By a West Midlands Labour Party member.
The Tories attempts to battle COVID-19 are disintegrating into incompetence, mixed messages and downright lies. This was all to be expected: since taking office in 2010, they have smashed up the UK’s ‘resilience’ or emergency preparedness sector, neglected the country’s critical emergency response infrastructure, and systematically ignored all the warning signs.
After 9/11, the UK built up a well-planned and exercised civil contingencies structure that could respond to any crisis, whether flu, floods or terrorism. As a senior government aide told the Sunday Times (19 April 2020): “We were the envy of the world.”
When David Cameron became Prime Minister, with help from the Liberal Democrats, the slashing and burning began. Planning for emergencies is not in the Tories’ DNA: their whole ethos is based on their neo-liberal economic policies, of ‘just in time’ production to maximise profits and let the market dictate. The ethos of the resilience sector is ‘just in case’. Just as US Republicans view a national health service as ‘socialist’, so the Tories view emergency planning as something Labour did with no net gain or profit, a ‘burden on the taxpayer’.
The axe falls
So the axing began in 2010. I was employed by the government in Civil Contingencies between 1996 until I was made redundant in 2010. Much of that time was spent ensuring preparations were in place, or dealing with local or regional major incidents, but during that period I was also involved in the UK response to nine national emergencies ie ones that require the formation of the UK government’s Civil Contingencies Committee, or ‘COBRA’ (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A). But now, according to the Tories, there were not going to be any more national emergencies.
A ‘quick win’ for the Tories was to axe the regional layer of government. This blunt instrument included the Regional Resilience Teams and the Regional Resilience Forums. These were essential to co-ordinate mutual aid – whether between the emergency services, local authorities or the NHS – within a region. A mere skeleton was left behind, with the original nine Government regions being whittled down to only three: North, Midland, South. Everyone knew this was unworkable – the Midland ‘region’ now stretches from Lincoln to the Welsh border.
The axe then swung at the local Emergency Planning Units based with local authorities. Birmingham, for example, the second largest city in the UK, had 12 Emergency Planning Officers. It now has one. Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire were so emasculated that they have had to merge all three units into one, to cover all three local authority areas. The professional association for emergency planners, the Emergency Planning Society, nearly collapsed in 2013, after it lost half of its membership virtually overnight through the massive cutbacks.
Regional strategic planning junked
The cuts to the Police and Fire Service are well documented, while the military has been slashed. The Army were down to 70,000 troops – just before Christmas, Boris Johnson announced further reductions to the Army, which will now be down to 60,000. So much for Jeremy Corbyn being a ‘threat to national security’.
The NHS were also hammered. Again, out went the regional tier – this time the Regional Strategic Health Authorities (‘Strategic’ being a bit of a clue to their role). Instead, they were replaced by a myriad of Clinical Commissioning Groups. It is like the Roman Empire being replaced by a patchwork of a thousand fiefdoms – and we all know what that led to: The Dark Ages.
And with that went many resources. In the past six years, the NHS has lost 11,500 hospital beds. South Korea, with a population of 51 million, has three times as many hospital beds as the UK. That is not an average or a percentage comparison, it is actual numbers.
Also closed down was the Central Office of Information in 2011, despite its historically proven role in ‘warning and informing the public’, with clear messaging in times of crisis.
Planning ignored
All threats to the UK are assessed and then placed on the National Risk Register. It’s not that complicated a process: you assess all risks on an ‘impact v. probability’ matrix, then focus on those that score high in both categories. The highest threat in the past decade has always been a flu pandemic, because we know the flu virus ‘morphs’ every 40 years or so into one we do not have a vaccine for, and the cycle has been for a new virus around about now. It is not a risk that ‘might’ happen – all the scientific evidence is there to show it will happen.
So for the Tories not to prepare for the current outbreak is criminal. They say they will “follow the science” but they clearly haven’t.
