All in public service remember the bleak period of the Covid pandemic. It is welcome that Baroness Hallett, in her first interim report last week, points to the ‘dedication of health and social care workers and civil and public servants' without whom outcomes would have been even worse, and also pays tribute to ‘local authority workers and volunteers'.
This first report focuses only on resilience and preparedness of the UK, and the second, on decision-making and political governance, will be particularly important for local government. It is here that the dysfunctionality, within government and between tiers of government, amply displayed during evidence sessions, is likely to receive sharp criticism.
Hallett's report already points to ways in which the marginalisation of local government, coupled with over-complicated institutional arrangements, hampered the UK's pandemic response. The section on ‘Exercise Cygnus', a three-day, cross-government exercise in pandemic planning held in 2018 is especially striking. Hallett notes that ‘the role of local authorities, local responders, and the voluntary, community and social enterprise sectors in the exercises was not adequately considered', with erstwhile Local Government Association (LGA) chief executive Mark Lloyd's observing that only eight out of 42 Local Resilience Forums were involved. Remarkably, the LGA was not sighted on its conclusions, and was completely unaware of ‘Exercise Alice', another planning exercise held in 2016.
The challenges faced by the UK were not unique: various European countries faced issues with preparedness, territorial coordination, and inadequate leadership.
The report contains exceptionally complicated ‘spaghetti diagrams' of structures, and wisely concludes that ‘proper preparedness and resilience can only come from systems (at the UK level and in each government or administration) that are streamlined, better integrated and more focused on what is to be achieved. The systems should be simplified and recalibrated …' and that ‘there should be fewer entities, working more closely with each other and within more clearly defined roles'. This may not prove entirely straightforward in the UK context: the relationship between devolved administrations and Westminster is testy (witness legal actions over competence on gender recognition between Scotland and the UK and the intermittent suspension of the Northern Ireland assembly). The role of combined authorities is both developing and uneven, with Greater Manchester's role in health particularly well-developed. The mixed geographies of unitary and two-tier local government (which may yet be augmented by non-mayoral combined authorities) could present a further challenge. One conclusion of this is that preparedness for future pandemics is particularly important given such complicated governance; conversely, elegant simplicity is unlikely ever to characterise the UK's system of governance, so those developing future resilience plans will have to take the world as they find it. Layered on top is the question of resourcing – an issue which Hallett is, we suspect, saving for future reports – but which will be a major factor in the ability of local and regional government to respond in the future.
The challenges faced by the UK were not unique: various European countries faced issues with preparedness, territorial coordination, and inadequate leadership. Even in Germany, where co-ordination, particularly in the first phase of the pandemic, was generally better, there are parallels with the UK. The Federal Audit Office published a report in 2023 which was critical of the ‘lack of co-ordination between ministries', and called for ‘competencies and responsibilities to be defined and clearly demarcated from each other'. While during the first phase of the pandemic in Germany there was reasonably strong co-ordination between different levels of government (including a very prominent role for meetings between the Chancellor and minister presidents of the sixteen states), in later phases, individual states increasingly went their own way, dividing into those who were more and less restrictive, fuelled by political rivalries. This hampered nationwide measures on testing and containment. In 2021, the country amended its pandemic legislation to give more power to the central government and reduce inconsistency.
Italy, the first European country seriously hit by Covid-19, exemplified a system where central, regional, and local decision-makers struggled to create a unified response, instead competing with each other and having a complex mish-mash of different powers. The early phase of the pandemic was marked by confusion and blame-shifting between government levels. Centralisation eventually became the only viable emergency strategy, but it soon proved unsustainable as both a cooperative political culture and institutional structures to allow co-ordination were missing. The healthcare system's territorial fragmentation, following 1990s devolution, caused significant discrepancies in regional outcomes, even more pronounced than in the UK. Political disagreements between regions and parties delayed the establishment of a public inquiry into pandemic management until March 2024, and it has yet to collect evidence and produce meaningful recommendations.
Turning back to the UK, there are early signs that the new government is seeking to defuse tensions between different tiers of government: Prime Minister Keir Starmer's first meetings with leaders of devolved administrations, and hosting a cross-party gathering of metro-mayors, were important statements of intent. But responding positively to the Baroness Hallett's damning analysis will require more than political will, but also technical finesse in bringing clarity to a complex array of institutional structures. This will not be a comfortable exercise for any level of government, but we owe it to the victims of the last pandemic to get it right for the future.
Ed Turner is co-director of the Aston Centre for Europe and reader in politics at Aston University; he is also deputy leader of Oxford City Council. Davide Vampa is senior lecturer in territorial politics at the University of Edinburgh and co-director of the Centre on Constitutional Change.
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