The Government says that the UK’s readiness for future pandemics is being overhauled through the publication of a new Pandemic Preparedness Strategy. This is being backed by around £1 billion of investment in health protection measures including enhancing access to essential vaccines and therapeutics, improving pandemic surveillance systems, and expanding the ability to roll out testing to the whole population.
Published by the Department for Health and Social Care, the strategy includes the following measures:
- PPE stockpiles will continue to be replenished with a variety of products and sizes..
- Departmental pandemic response plans will be reviewed to ensure that Government services and critical national infrastructure can be maintained effectively in a pandemic.
- An ‘All Pandemic Hazards Bill’ will be drafted to ensure that the Government has legislative options ready to review and introduce as necessary in response to a range of pathogens. This will sit alongside a suite of prepared options for community protection measures to support swift decision-making and prioritisation to keep people safe.
- UKHSA will build a new set of services to manage large scale testing, contact tracing, and other scaled public health response measures.
- Chemicals and equipment stockpiles needed for testing will be built up further to protect against supply risks that could develop in the early stages of a pandemic.
- Data requirements to support decision-making will be reviewed to ensure information needed in a pandemic response is available, transparent, and can be shared quickly between organizations and with the public. The new strategy replaces a previous strategy for Pandemic Influenza published in 2011.
The Pandemic Preparedness Strategy has been directly informed by early findings from the largest ever pandemic exercise in UK history which took place in autumn 2025. Exercise Pegasus saw every Government department, the devolved governments, arms-length bodies, local resilience forums, and external stakeholders respond to the spread of a simulated pathogen over a number of weeks.
