David Cameron was warned in 2013 UK risk assessment ‘too secret’

David Cameron’s chief scientific adviser warned him in 2013 that the UK’s assessment of risks, including from pandemics, was not being used properly to prevent and mitigate dangers and was being kept too secret, the Covid-19 public inquiry has heard.

Sir Mark Walport, the government’s chief scientific adviser until 2017, raised the concern with the then PM in a letter and told the inquiry the national risk assessment (NRA) “was locked in departmental safes most of the time and I felt that that wasn’t the most effective way”.

“The whole point of [a] risk assessment is that you will be able to use it to see if you can stop something happening in the first place,” he said. “If it is going to happen – to mitigate your numbers, reduce its effects.”

The public inquiry into the UK’s Covid response has heard claims that too much stress was placed on planning for a flu pandemic and that the UK was badly unprepared for the different virus that struck in early 2020.

Walport also told the inquiry that not enough was done across government to build broader national resilience against risks. He said he raised this with Cameron in 2013 and again with the Cabinet Office’s civil contingencies directorate a year later, saying he sounded like “a broken record”.

Walport, a member of the prime minister’s council for science and technology until 2020, backed calls from Oliver Letwin, the former Cabinet Office minister, for the creation of a new post of minister for resilience.

On Tuesday, Letwin told the inquiry’s investigation into the UK’s preparedness for Covid-19, that Britain’s critical national infrastructure remained “wildly underresilient”. Walport also described the NRA as “still a work in progress”.

On Monday, Cameron said 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.

The NRA placed pandemic flu as the highest risk with a medium to high likelihood of a catastrophic or significant impact in a reasonable worst case scenario.

Walport said: “Rather than focusing solely on influenza, it ought to have recognised the fact that pandemics come in many different forms.”

The assessment on emerging infectious diseases was a medium to high likelihood of a moderate impact. But there was “low confidence in the overall assessment based on a relatively small body of knowledge”.

Walport said this was because these diseases hadn’t existed before.

He defended the decision for the nation’s preparedness to be focused on a specific pandemic risk rather than a range of options as has been proposed by others. But he said it was important to build more national resilience not just for biological and medical risks, but also in relation to infrastructure.

“As we have become more efficient, we have become less resilient, and you can have cascading failures very, very quickly,” he said. “So for example, when the supertanker got stuck in the Suez Canal, suddenly supply lines were disrupted.”

He called for a greater public health workforce “that could help with screening for hypertension, diabetes, heart disease … [which could then be] repurposed for the purposes of vaccination, and things like testing [in a pandemic]”.

The inquiry continues.