely accountable for it because I'm accountable for everything happened in the department um I would also though ask you to consider each of these in detail because it comes to the point we discussed earlier on significance for instance the moral and ethical Advisory Group existed it had membership when the pandemic struck so further membership and recruitment was not a consideration that would have made a material difference to planning for the for the pandemic the influencer strategy refresh that was a 2011 document it would that would only have been significant if that refresh had completely changed the strategy that the entire Western world was following that was regarded as by The Who as uh as Best in Class may I pause you that is that the 2011 strategy approach in your witness statement you state that for the purposes of pandemic planning was woefully woefully inadequate and you I don't think a refresh would have changed that because all of the independent external advice the World Health Organization advice indeed the international Health regulations stated that we should not have lockdowns in fact in 2017 document it said the evidence is not strong enough to Warrant advocating legislative restrictions this is where I I'm I need to add to what I've written in my written statement because I thought at the time it was simply an oversight not to consider lockdowns actually it was an explicit decision the London resilience partnership published document May 2018 and I quote it will not be possible to Halt the spread of a new pandemic that was the attitude it was the doctrine and it was wrong so that refresh would have made very little difference Healthcare surge is a lot was largely complete the final action there is on involvement of the DA's since Healthcare is devolved that would have been a a a a not been a terribly important area adult social care largely complete I'm not exactly sure what the CMO action is outstanding are um my point is about materiality may I just pause you there to ask you some more questions about you I've got social care yes you raise it yes in your statement you refer to the fact that one of the major problems with the Department's supervision of the adult social Care Center was was the lack of policy levers yes which would enable the department to ensure pandemic preparedness absolutely official care yes and as you said earlier but that's not what this is refacting well I want to ask you whether or not you can say that the adult social care sector was well prepared for a pandemic when the department had no means of finding out whether or not they had the right plans in place but the local authorities had planned sufficiently let alone how many numbers were in the care sector no it was terrible the department had no visibility of whether or not the health adult social care sector was prepared at all it wasn't within your ability that's not my contention my contention is this action here would not have solved that the CMO could not have solved the problems in terms of oversight of the adult social care uh sectors what was the name of your department that I've come I've already talked about this it was it's the Department of Health and Social care and yet the legal responsibilities are with local authorities and we had a program a separate program work underway that did not stop because of brexit planning that was accelerated by the new prime minister in summer 2019 of Reform of adult social care we had ongoing work to get better data that was that was continued in this uh in this process adult social care desperately needs reform it needs more support it needs more resilience and I feel that very strongly as does the current chancellor exchequer who has been clear about that not only when he was in my job but in his current job my point and my contention is that this whatever the CMO actions outstanding were here they would not have solved the huge challenges of adult social care in this country which requires significant Improvement and work by January 20 did the department have in place the department of social care having place a single coherent plan to identify vulnerable service users across the country that is to say how many people are in the care sector no did it have a central plan for the sharing of data between private and public care providers and emergency responders in order to be able to better prepare them all for a pandemic something along those lines was being developed but it was definitely not in place was there a single National guidance for pandemic preparedness in the adult social care sector the guidance for pandemic preparedness went through local authorities and so there was not a single one no did all the lrf the local resilience forums have plans in place on the local Authority level for dealing with the impact of a catastromic catastrophic pandemic on the elderly no they were required to and as far as I'm aware only two had done the work was the Department of Health and Social care able to verify the extent of the pandemic preparedness planning that was being done by local authorities no we didn't have the policy levers to do so despite having the name social care in the title did the department of social care put into place a National Standard by which the plans from the local Authority could be gauged nope in relation to those local resilience forums did the department prepare in fact a pandemic flu standard at the latter end of 2019 which for the very first time obliged local resilience forums to compare their plans against a national standard for influenza pandemic planning well um yes is the answer it is and the and I suppose what that demonstrates because that came into place late in 2019. yes it is