Whitehall officials were forced to cancel workshops to discuss councils' pandemic flu preparations because of ‘limited take up' months before coronavirus hit, The MJ has learnt.
The scheduled workshops in January 2018 for local resilience forums (LRF) to discuss their pandemic influenza preparedness had to be postponed after not enough delegates came forward.
Organisers said a ‘good mixture of local partners with a knowledge of, and interest in, pandemic flu planning' needed to attend to have made the events ‘useful'.
One council chief executive said presciently at the time of the cancellation: ‘If a real flu pandemic arrived we might not get that much notice and we would have to deal with it.'
An email from Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government resilience adviser Denise Welch read: ‘We are very keen for the workshops to go ahead but so far we have very few names for each one.
‘We want to run four separate workshops to ensure there is a good geographical spread, but if there aren't enough local partners at each we will need to consider consolidating some to ensure they are worthwhile.'
The workshops in Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol and London had been organised to ‘discuss aspects of sector resilience in a pan flu scenario (with particular focus on the impact on, and role of local authorities)' and to ‘share good practice and update on national work'.
A summary read: ‘The workshops will be of greatest benefit to those with a good working knowledge of pan flu arrangements in their area/for their organisation, and an overview of how an outbreak might affect partner organisations or organisations across the LRF.
'There will be a particular focus on the impact on local authorities.'
The struggle to drum up interest in pandemic plans came after the final report on the findings of Exercise Cygnus – a three-day dry run for a mass outbreak of killer flu – found the UK's preparedness and response was ‘not currently sufficient to cope with the extreme demands of a severe pandemic of the type that would have a nationwide impact across all sectors'.
An evaluation by the Cabinet Office following Cygnus found that LRFs would have ‘difficulty operating their plans and capabilities' at such a scale and the ‘coordination of resources at the national level may be required in some scenarios'.
A separate Government debrief after Cygnus said much of the information coming in from LRFs had been ‘conflicting, ranging from the situation being under control, to near catastrophic, and it was difficult to pull this together into one coherent picture'.
It added: ‘The level of detail provided also varied hugely, making it hard to pull out relevant information.'
Richard Stokoe, who lectures at the University of South Wales on planning for disasters and civil contingencies, said: ‘The thing with disaster risk reduction is people don't find it terribly sexy until it happens.
‘Were we fully prepared?
'Of course we weren't.
'There's always more things that people can do.
‘People become complacent about threat.
'That's just human nature.'
A spokesman for the Local Government Association said: 'Preparing for emergencies is a key priority for councils and LRF partners.
'Robust emergency plans have seen councils able to rise to the challenge of leading local communities during this coronavirus crisis, protecting the vulnerable, keeping services running and supporting ongoing national efforts to beat this virus.'
Separately, data compiled by LRFs this week showed that only Greater Manchester needed ‘major support' in dealing with coronavirus, with issues with business continuity and adult social care said to be having a ‘significant impact'.
Some 20 out of 38 LRFs said issues with personal protective equipment were having a ‘significant impact' while four said the same for adult social care.