They ignored all the warning signs for all threats. In 2011, Exercise Watermark was held to test flood defences. It was the largest civilian exercise ever held, to test whether the recommendations of the Pitt Review (held after the 2007 summer floods) had been implemented. They clearly hadn’t, with flood defences clearly in a state of array, and the Fire Service needing a massive influx of boats. The Tories’ response to Watermark was to make 1,600 Environment Agency flood workers redundant. No recommendations from Watermark were acted on, and hence as we saw in January and February, no defence to the growing threat of annual flooding.
In 2016, there was a national outcry over the findings into the deaths of six residents in a fire at Lakanal House, a tower block where there were concerns about the external fittings contributing to the deaths. The Tory Housing Minister pledged to review building regulations. Instead, they did nothing. Then came Grenfell a year later.
So too in 2016, a national exercise looking at a flu pandemic – Exercise Cygnus – warned of a massive lack of PPE and the need for 10,000 more ventilators for the NHS. Again, no response or action.
Brexit focus
The warnings from Exercise Cygnus were ignored because the Tories switched the remnants of the emergency planning service to preparing for Brexit. It is not without irony that those who championed Brexit with promises of a new golden era, have been in a blind panic since 2018 about its reality. With good cause, as there are a thousand and one consequences of Brexit that have remained unanswered.
For example, what will happen to the 55,000 EU nationals working in the under-resourced NHS or the 80,000 EU nationals working in the equally neglected adult care sector? In medical research too – yes, between 2007 and 2013, the UK put 5.4 billion Euros into the medical research European Union fund, but it got 8.8 billion Euros back into UK research (Office of National Statistics): where will the extra 3.4 billion come from?
All of this meant nothing was done about a flu pandemic. Or floods for that matter.
The new Nero
The ‘Swiss Cheese Model’ is a risk assessment method to help organisations realise how holes in their various layers of defence can align to create a catastrophe. Imagine slices of Swiss Cheese, with all their different holes, all on spindles rotating independently. The law of probability ensures that at some point, some of the holes will align, creating one big hole.
The point is to demonstrate to organisations that a hole in whatever layer is not acceptable – it is not safe to say ‘we have a gap here, but don’t worry as the next line of defence will cover it.’ The Tories have been kicking holes into the resilience structure for a decade – the last hole to align in the current crisis is Boris Johnson.
We were beginning to get the feel of Johnson’s ‘command and control’ abilities during the floods at the beginning of the year. He didn’t call a COBRA meeting – he was sunning himself in the Caribbean on the island of Mustique.
The World Health Organisation began to ring the alarm bells about COVID-19 on 17 January. The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) In the UK met on 22 January, warning that unless the spread forecast for the UK was not cut by 60 per cent, the NHS would collapse. A COBRA was finally called for 24 January but chaired by the Health Secretary – Boris was much more excited about signing off the EU withdrawal on that day.
Johnson missed five first Cobra meetings
But despite the COBRA meeting, no action was taken, other than platitudes that ‘everything was under control’. Johnson did not attend the next four COBRA meetings either, two of the weeks being spent at his Chevening country retreat. As a senior advisor told the Sunday Times (19 April 2020): “…what you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends…There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning.”
He didn’t attend his first COBRA until 2 March. Then promptly fell ill. This five-week period of ineptitude and inaction has cost us dearly. Thousands have died because of it. They lost the opportunity to swiftly move to testing – ‘test, test, test’ as the WHO have been urging since early March, after they saw the success in South Korea. There, they began testing from the start, tracking down virus carriers and all they had been in contact with, and isolating them. At its peak, nearly 8,000 people were infected – yet ‘only’ 236 have died to date. Germany followed their testing model – despite a larger population than the UK, they have kept the death rate down to 4,500.
When this is all over, there will be a reckoning. We used to be called overdramatic when we chanted ‘Tory cuts kill!’. Now we know they really do. And the Tories must pay for it.
April 20, 2020