my central contention in this area which is that the system for how we run adult social care is flawed there was work ongoing to try to resolve it including work directly related to pandemic planning but it was in nowhere near good enough shape and it meant that as the as the person trying to solve this problem with a disease that self-evidently impacted on older people most we were in an incredibly difficult position to do so when the pandemic struck and despite the enormous hard work of everybody in that sector and in the department in relation to adult social care it was very very difficult early on and that's been in part because this planning was on going but the systems in this country for managing adult social care are not good enough and uh that that that reform that reform work was underway but it still hasn't been completed so drawing some of these threads together please Mr Hancock would you accept the following propositions firstly there was a long-standing bias within the Department of Health and Social care as the risk owner of the pandemic influenza risk and as the author of that strategy which you described as woefully inadequate in favor of influenza a failure to pay sufficient regard to the risk admittedly a lesser risk of another different catastrophic hcid it would have been better yes if it if the plans had been for a generic respiratory disease because what matters is the characteristic of the novel virus indeed proposition 2 there was a failure to think through properly the risks of a non-influenza pandemic due to the inherent unpredictability a viral respiratory pathogens and their characteristics as you say transmission rate high or stuttering incubation period long or short viral loads great or less whether viruses congregate in the upper or lower respiratory tract whatever they may have been because those other characteristics were simply not thought about enough the real risk of an hcid with catastrophic consequences was not adequately thought about either I wouldn't put it like that and I think there's an irony here the irony is that one of the major problems we had early on which I'm sure we'll come to an M2 was the fact that covid-19 has asymptomatic transmission it's the first known coronavirus that affects humans that can be transmitted asymptomatically and the who assumption was that this wasn't possible until April 2020. um there's a really important reason I'm saying this a flu plan assumes asymptomatic transmission indeed there are some ways in which the flu plan was in fact more appropriate as a planning document than a generic document or indeed a document that had been written to consider the impact of one of the then known coronaviruses because that plan a coronavirus pandemic plan would have assumed no asymptomatic transmission so this is underpins my point that of course it would have been better to plan for a generic you know respiratory disease X and that is what we should do in future however planning for the planning for flu did have some benefits and it brings me back to my central contention that whilst this was an error it was in no way the biggest error and it's not just that there were two errors in the core plan you know flew rather than coronavirus and wrong Doctrine the era of the flawed Doctrine was significantly bigger than the era of targeting a flu rather than a coronavirus pandemic all right well I I don't need to trouble you about degrees of failure will come on to identifying the the various propositions yeah the third issue is one you've just touched upon which is that that approach and the risk assessment was cause agnostic it simply failed to identify a sufficiently broad range of scenarios and as you know the risk assessment process has been Rewritten thanks in the main tour report from the Royal Academy of engineering yes to make that flame yes and there's an irony there as well which is that we were dealing with a live Ebola epidemic with the Potential Threat that would come to this country as a pandemic um and yet at the same time the paperwork was all focused on a flu pandemic so in PR the theory written down in these strategies was actually not what was playing out in the day-to-day practice of infectious disease management that we were undertaking as a department and that phe was undertaking it's not just a question of Aaron is it these failings materially hampered the United Kingdom's ability to prevent death the central failing that that hampered the UK's response common with the rest of the western world was the refusal and the explicit the explicit decision that it would not be possible to Halt the spread of a new pandemic that is wrong and that is at the center of the failure of preparation I know that because I was the person responsible as the category one responder when this pandemic struck and all of the other considerations are are small important but small compared to the Colossal scale of failure in the assumption that it will not be possible and the lack of ambition in the assumption that you can't stop the spread of a disease we can you know imagine if this disease had had tragically killed children as much as it did old people and maybe it transmitted twice as easily as kovid would it then be possible to stop this whole to Halt the spread of course it would we would do whatever it took and that's where we got to but it it but we got there far far too slowly because none of the preparation included any thinking around that and that is my fourth proposition it's the one that finds a place at the front of your witness statement it is that there was a failure a complete systemic failure to think about how to prevent catastrophic consequences arising at all as opposed to how to