Matt Hancock says he is ‘profoundly sorry’ for ‘huge error’ in UK’s pandemic planning – UK politics live

Hancock said the UK came “within hours” of running out of medicines for intensive care during Covid.

And he claimed the only reason this did not happen was because of the work done for a possible no-deal Brexit. He said:

[The government came] extremely close, within hours, of running out of medicines for intensive care during that pandemic. It wasn’t widely reported at the time … and I think the only reason that we didn’t run out is because of the work that Steve Oldfield and his team did, which they did during 2019, in preparation for a no-deal Brexit.

Hancock said during Covid the government “knew more about the pharmaceutical supply chain in the UK than at any time in history”. This information was vital, and it meant “the difference between running out and not running out of drugs in intensive care in the pandemic”.

He went on:

So when it comes to the question of the overall impact of Brexit, absolutely the paperwork is very clear that some of the preparation work was stopped, and a small number of people would move off that work.

On the other hand, we were better prepared in terms of supply chains.

Keith is now showing Hancock a letter sent to Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, in March 2019 saying that responsibility for pandemic planning had transferred to his office because of the no-deal work being done within the Department of Health and Social Care.

He says the letter shows that some pandemic planning was paused. That was a decision of great significance, wasn’t it?

Hancock says it was a decision. But he does not accept it was “of great significance”.

The number of individuals involved in this work was limited, he says.

And he says, for the reasons he has explained earlier (see 10.42am and 11.34am), he is not convinced that extra pandemic planning, under the doctrine then in place, would have made that much difference.

Going back to the Covid inquiry, Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, told it that, even if the UK had been hit by a flu pandemic (which it had prepared for thoroughly), there would have been problems because the planning was flawed. He said:

My central point that to say that the main problem with that plan was that it was a flu plan and there was and we ended up with a coronavirus pandemic is, of course, a flaw, but it is not the central flaw.

If we’d had a flu pandemic, we would have had a massive problem because of the doctrinal failure of how to respond to it as well – that was a much bigger error, it was an error across the western world, but it was a much bigger error and it is absolutely central.

He argued that the key doctrinal flaw was the assumption that planning should focus on dealing with the outcome of a pandemic, not with preventing it. (See 10.42am.) He said the UK should be ready to implement policies like lockdown more quickly.

It is central to what we must learn as a country that we’ve got to be ready to hit a pandemic hard: that we’ve got to be able to take action – lockdown action if necessary, that is wider, earlier, more stringent than feels comfortable at the time.

And the failure to plan for that was a much bigger flaw in the strategy than the fact that it was targeted at the wrong disease …

The doctrinal flaw was the biggest by a long way because if we’d had a flu pandemic, we still would have had the problem of no plan in place for lockdown, no prep for how to do one, no work on what, how best to lock down with the least damage.

I understand deeply the consequences of lockdown and the negative consequences for many, many people – many of which persist to this day.

A standards watchdog has said that Boris Johnson’s failure to comply with outside job rules before starting as a Daily Mail columnist shows how “out of date” the regulatory system in this area now is.

Lord Pickles, the Tory peer who chairs the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), made the point in a letter to Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, published today.

Acoba advises on what second jobs it is appropriate for former ministers and former senior officials to accept soon after leaving government. The system is designed to avoid conflicts of interest. But its advice is not binding.

In his letter to Dowden, who is in charge of the Cabinet Office, Pickles also suggested that corruption risks are not being monitored because the system is outdated. Pickles said:

Mr Johnson’s role as a columnist for the Daily Mail was trailed by the media outlet in a front page pre-announcement of a new columnist on the morning of Friday 16 June. Mr Johnson later the same day confirmed his new role in a pre-recorded video on Twitter around 1pm, 30 minutes after submitting an application to Acoba for advice. This is a clear and unambiguous breach of the government’s rules and requirements of the ministerial code. Mr Johnson is familiar with both. He set out the standards expected in the ministerial code whilst prime minister and has had made previous applications under the rules, including a similar failure to follow the rules when he left ministerial office in 2018.

The risks under the rules in media and journalistic appointments are usually regarded as limited and have been subject to a standard set of conditions preventing individuals from: drawing on privileged information; and lobbying the UK government.

