Chaired by crossbench peer Heather Hallett, the inquiry pointed to Britain’s preparations for a no-deal Brexit, which had been going down across the time of a serious authorities coaching train on responding to an influenza pandemic.
After the coaching operation — named “Train Cygnus” — in 2016, 22 suggestions had been made to enhance the U.Ok.’s response to a pandemic. Simply eight of those had been accomplished by June 2020, six months after the pandemic started — and the inquiry cites the competing calls for of no-deal Brexit planning as a motive for this “inaction.”
Different avenues of preparation for potential pandemics had been additionally paused because of “Operation Yellowhammer,” the codename for Whitehall’s contingency planning for a no-deal Brexit.
The existence of the Yellowhammer operation was leaked in 2018. It coated actions to be taken if Britain had crashed out of the European Union with out a deal, figuring out areas of threat.
“A number of witnesses from the U.Ok. authorities and devolved administrations advised the inquiry that quite a few workstreams for pandemic preparedness had been paused because of a reallocation of assets to Operation Yellowhammer,” the report states.
Elsewhere, the inquiry pointed to “a number of vital flaws” within the U.Ok.’s methods of constructing preparedness, together with an “outdated” technique, a failure to account for “pre-existing well being and societal inequalities and deprivation” and a “lack of enough management.”
