By Peter Power, FBCI
On 20th November 2025 the UK Covid-19 Inquiry published its second report (with more to follow in 2026/7). Headed by Baroness Hallett and at an estimated cost of c£200m, it should be possible for the inquiry to take a calm, detached view of all the many lessons learned that are crucial to enhance overall UK resilience, especially as:
- The initial report made it abundantly clear that it is not ‘if’ another pandemic will hit us, but ‘when’.
- In tune with this, the current UK publicly available National Risk Register (NRR) positions the threat of another pandemic as a top non-malicious risk with catastrophic impact on the UK. Presciently, the 2017 NRR came to the same conclusion.
Writing in The Times newspaper on 21st November, experienced journalist Fraser Nelson, having read the November report, summarised some of the findings: “Ministers and officials started off cautious and open-minded but soon succumbed to tribalism. Politician, scientist and civil servant alike started to see it as a battle between the pro-science lockdowners and reckless, heartless deniers. So those asking questions, whether epidemiologists or chancellors, were mocked and marginalised … The task now is for a pandemic response system that is more capable of learning… In the Covid chaos, dissenters were urgently needed. But what should have been a scientific question was over-simplified, moralised and politicised, with difficult questions ignored”.
How true, but I sadly feel the basis of the 19 recommendations in the most recent report are rather too light on learning lessons and too heavy on condemning incompetent individuals who have now all moved on to other jobs: as if blaming them – and welcoming their subsequent move to other positions – solves most of the problems. A fundamental mistake. We now know every small detail about how Boris Johnson handled Covid-19, but the next pandemic will not be Covid-19, and he will not be the Prime Minister.
I have previously written an article drawing attention to what I consider to be the inappropriate adversarial nature of cross-examinations during the evidence-gathering stage, conducted by barristers seemingly more familiar with scoring points to prove guilt or innocence in criminal courts, rather than looking for lessons to be learned. This is a key point: I think this was an unfortunate error in the inquiry process that probably reflects the otherwise distinguished career of Baroness Hallett, who for many years specialised in criminal law.
There is an urgent need for answers on the greatest questions for governments about pandemics, starting with what more can be done, if anything, to stop the next one happening – especially since a future pandemic is almost a certainty. The only real questions are when will it happen? And how impactful will it be?
Lessons from the lessons learned process
Baroness Hallett correctly stated: “There was often no right answer or good outcome,” when criticising the Government response for being “too little, too late”. This flags up an important point.
BS11200, written as guidance and published well in advance of the pandemic (I am an author), clearly states: “Apparent solutions are not right or wrong, but better or worse … Decision-makers might have to choose the least bad solution. Most choices come with a penalty of some sort and there is no ideal solution”. US General Colin Powell summed it up neatly when he suggested making decisions on just 40% of information can be too risky. Similarly, so is waiting until you have at least 70% of data. The former suggests too much detail is probably missing to make effective decisions. The latter is usually reached only when the time for urgent decisions has passed and it is therefore too late, as the scenario has most likely spread further. Exactly as happened with Covid. The ideal time for crisis decision-making is therefore between 40% – 70% of wished-for information.
As highlighted earlier, the current (2025) version of the NRR once again highlights pandemic as a leading risk. I just hope this time more is done to prepare in advance. This needs the analysis of the Covid Inquiry to shift from ‘who said what’ in the blame game towards much more important issues of learning and national governance. And inherent in that, the need for much increased national resilience to include horizon scanning, situational awareness, agility, and adapting.
During the criminal court-style inquiry stage, UK parliamentarian William Hague wrote an excellent article making the same point. He concluded: “One of the lessons to be learnt from Covid might well be that there must be a better way to learn them”.
Hague also suggested something else relevant to the problems inherent with the ongoing Covid Inquiry, something that I think is most pertinent but not sufficiently recognised. He wrote: “The problem is encapsulated by the slogan used by the inquiry to encourage the public to provide evidence: ‘Every story matters’. That is a comforting thought but in a country of 67 million people it brings the danger of countless trees taking our eyes off the shape of the forest. Other countries do it differently: Sweden’s national commission of inquiry published its final, 1,700-page report, in February 2022. Major parliamentary inquiries in France and Australia have been completed”.
The Cullen review into handguns after the Dunblane massacre in 1996 and the foot-and-mouth inquiry in 2001, although dealing with very different scenarios, both led to swift and meaningful action, based very much on learning important lessons. However, I fear that might not be the case with the Covid Inquiry. Fraser Nelson concluded his article by pointing out: “The task now is to have a pandemic response system, above all, more capable of learning. Without it, we are fated to enter the next crisis just as blind as we entered the last”.
Spot on, but I wonder if we might have just wasted some of the £200m inquiry cost by pursuing the guilt of individuals, rather than thoroughly identifying all of the organizational lessons that we urgently need to learn?
The best way to summarise the above might be this quote from Peter Drucker:
“Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.”
The author
Peter Power FBCI FIRM BA JP has considerable hands-on experience of real time events and for many years has supported various governments and organizations in several different countries. He occasionally appears on TV and radio as an expert guest. He is also a past member of the UK Security Review Commission (IPPR) and previous Chairman of the World Conference on Disaster Management. Peter is a co-author of the UK Cabinet Office / BSI standard on Crisis Management (BS11200) and in an earlier life was instrumental in helping to create/promulgate the UK ‘Gold/Silver/Bronze’ Crisis Command System. He is quoted in the UK Government Guide on Integrated Emergency Management and is the author of many guidebooks, including the original UK Govt. (then DTI) issued guidebook on business continuity. Nowadays his focus is very much on promoting organizational resilience.
Peter is an Editorial Advisor for Resilience Forward.