manage catastrophic consequences which were assumed to result I couldn't agree more and it's an absolute tragedy number five there was an Associated failure to think about countermeasures because of course flu has a shorter incubation period it is symptomatic there are antivirals there are vaccines available there was therefore a failure to think about in the way that other countries particularly in the Far East had done countermeasures such as mandatory quarantines yes shielding yeah social restrictions yes border controls yes there was as you say a complete lack of imagination yes I had to overrule the initial advice not to quarantine people being brought back from Wuhan I mean that is it's Madness and it was written into the international Health regulations that you shouldn't close borders this was not a UK problem it was a World Health Organization problem and the World Health Organization of all people should have learned the lessons from MERS and SARS and so we had diligent hard-working teams working on this pandemic preparedness but there was a absolutely Central doctrinal failure in the response of the UK and almost every other Western Country and number six coming to the government particularly through the cabinet office and the dhsc there was a failure to implement in a general sense the recommendations from the various earlier exercises because the majority of them were simply not implemented for good or ill by the time the pandemic struck and actions and work streams which were identified as being necessary in the fields of pandemic preparedness were not carried through to fruition while that is true my my evidence to you is on materiality of what really mattered when the pandemic struck and as we saw when we went through that list on the screen those um work streams that were stopped I couldn't identify any of them that would have made a material impact had had another Year's work been done on them we just we went we got halfway through them and are there on what I put that down to is the team prioritizing within the resources that were available to do the things that really mattered and the thing that was most useful to me when the pandemic struck was making sure we had a piece of legislation ready to get onto the statute book now we you know there's a lesson there as well which is we need a new piece of legislation both for civil contingencies and we need an update to the 1984 Public Health act and I'm very happy to give further evidence on what's needed there but the my point is that I think the team were working very hard to try to do the things that were the most material in terms of preparation and what everybody missed in the western world was that lockdowns were going to be necessary and that's why I'm stressing this point so much because it is it is the most single most important thing we can learn as a country Mr Hancock you've just said I couldn't identify any of those work streams that would have made material impact was not one of the work streams the need to identify data numbers the planning for the number of people in the adult social care sector would be affected by a pandemic and the planning for the required surge capacity which would be required in the event of a pandemic pandemic are you saying those my reflection is that data work continued as part of the adult social care reform plans did that work get completed by the time of the pandemic it didn't get completed but the work continued was a fully developed plan for surge capacity in the adult social care sector put into place by the 1st of January 2020. a fully developed plan no your question originally to which I responded was what the work being done but it hadn't been completed no there's a difference between doing work and completing work there is a difference between planning something and not even completing the plan so that the work can't be done was the planning complete to allow the surge capacity to be developed I'm very happy to look further into the paperwork and write to you on that point my point I but my point was a was a more strategic one about what really matters in terms of protecting lives in the future and that's why I'm at so much pain to stress it there were significant areas of preparation overlooked or not progressed you agree absolutely were the nation's preparations for a pandemic of this nature good enough no was there a serious insignificant inadequacy of preparation for a pandemic Health Emergency yes preparing for this tier one risk of a catastrophic Health Emergency was at the core of your own Department's functions would you agree yes and therefore a secretary of state you bore and you bear ministerial responsibility for that calamitous State of Affairs do you not I bear responsibility for all the things that happened not only in my department but also the agencies that reported to me as Secretary of State you will no doubt have given a great deal of thought and it's evident from your evidence today Mr Hancock as to how to make things better yes and you've mentioned many of them today in the course of evidence are you aware of some of the matters that sir Oliver let win spoke about when he gave evidence do you agree that there is now a need for a formal system system of training for ministers and Senior civil servants in civil contingencies yes there's an irony here another one which is that I was in the process of putting one in place with the blavatnik school of government when the pandemic struck and we stopped that work because there were because the pandemic became overwhelming is there a case for a cabinet minister to be appointed to be in Soul charge of eprr yes across government and then the panda then the responsibilities of lead government