UK focused too much on flu preparedness, Cameron tells Covid inquiry

David Cameron admitted during an evidence session at the UK Covid-19 inquiry on Monday that pandemic planning had focused too much on influenza while he was in office from 2010 to 2016.

But the former prime minister, the first politician to appear before the public inquiry, rejected claims that his government’s austerity programme had undermined the ability of the NHS to respond to the health crisis.

“Much more time was spent on the dangers of pandemic flu rather than on potential pandemics of other more respiratory diseases — like Covid turned out to be,” he said. “I think this is so important because so many consequences follow from that.”

Cameron spent an hour and a half in the witness box in London, questioned first by Kate Blackwell, deputy counsel to the inquiry, and then by Claire Mitchell for Scottish Covid Bereaved, which campaigns on behalf of those who lost loved ones during the pandemic.

The ex-prime minister was asked whether his administration’s public spending constraints reduced Britain’s ability to cope with Covid and why pandemic planning did not anticipate a highly contagious respiratory virus spreading through asymptomatic transmission.

The former prime minister repeatedly challenged the view that the NHS would have responded better to the crisis if it had received more funding from his government.

“The biggest thing was to get the British economy and the public finances in a state where they were capable of responding to the next crisis,” he said.

Without fiscal prudence, government debt might have been £1tn higher, he said. He added that a financial and fiscal crisis would have made it harder to fight the pandemic through increased spending, for example via the furlough scheme that supported workers during lockdown.

Cameron found it “very hard” to explain why a gap remained in UK preparedness after a series of government inquiries and reports on pandemic threats between 2010 and 2016, including Mers coronavirus and Ebola as well as flu.

Hospitals in Hong Kong had to have three months of personal protective equipment, Cameron noted. “I was never asked: ‘Can we have funding for three months PPE supplies for every hospital’ but had we been asked we would have granted it.”

“That’s not a huge commitment,” he added. “But it comes out of planning for the right sort of pandemic.”

Cameron closed by telling Mitchell: “I’m desperately sorry about the loss of life. So many people have lost people that are close to them . . . and people also suffered in all sorts of ways through the pandemic. And that’s why this inquiry is so important.”

The Covid inquiry was set up to examine the UK’s response to and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and is due to hold public hearings until at least 2026.

The next politicians to give evidence will be former chancellor George Osborne and Sir Oliver Letwin, former cabinet minister on Tuesday, followed by chancellor Jeremy Hunt and cabinet office secretary Oliver Dowden on Wednesday.

The leaders of the government’s scientific response to Covid, chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty and former chief scientist Sir Patrick Vallance, will appear on Thursday.