Robert Peston Robert Peston

The real reason Britain failed on coronavirus

Christopher Furlong/Getty

The joint health and science super-committee’s report into ‘lessons learned’ on the UK’s coronavirus response may not want to ‘point fingers of blame’ for the grotesque failures, but my goodness it leaves the reader angry and upset.

It confirms so much that we knew anyway, namely:

1) The early consensus among ministers, officials and scientists was that ‘herd immunity by infection was the inevitable outcome’.

2) That this led to lockdown being delayed, at a cost of thousands of lives.

3) That there was a ‘serious early error in adopting this fatalistic approach and not considering a more emphatic and rigorous approach to stopping the spread of the virus as adopted by many East and South East Asian countries’.

4) That there was ‘groupthink’ among official scientific advisers and the government which meant ‘we were not as open to approaches being taken elsewhere as we should have been’.

To be clear, the success of countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and China in limiting the spread of the virus through strict isolation of those infected and prohibitions on travel was conspicuous as early as February 2020.

Lockdown was delayed, at a cost of thousands of lives

The approach was rejected by ministers, scientists and officials as simply not the British way.

For the avoidance of doubt – and before I move on – this ‘Whitehall and Britain knows best’ culture remains a cancer in the system, contingency planning against future risks is lamentably poor, and is a reason why the current response to the energy spikes and supply chain breakdown has been so chaotic. Rightly the MPs on the committee, chaired by former Tory ministers Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, highlight the ‘serious mistake’ of stopping testing for the virus in the community just as cases were really taking off, in March 2020.

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