departments would need to report into that Minister who would then act on behalf of the Prime Minister that's effectively the job that Oliver letwin did when he was in office and therefore there needs to be a head of resilience at the Apex of a official structure a civil servant who will then report to that cabinet minister yes there's one subtlety that's incredibly important here which is that it would be a mistake if such a structure took away the sense and the feeling of accountability for an individual Department what you wouldn't want is the department thinking oh well the cabinet office has got that covered you need you need the department to still feel that it is accountable and held to account by the cabinet office rather than replaced by the cabinet office which would be uh sub-optimal so I'm not following what he's suggesting would be different from the present system Mr Hancock that you would have as we had when Oliver letwin was in post a minister responsible for resilience across the board and for challenging the different resilience plans that came up and obviously that will require an official structure underneath her or him and um but the key point is that needs to be like a red team effort as has been discussed right rather than letting the Departments off the hook for the areas which they're responsible that Minister's solely responsible resilience I've heard that cabinet folio on occasions um yes I think I'd I whether or not they attended cabinet What mattered in actually is in practice whether they had the ear of the Prime Minister you you could easily make it the person who was in my old cabinet office job as number two so long as they had a direct line to the Prime Minister when it mattered is there now a case for an independent perhaps statutory resilience Academy or some such body to to warn advise guide in relation to eprr train organize exercises and make sure that recommendations and actions are properly implemented yes I think that's I think there's value to that again you wouldn't want to take away from the individual responsibility of the area that it concerned let me give you an example and we now once again have a body whose sole responsibility is preparing Britain to be resilient to health external Health threats oxa and Dame Jenny Harris is an excellent chief executive of AXA um you wouldn't want such a body to replace oxa or make AXA feel less accountable I want Jenny Harris and whoever's in her job to wake up every morning worrying about the next pandemic and what needs to be put in place you can of course supplement that with better resilience training at the center as well but you can't you mustn't take away from the the real burning accountability of the person in that job and also I one of the recommendations was that they would these people would make recommendations in terms of allocation of budget because it isn't there's obviously been a discussion of the impact of budgets in the last couple of weeks it isn't just about the total Quantum of budget it's about how it's spent in this country this year we spent 53 billion pounds on physical military defense axa's core budget is 450 million pounds that's less than one percent and yet over 220 000 people died of covid have died of covert so far the impact on the health of the nation and the well-being of the nation of Health protection is an order of magnitude bigger than as currently represented in the oxa budget and the idea that we spend over 50 billion pounds on defense and under 500 million on XA is for me completely indefensible all right I was asking you in fact about a general resilience Academy to deal with civil contingencies you you responded by reference to to the United Kingdom um Health Security Agency yeah that is of course involved with health emergency exactly as were you so it's worth having to cross the board as well yes I intended to ask you and I perhaps didn't make that sufficiently plain whether there was a case for resilience Academy to deal with civil contingencies for example a collapse in critical National infrastructure or a Cyber attack or or some other Mass event or catastrophe that which could befall our nation it's now Beyond time is it not it is beyond time my sorry I the reason I got into budgets is that it's only a central body that can also make recommendations in terms of allocation between different departments as a departmental head you can't do that yes is there therefore also a case for fundamental rethink on this whole CCA 2004 structure and the lead government Department model I don't want to intrude into module two issues sure but but obviously when dealing with a national crisis yes it's beyond the ability of a single Department to be able to cope because of course all national crises by definition will have an impact a range of impacts across government yes I I think that you need you I I actually support the lead government department at structure because you need somebody who feels accountable for looking out for that threat all of the time but you then need a system in the center that is stronger at holding that accountability holding feet to the fire and the but the coordination element of it in when you get to a massive crisis goes up to the chain to the Prime Minister anyway and so that is a role of the Civil contingencies Secretariat which when you have a huge crisis like covid then was replaced with the covid specific Central secretary but some of these issues Mr Hancock didn't go to you even though you're the Secretary of State and your own lead government Department yes but imagine so so with respect is there not now in a need for uh for a much stronger coordinating body not perhaps just part of the cabinet office