Five things we learned from the UK Covid-19 Inquiry report on Module II

The civil service gave narrow and at times incoherent advice

The civil service as a collective institution is not a core target for the report. Baroness Hallett focuses on individuals, structures and processes rather than the civil service as a whole. 

There are, though, lessons for the civil service – and civil servants. While the tone is set by the prime minister, the culture at the top of government is amplified or reinforced by the civil service. Civil servants are professionals in serious jobs. Former cabinet secretary Simon Case’s poorly-judged WhatsApp messages were well-aired during the inquiry’s hearings, but the now-cabinet secretary Chris Wormald is also criticised for failing to “rectify the overenthusiastic impression” that Matt Hancock had given to No.10 about the Department of Health and Social Care’s ability to cope with the pandemic.

The narrowness of civil service advice is also cause for concern. The Covid Taskforce, the core team supporting ministerial decision making, is criticised for its lack of diverse thinking and being closed to external voices. This meant advice was given and decisions were made and turned into law with little challenge or scrutiny. The inquiry finds that scientists, including former chief scientific adviser, and now minister, Patrick Vallance, were wrong to advise against early lockdowns at the start of the pandemic. And it concludes that the Treasury should have been more open to different modelling. The civil service must build in more open ways to make decisions – at pace during a crisis and more generally during policy making.

The report is a useful record for the civil service, and in many places a guide about what not to do during a crisis. It includes a painstaking chronology, especially of the early weeks of the pandemic. It is a reminder about the importance of culture, honesty, good record-keeping, proper contingency planning, moving at speed and the need for clear objectives. The civil service should have been swifter to recognise that an existing plan to deal with influenza would be inadequate for Covid-19.

These are all things we knew already. What is less clear is how future governments should manage their decision-making processes. The inquiry touches on structures of decision making, and the inadequacies of the UK contingency response architecture for a sustained crisis like Covid. It recommends that the civil service plan for longer-term decision-making structures. But beyond acknowledging the added coherence that over time the Covid Taskforce, alongside distinct ‘strategy’ and ‘operations’ committees, it misses an opportunity to relate the lessons of the pandemic to how governments should operate in future crises.

Individual ministers’ mistakes are well known, but this government should not ignore the lessons just because they were not involved

Some of the lessons in the report are inevitably specific to the ministers and advisers who were running government at the time. Boris Johnson’s “oscillation” in decision making and Dominic Cummings’ contribution to a “toxic” workplace are both now part of history – though current and future ministers and advisers should learn from these examples of what not to do. And presumably any future government that imposes emergency restrictions on individual liberties will now be extremely cautious to ensure that its members do not breach those restrictions, unlike Johnson and his team.

But other lessons are more generally applicable. The inquiry has pointed to the lack of diversity of views and experiences around the cabinet table as a factor in poor decision making. No cabinet will be fully representative of the country, but future ministers should ensure that the advice they get in such situations properly considers the impact of different policy options on different groups in society.

And the inquiry has lessons for how ministers manage crises more broadly. While criticising the prime minister’s decision not to chair COBR on Covid until March 2020, the report also points out that COBR itself was not well-suited to a long-term crisis like a pandemic. The inquiry stops short of detailed recommendations about what structures the government should create to tackle long-term crises, simply recommending that it should create something. Despite the lack of detail on a solution, the diagnosis is correct – better long-term thinking would help ensure the government does not repeat mistakes between phases of a crisis, as happened in 2020, and would help ensure that ministers in the UK government can collaborate more effectively with their counterparts in the devolved nations.

While the report will not make for happy reading for Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock or many of their peers, current ministers can learn a lot too. From avoiding WhatsApp as a means of decision making to setting clear objectives to creating a positive culture in No.10, the issues the inquiry exposes are not limited to Covid. 

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The inquiry highlighted weaknesses in all four governments and in how response was co-ordinated between them

The inquiry also identified some substantial weaknesses in how the UK government worked with devolved and local governments to manage the pandemic, as well as highlighting failures at the devolved level as well.

In the early phase of the pandemic, as the IfG noted at the time, there was a high degree of co-ordination between Westminster and the governments in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, as reflected in the joint announcement of lockdowns in March 2020 and the jointly-agreed Coronavirus Act. But this began to fray by late spring, and the inquiry report paints a picture of somewhat ad hoc attempts to co-ordinate actions and messaging between the four governments.

