‘Siloed and isolated action has been proven to fail again and again' in the country's response to coronavirus, a debrief by a cross-government review has warned.

The C-19 national foresight group, which has been capturing live learning and insight from the pandemic, found a ‘strong and persistent theme' had been the ‘lack of strategy and shared plan, which reduced our ability to tackle COVID-19's impact on our society'.

It identified a lack of clarity and leadership in the strategic management of the pandemic and said ‘inconsistent and misleading messages from governmental authorities during COVID-19 have led to confusion and frustration'.

The review team, which has been speaking to people involved in the emergency response since March, said ‘command and control from a variety of structures above the local level made decision-making, allocation of resources and coordination of response difficult for LRFs [local resilience forums],' and subsidiarity had been ‘significantly eroded' by the crisis.

It read: ‘Delegates reported being frustrated by a centralised system of decision-making, with delays in provision of information and resources, and a hierarchical command and control structure whereby LRFs did not feel that key information and decision-making was shared with them in a timely and supportive manner.

‘The centralised nature of the UK's response to COVID-19 may have acted as a bottleneck to the provision of support or intelligence to LRFs and the communities they serve. 

‘The structures currently in place for the management of COVID-19 are threatening subsidiarity.'

The review comes as senior council officers are privately growing more frustrated with their interactions with Whitehall.

Several sources suggested that senior council officials increasingly faced meeting junior civil servants who are not well briefed.

One senior sector figure condemned the ‘centralising instinct of Whitehall,' adding: ‘ When the history is written we'll see that had the money been channelled to local authorities to devise local systems we would all have been better off.'

A County Councils' Network consultation response said ‘national centralised approaches' to test and trace and the distribution of personal protective equipment had ‘often struggled to respond as quickly and effectively to need on the ground as localised systems benefitting from local knowledge'.