David Cameron admits series of failures in his government’s pandemic preparations

David Cameron has admitted a series of failures in his government’s preparations for a pandemic but defended the austerity drive he and his chancellor, George Osborne, imposed, saying “your health system is only as strong as your economy”.

The former prime minister repeatedly told the Covid inquiry it was a mistake that “more time and more questions” were not focused on tackling what turned out to be a “highly infectious, asymptomatic” pandemic.

He suggested a review into the swine flu epidemic could have been a good time to assess the risks of a wide range of pandemics, claiming Dame Deirdre Hine’s independent review into swine flu did not make the recommendations that would have been necessary to prepare for a pandemic like coronavirus.

But he strongly defended his government’s austerity programme that unions have said “ground down and pulled apart public health systems” with cuts that meant the health service “didn’t stand a fighting chance”.

While Cameron accepted that his government was repeatedly warned about the pressures facing the NHS, he insisted Britain had the financial capacity to roll out schemes such as furlough during Covid because of his government’s ability to “get control of the finances and increase funding for the health service at the same time”.

Reflecting on his time in office, Cameron told the inquiry: “I think it was a government and prime minister that was very concerned about potential pandemics and about dangerous pathogens and the bad things like antimicrobial resistance and all the rest of it so we weren’t backward in thinking about it.

“But it does still come back to this issue of why so much time spent on a flu pandemic and not so much on these others?”

Cameron spoke to the inquiry, after Prof Philip Banfield, the chair of the British Medical Association, said there was “no doubt that both staff and patients were put in harm’s way” because of underfunding in the decade running up to the arrival of Covid-19.

In a blog written for the union’s website before Cameron’s appearance, he wrote: “I have seen first-hand the damage wrought by years of austerity and a failure to prioritise the nation’s health. The UK was severely on the back foot when Covid took hold, and this proved disastrous – for the doctors I represent and the millions who suffered at the hands of the virus.

“It is therefore critical that Cameron, Osborne and Hunt are taken to task over the decisions they made that left us so unprepared, and to ensure the same mistakes are not repeated when we face our next health emergency.”

Cameron told the inquiry it was “wrong to say we [were] preparing for the wrong pandemic”. He said there “could still be pandemic flu, and it’s good that we have been prepared for that but, as Oliver Letwin says in his evidence, and George Osborne says in his – and they put it out better than I have – a long time was spent preparing for a pandemic that didn’t happen rather than the one that did happen”.

While Cameron, who became the first politician to give evidence under oath to the inquiry, was swift to admit failures on pandemic preparedness, he insisted the UK had done a lot more than other countries when it came to planning.

“The problem was that when pandemics were looked at, there was too much emphasis on pandemic flu, and when other pandemics were looked at, including Ebola, including Mers, they tended to be high fatality but low infection,” he said.

“And you know, the regret … is more questions weren’t asked about the sort of pandemic that we faced. But I think many other countries are in the same boat of not knowing what was coming.”

The former prime minister told the inquiry that Letwin had suggested a “red team”.

Cameron said: “As Sally Davies said, there is always a danger of groupthink. We were so focused, or the system was so focused, on pandemic influenza because of the well-known risks of it, that the system had got itself into a belief that that was the most likely pandemic and that was the one that needs to be prepared for. And so I think Oliver’s statement is very powerful.”