In the early period, devolved leaders were invited to COBR and to participate in meetings of the new ‘ministerial implementation groups’, which offered useful opportunities for information sharing and co-ordination. But COBR ceased to operate and the ‘MIGs’ were wound up by summer 2020, leaving an intergovernmental relations gap in which the four nations started to act in a less co-ordinated way, contributing to some confusion among the public as rules and messaging diverged.

The inquiry also found evidence that the UK government was often unclear in its communications about when it was acting only for England, for instance by using vague language such as ‘this country’ or by paying for public health advertising in newspapers and media that had a reach across the UK.

Like the UK government, the devolved governments were themselves criticised by Baroness Hallett for aspects of their response to the pandemic. During the second wave in autumn 2020, the Welsh government and Northern Ireland executive were both found to have delayed acting, while the Scottish government was determined to have been more fleet of foot, introducing local restrictions that avoided a national lockdown.

The Welsh government was identified as operating the most inclusive decision-making process, both within cabinet and in terms of engagement with local government. In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, poor relationships between unionist and nationalist leaders led to the cessation of joint press conferences by the first and deputy first minister, potentially weakening the effect on public opinion.

The inquiry took an interesting approach, to compare the four governments in one module, rather than consecutively. The comparative approach has revealed some useful insights and findings and some healthy competition may help to spur the governments to take action. The inquiry makes sensible recommendations for better communication between the UK and devolved governments, and for greater clarity in public communications about which rules apply in which parts of the UK.

Co-ordination across the wider health and care system was poor

Rarely has a government made such wide-reaching interventions as the Johnson government did by locking down the entire population. Communicating lockdown requirements was therefore a vital part of the pandemic response. The report found that there was poor co-ordination across government on public health messaging. Lee Cain (then director of communications in 10 Downing Street) developed the ‘Stay at home’ messaging in collaboration with an “external digital creative industry”. But it appears as though Cain did not include NHS England (NHSE) in that process. Simon Stevens (then CEO of NHSE) said that the NHS was concerned that it discouraged people from coming forward for vital care. In response, NHSE launched its own messaging campaign.

We’ve long known that the government’s handling of care homes was ill-judged, and this report pulls no punches. It says that the impact of the virus on people in care homes “was devastating” and that around a fifth of all deaths involving Covid between March 2020 and February 2022 happened in care homes. The defence of leaders across the UK was that this was a regrettable necessity that stopped the hospital system from being overwhelmed and that there was not enough capacity to test everyone that was discharged from hospitals into care homes. This may be true. But it also reveals that the government prioritised the needs of the NHS over the care sector – an outcome that was likely given the NHS’ disproportionately strong, single voice when it came to decisions that had to balance multiple priorities. The care sector suffered in those instances, as it did not have a single voice advocating its position. Any government working through a future pandemic must find a way to bring a more representative sample of views into the decision-making process.

The government chose the wrong model to deliver quick lessons, it is time to see some real change

A natural question to ask now is: did we really need a statutory public inquiry to tell us all this? From the start, it was clear this would be a long and expensive process. The inquiry’s remit is vast – delivering both a “factual narrative account” and identifying “lessons learned” across ten separate modules covering a many different aspects of the pandemic response. There are still many modules and more recommendations to come.  

The inquiry has been fairly effective in establishing a public record of events. The report sets out who did what and when, in the early stages of the pandemic. Crucially, the statutory powers have forced the government to disclose material it resisted releasing, including requests for WhatsApp messages and private documents which the Cabinet Office challenged via a judicial review in 2023. Looking ahead, provisions in the Hillsborough Law – a duty of candour and a duty to assist – should make for a smoother disclosure process.

But while this model has succeeded in getting much of this on the public record, it is far less suited in delivering timely lessons for government. The UK Covid-19 Inquiry is on course to become the most expensive public inquiry  in UK history, surpassing the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. This is a slow and expensive way to identify lessons delivered more than five years after key decisions were taken and many individuals have moved on. The inquiry has also had an opportunity cost for the civil service, where the very fact of an external, legalistic process has had a chilling effect on open discussion, and delayed learning as officials prepare for hearings and await conclusions from the inquiry.

Back in the summer of 2020, we argued for a rapid review, ahead of a full public inquiry to inject lessons into government ahead of the expected second wave in the autumn. Five years later, very few lessons have been applied. While the inquiry has produced some sensible recommendations, its legalistic format isn’t designed to fully unpick how complex systems and different layers of government actually work and interact. That work now falls to each of the four governments, who must turn the inquiry’s findings into real, substantive change.