Re:View

Re:View 21 November 2025

A week before Budget, speculation continues about the measures the Chancellor will take. Plus announcements from the Government on breakfast clubs and new immigration policy, there’s plenty for Whitehall watchers to keep up with.

But more than three years after the Covid-19 pandemic stopped being a national crisis, the Inquiry’s second (of ten) reports was published yesterday afternoon. We can expect policy analysts to spend the next few days combing through the 800+ pages of this report for damning details about how the last Government and the devolved administrations handled the pandemic.

But it’s hard to meaningfully litigate the past, and the inquiry have a tough job to do if they’re going to contribute to more than just headlines. Aside from helping the nation understand what happened, giving victims a voice, and apportioning praise and blame, the helpful part for policymakers is whether the Inquiry can recommend productive changes which can better preparedness for future crises.

Module 1, published in July 2024, focused on preparation, and how policies like the Civil Contingencies Secretariat’s “lead department model” didn’t ensure that government was prepared for the top risk on the National Risk Register for many years before 2020. But Module 2, published yesterday, focuses on core decision-making and governance, where there will be many lessons for this and future governments on how to lead in a crisis.

I was a civil servant at the Treasury during the pandemic, and a lot of this rings true. But an area I don’t feel gets enough attention, outside of some discussion regarding the role of SAGE, is groupthink. It’s an area which we’ve identified as a problem throughout Whitehall, not just at the political levels of Westminster, and wrote about in our own report on pandemic preparedness. But I think it’s best summarised by Professor Dame Angela McLean, then Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence, in her evidence to the inquiry from 2023:

“The nicest thing that an academic can do for a colleague is point out why they're wrong before it goes out into the world and somebody unfriendly points out why they're wrong.”

“Whereas it is very frequent in a civil service meeting that as somebody stands up the very first thing they will say is ‘I agree with everything that's been said’, and you're sat there thinking, ‘Well, you can't have been listening then’.”

The recommendations of Module 2 make no mention of well-tested ideas like ‘red-teams’ to separately scrutinise and challenge plans, and it doesn’t spend enough time interrogating why (from their own evidence), when Patrick Vallance initially raised the idea of a lockdown, current and former Cabinet Secretaries were “incandescent” with him for raising it with them...

Until such practices become much more common, it seems likely that the next crisis will suffer many of the same errors of preparation and decision-making, that the pandemic did. And with the Defence Select Committee reporting this week that we are not prepared to defend our own territory in the face of direct aggression from a hostile power, that is more important than ever.