Mr Johnson’s case is a further illustration of how out of date the government’s business rules are. They were designed to offer guidance when “good chaps” could be relied on to observe the letter and the spirit of the rules. If it ever existed, that time has long passed and the contemporary world has outgrown the rules. This forces Acoba to spend time on low-risk applications at the expense of more complex and challenging cases. New areas of corruption are not monitored because they were not envisaged when the rules were drawn up.

Pickles has also published his letter to Johnson saying he committed “a clear and unambiguous breach of the rules”.

Matt Hancock has said that he thinks of those who died during Covid, and their loved ones left behind, every day.

He made the comment in his witness statement to the inquiry. The statement has not been published in full, but an excerpt from it was shown on screen at the opening of the inquiry. In it Hancock said:

There isn’t a day that goes by that I do not think about all those who lost their lives to this awful disease or the loved ones they have left behind.

My office in parliament overlooks the National Memorial Covid Wall. I have visited the wall and been able to read about many of the families affected. I express my deepest sympathies to all those affected.

Keith asks Hancock why he did not ask officials where the antivirals (drugs) where for a non-flu pandemic, and where the stockpiles were for a non-flu pandemic? He says Hancock did not need a formal submission from civil servants to ask these questions.

He says Hancock could have “pursued and harried [officials] until something was done”.

Hancock says the pandemic was unprecedented. And he says that, as secretary of state, he had to address multiple problems. He says he was told that tackling problems like obesity were the main health challenges.

Hancock expands on his belief that the UK’s pandemic planning was wrong. And he says this was a problem for other countries too.

He says that is why is “emotionally committed” to the inquiry. It must get to the bottom of this “huge error in the doctrine”, he says.

He goes on to apologise.

I am profoundly sorry for the impact that it had, I’m profoundly sorry for each death that has occurred.

And I also understand why, for some, it will be hard to take that apology from me. I understand that, I get it.

But it is honest and heartfelt, and I’m not very good at talking about my emotions and how I feel. But that is honest and true.

And all I can do is ensure that this inquiry gets to the bottom of it, and that for the future, we learn the right lessons, so that we stop a pandemic in its tracks much, much earlier.

And that we have the systems in place ready to do that, because I’m worried that they’re being dismantled as we speak.

Back at the Covid inquiry, Matt Hancock says he was told that the UK was well prepared for a pandemic.

He was told the UK had PPE stored up. It did – but it was hard to access it quickly, he says.

He was told they had the ability to do testing. They did, he said – but they were not able to scale up testing.

He was told they had drugs available. They did, but they were only suitable for flu, he says.

He says the UK had a doctrine on pandemic planning. And that doctrine was “wrong”.

The absolutely central problem with the planning in the UK was that the doctrine was wrong.

The attitude, the doctrine of the UK was to plan for the consequences of a disaster.

Can we buy enough body bags? Where are we going to bury the dead? And that was completely wrong.

Of course, it’s important to have that in case you fail to stop a pandemic, but central to pandemic planning needs to be – how do you stop the disaster from happening in the first place? How do you suppress the virus?

The doctrine was about planning for the consequences of dealing with a pandemic, for example, being able to cope with large numbers of dead bodies, he says.

He says the planning should have focused on avoiding a pandemic in the first place.

(This echoes one of the arguments made by Keith himself, in his opening statement to the inquiry two weeks ago.)

UPDATE: Hancock said:

I was told that we have plans in these areas.

So for instance, on stockpiles, I was told that we had a very significant stockpile of PPE. And we did. The problem was that it was extremely hard to get it out fast enough when the crisis hit.

I was told that we were good at developing tests, and indeed we were. We developed a test in the first few days after the genetic code of Covid-19 was published. The problem was there was no plan in place to scale testing that we could execute.

On antivirals, we had a stockpile of antivirals for a flu, but not for a coronavirus.

On vaccines, I was concerned that we weren’t in a strong-enough position because we were reliant on manufacturing vaccines overseas. And I thought that in a pandemic scenario, force majeure would mean it would be hard to get hold of vaccine doses if they were physically manufactured overseas no matter what our contracts said.

And so I insisted that we pushed on domestic manufacture and sought the funding to deliver on that.