More than half of the Government’s emergency planners were tied up preparing for a No Deal Brexit just before Covid struck, the public spending watchdog reveals today.
According to the National Audit Office (NAO), only a limited amount of time can be used for other plans.
Additionally, there were no lessons to be learned from past incidents like the swine influenza.
That meant there weren’t any plans to address the huge impact coronavirus had on education, employment, and vulnerable citizens when it struck the country last January.
Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was seen aboard a train that ran from Wolverhampton towards Coventry Thursday. A watchdog has found more than half of the Government’s emergency planners were tied up preparing for a No Deal Brexit just before Covid struck
The NAO found that as far back as 2008, a flu pandemic had been seen as the ‘top non-malicious’ threat facing the UK in an official National Risk Register.
The focus also shifted to diseases like ebola which are fatal and can’t be treated. It was not the Covid virus, which is spread by people without symptoms.
The Cabinet Office’s Civil Contingencies Secretariat, responsible for co-ordinating an emergency response, had put 56 of its 94 staff on preparing for a No Deal Brexit.
And the work of the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Programme Board was ‘paused or postponed to free up resources for EU Exit work’.
London National Audit Office This watchdog stated that only limited time was available for plans other than Brexit in the immediate aftermath of the coronavirus epidemic.
However officials also said the Brexit work also ‘enhanced the crisis capabilities of some departments’.
The report concludes: ‘This pandemic has exposed a vulnerability to whole-system emergencies – that is, emergencies that are so broad that they engage the entire system.’
Last night Labour MP Meg Hillier, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, said: ‘The pandemic exposed that government was just not set up to deal with large-scale emergencies that impact right across society.
‘Today’s report shows that government failed to learn some of the lessons from previous emergencies and its own practice exercises. The plans were more focused on the pandemic’s health effects than its wider economic and social impacts.
‘In future the government needs to look at the big picture when preparing for emergencies on the scale of Covid-19.’