but a stronger body which can ensure that in the run-up to a crisis in terms of the preparation the preparedness the planning things that need to be elevated to the highest levels are yes and the way that I put it is that the goal of it should be to hold the lead Department's feet to the fire for instance if you had one of these bodies in the center if they tried to do the job of the of the health secretary as the category one responder then no then who guards the guardian far better would be that they are in a position to haul in the health secretary and say are you doing you're doing that enough because I wasn't called to the National Security Council for instance in order to answer those questions in my 18 months as health secretary before the pandemic struck finally I want to ask you some questions please about some other aspects of the system which you found to be deficient when you were faced with a terrible crisis in January of 2020. yeah you've touched on many of them already but I just want to summarize the position in order to be able to to focus Minds for when we get to the next module and thereafter yes the areas that require particular and detailed consideration yeah there was obviously this issue therefore of there being a stockpile of PPE but as it happened given the sheer number of casualties and those who are sick and ill and of course those who died the stockpile was completed uh depleted sorry yes and it was necessary for the government to try to secure further supplies through just in case contracts and deal with the Mayhem of the international markets yes is there therefore an issue which requires further consideration in relation to how we make sure that next time such stocks as there are such stockpiles as there are for the particular pandemic which may eventuate are sufficient or at least that there is an ability to improve the numbers to to to to increase the numbers yes in in a way that doesn't leave the sexual status as you are having to to make up the deficit so we started buying um PPE in January 2020 um long before it was certain this would become a global pandemic um but the problems with the stockpile were very significant and I'm sure that we'll come to this in future modules um what is vital for Preparation is that there are stockpiles that are accessible uh pickable in the technical language um that can be distributed quickly and can be distributed to all Health and Social care settings and as I say I think this should be a legal requirement on Health and Social care settings to hold a significant amount of PPE to be able to get through the early weeks of a future pandemic because the sheer logistical complexity of setting up these Supply chains in in short order is exceptionally difficult as we as we learn all right I don't want to ask you to to address the solutions or in fact to identify the specific problems that arose only to to acknowledge that there were very real difficulties areas the availability of mass diagnostic testing yes you've already referred to terrible the availability of Mass contact tracing systems yes there was no such thing obviously there are the NHS related issues concerning resilience bed capacity workforce planning all of which are issues which you've um referred to yes there's a bigger thing there as well within the NHS which is that you know whilst the discussion on how much resources the NHS should get is a highly political one and we've seen it play out over the last couple of weeks in this inquiry there is actually a really big question that the nation needs to ask itself which is that you wouldn't have Ascend the whole of your army out into battle at once you have spare capacity in case there's a crisis you have what they call redundancy in the in the military sense yet every single day we send our whole Army of the NHS out into the field and there is no redundancy we run the NHS incredibly tight it's an incredibly efficient organization in the grand scheme of things despite obvious areas that can be improved it is overall run very tight and that means that there simply isn't the resilience when a crisis comes but that would require a materially huge increase in the already very very large NHS budget but other countries choose to spend a higher proportion of GDP on health care and have that redundancy and it it means that they are better able to respond but it also comes back to Doctrine because no health system or any size would be able to respond unless you suppress a virus when it's as bad as covid-19 but as Milady has already observed in another context there are choices that will have to be made and there is therefore an issue about resilience and about bed capacity and surge capacity and so on absolutely for the future absolutely and then in your statement you address issues such as the changes over time in the public health structures yes there is an issue about the the necessary degree of coordination across the United Kingdom given the fact that Health security is a devolved issue yes but at the same time of course viruses uh honor No Boundaries and then finally you say that well they they honor Geographic boundaries they honor no administrative boundaries the fact that we are an island is an advantage that we uh should use much more aggressively in future in preventing a pandemic coming here and you refer finally to the need to examine more closely the degree of required International coordination yes I do I don't want you to develop that that point The Remains the final issue um which I think I I'd be grateful for your views on which which is the degree to which you [Music] development what turned out to be life-saving vaccine production yes we heard evidence from uh Jeremy Hunt MP as to how he assisted to the process by which the process of the the UK vaccine Network when he was Secretary of State and were you also materially concerned in ensuring that we had the proper structures in place for future development of vaccines when you were Secretary of State yes I thought this was very important and in fact in terms of pandemic preparedness given the reassurances that we were well prepared this was the area I put most effort into and I'm and it um a lot of the preparedness work was very helpful here and the Oxford vaccine was essentially built on a project that started with an attempt to get a vaccine for Ebola that was before my time I worked to try to enhance the domestic manufacturing capability and I did a huge amount of work also on stopping anti-vax content I was worried about that for normal everyday vaccines like MMR and the flu jab but it was also very important ahead of a pandemic because the point is that once you have the right doctrine of suppressing a virus until the vaccine can make us safe you've got to make sure that you get the vaccines and that people have the confidence to take them so there was a there was a huge amount of preparation work in that area that I was directly involved in um and that ended up being one of the areas where we where we performed incredibly well and we of course had the first vaccine in the world and Miss tank my final question do you know why no pathogenic outbreak related exercise or any governmental policy or guidance or paper paid any regard to the impact or Consequences of a pandemic on the vulnerable on members of our community in in our minority ethnic sectors or on the marginalized or otherwise suffering from inequalities there appears to have been absolutely no thought given at all at any time other than in relation to the obvious point that there would be a clinical risk to what the likely impact would be of a pandemic sanctorally and therefore no thought was given to how the plans might be adjusted to cater for that significant risk it saddens me enormously that the central work the the CMO was planning to do when I appointed him in October 2019 was to focus on the reduction of the completely unacceptable Health inequalities that exist in this country the life expectancy of a man born in Blackpool is 15 years less than a man born in buckinghamshire and I appointed Chris witty to the CMO job based on his proposal that he wanted to do everything that we could to address this so Health inequalities were right at the Forefront of his and my agenda um the of course the different impact clinically of a virus on different groups is absolutely front of mind and implicit in all of the planning well that's obvious yeah it has to be um but in terms of the social and socio-economic uh impacts all I would say is that an assumption that you're not going to stop a pandemic running through the population [Music] it is but implicitly an assumption and a decision that those most vulnerable to it will be hardest hit so the single best thing we can do to protect those who are most vulnerable is stop viruses from killing hundreds of thousands of people and it brings me and we end on my on the central my central contention which is you've got to work out there are costs of lockdown you've got to work out whether the impact of the virus is going to be worse than the cost of lockdown and if it is going to be worse as was the case with covid-19 you've got to hit it hard and very very early but Mr Hancock as you now have acknowledged our system of preparedness for being able to deal with the pandemic was materially hindered and weakened and the sad reality is that as part of that failure there was no consideration of the needs of the most vulnerable at all there was consideration on a clinical basis of the needs of the most vulnerable but not on a socio-economic basis and if I may and finally um this was of course an unprecedented pandemic in anybody's lifetime and those who worked so hard to respond to it had to respond from the basis of the preparation that there was um and they did work incredibly hard and I think everybody in in the health area that I was responsible for uh gave their all with humility in the face of this virus and unprecedented event um but that just underlines why it's so important that we get the right lessons out of this inquiry the Lions led by structural donkeys Mr Hancock personally everyone gave their all but the system was not fit for purpose was it that's absolutely right and it goes it is that is a that is a pro was a problem Across the Western world and it goes back a long long way in the assumptions underpinning how we plan for these things and it must never happen again Milady that concludes my question Mr Hancock there is one area submitted by covid-19 brief families for justice UK and Northern covid-19 breed families for justice which you've given permission Mr Weatherby sorry not quite finished Mr Hancock no problem yes yes thank you very much Mr Hancock I ask you a few questions on behalf of the covid brief families for justice which represents the interests of many many very families from across the United Kingdom and it's centered around the pandemic flu bill which was one of the two key work streams that were kept going when most of the rest of the refreshers we've heard it called um was paused because of brexit is that right so that gives the importance with which you um looked at the pandemic flu Bell yes and and I would say it was one of the most important things to come out of operation sickness okay I want to just explore the background of that and what was in it very very briefly indeed um but you have um already indicated to Mr Keith the the 2011 Doctrine strategy um was woefully inadequate yes and you put that in your statement yes and I just want to just read that one paragraph from your statement to flesh that out yes um clearly this is your words clearly the approach in the 2011 strategy was woefully inadequate I have no idea why the 2011 strategy did not consider the approach taken by countries affected by SARS and learned the lessons for the UK I also do not know why the who considered the UK one of the best prepared countries in the world when our strategic approach did not consider it possible to take social distancing measures necessary to stop the spread of a killer disease yes yes and so you're emphasizing the lack of learning and the emphasis around social distancing measures yes and that would of course include lockdowns absolutely yeah okay and you've also elsewhere paragraph 29 refer to the who as an authoritative Source yes so you're giving respect to the view of the who yes well it is the yeah UN agency in this area it needs radical reform but nevertheless it is leave that one for a different day but you're regarding that as an authoritative source in 2018 at precisely the time that this work on the pandemic um flew bill was being um completed or being looked at considered the who as part of its Global influenza program published an update to a document which had been around since 2005. entitled a checklist for pandemic influenza risk and impact management I just want to take you to one passage of that okay and it's one eight double seven four eight please and Page One have you got it in front of you there I've got the title screen and not the paragraph no no um just want to orientate us all this is the this is the who document 2018. um I'm going to take you to page 11 in a minute um in the interest of time I'm just going to flag up one other reference which is at Page Six thank you foreign [Music] and I think that you know on to do justice as much nothing can bring the people who died back and each and every one but we must learn that lesson that we need to take the measures necessary early to stop a future pandemic from killing people yes um the but but to say they're not in this bill and it um without considering what other bills they might already be doesn't really prove that point okay well I'm sure we can look at at the legislation as we go along but this this is the work stream I know but but we do but I I use that legislation extensively I understand that the public health act 1984 very well and what I can tell you is that the who recommendations in 2018 other than on temporary closure of educational institutions those powers are available as far as I understand it in the public health finally just in terms of the devolved Nations it's right isn't it this legislation um was developed as draft legislation was developed with some input from the devil name yes it's also right that none of them used it in in the event because they have their own other legislation already on the statute book I mean I I actually think that we could do part of the reason for a need to reform the 1984 Act is to have a uk-wide approach because I think that um whilst it's totally appropriate to devolve um uh health and the NHS because of the nature of how pandemics spread it would be far better to respond to the next pandemic on a uk-wide basis rather than an England Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland basis and I think that way we would save more lives yes are you finally there see are you able to point to to any documents or any briefing or any meeting where the fact of um Powers um or legislation being elsewhere was a factor in what was included in in their strap Bill oh yes of course that was the important consideration in what to put into the build because one of the things that parliamentary Council who draft bills absolutely hate is legislating in an area where a policy is already legislated for yes okay so that is a material consideration yes that's all I asked thank you thank you Milady we've received an email from bereave Francis Justice Camry who wish I think perhaps vicariously to ask for permission for a point to be put to Mr Hancock who said in the course it was evidence that coronavirus was the first Coronavirus known to be or the first coronavirus that could be transmitted asymptomatically um the position is as the chart that you directed be prepared amply demonstrates is that MERS and SARS were also are also um asymptomatically transmitted and therefore there is clear evidence to to correct that position I don't want to give evidence about it but there is that material there in the chart but perhaps I could be permitted to to ask you one question um Mr Hancock in light of the question from Marie fans Justice Camry the transmission rates in relation to ma the Mars and SARS one yes are of course very different yes yes um what I stated was the uh clinical fact as I was advised uh at the uh during the debate about asymptomatic transmission which no doubt we'll cover in M2 because it was absolutely Central uh to the challenges of the early response to the to the pandemic thank you melody that's that concludes Mr hankelton thank you very much Mr Hancock that completes um the evidence should be given certainly in this module um thank you for your help okay thank you two o'clock [Music]

Channel: The Telegraph

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Keywords: Telegraph, News, George Osborne, Covid Inquiry live, covid, inquiry, uk, government, pandemic, covid-19, tories, conservatives, cabinet office, oliver letwin, labour, politics, evidence

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Length: 190min 49sec (11449 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023