Nicola Sturgeon’s government ‘lacked leadership’ in planning for pandemic
Covid inquiry finds that SNP failed to implement UK-wide preparedness recommendations in Scotland
Nicola Sturgeon’s government failed to prepare Scotland for the Covid pandemic thanks to lacks of leadership, planning and “urgency”, a public inquiry has ruled.
The UK Covid inquiry said both the UK and Scottish governments “failed their citizens” by not doing enough to properly plan for the crisis.
In a damning initial report, it said Ms Sturgeon’s SNP administration had adopted a UK-wide pandemic risk assessment without tailoring it for Scotland’s needs.
No separate analysis was conducted before Covid struck that “adequately took into account specific factors that might particularly affect the population of Scotland”, the report said.
Although a major exercise was conducted in Oct 2016 assessing the UK’s pandemic preparedness, eight of its 22 recommendations had not been implemented in Scotland by the time Covid struck in March 2020.
These included updating a strategy that had been drawn up in 2011, testing personal protective equipment (PPE) such as masks to ensure their suitability and expanding the capacity of care homes.
The inquiry, chaired by Baroness Hallett, concluded that the UK Government and three devolved administrations “did not act with sufficient urgency, or at all”.
Instead the lessons that should have been learned from 2016’s Exercise Cygnus “were left to be discovered afresh in the next exercise or, as it transpired, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck”.
Resilience unknown to governments
In another extraordinary finding, it said that the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland administrations “did not, in fact, objectively know the state of their preparedness and resilience”.
A group set up in 2017 to prepare for a pandemic did not meet at all between Nov 2018 and June 2019, with its meetings cancelled or postponed thanks to officials being unavailable or being diverted to planning for a no-deal Brexit.
The inquiry also criticised the “confusing” structure of Scottish Government health agencies responsible for pandemic planning, with some left further from the centre following a series of reorganisations.
The report on the UK’s preparedness was published after the inquiry heard evidence in January that Ms Sturgeon’s government was less “mobilised” for the pandemic than Boris Johnson’s shortly before it started.
Notes taken by David Grieve, a senior Scottish Government civil servant who led the initial response, showed that as late as March 5, 2020, few of his fellow mandarins in Edinburgh believed “this is going to be serious”.
After attending a Cobra meeting on Feb 26 that year, he wrote that it was “clear” that all UK Government departments were “fully engaged and mobilised in a way that the SG [Scottish Government] simply isn’t”.
The inquiry’s findings also echoed those of a 2021 Audit Scotland report which found the Scottish government was not sufficiently prepared.
People in Scotland ‘let down’
More than 17,000 people died in Scotland during the pandemic with Covid listed as one of the causes on their death certificate.
John Swinney, the First Minister, who has faced criticism for deleting his text messages from the pandemic, said that the report’s recommendations would be “carefully” considered.
But Dame Jackie Baillie, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader, said: “During the pandemic, people across Scotland were let down by two ill-prepared governments and the consequences were catastrophic.
“The SNP must respond to these damning findings and set out how it will address the serious shortcomings raised. All those in power at this time owe us complete transparency and honesty as this inquiry continues to seek the truth about what went so tragically wrong.”
Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, said: “SNP ministers including Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney were consistently warned that a pandemic was the single biggest threat to Scotland. Despite that, the Scottish Government they led was completely unprepared and distracted.”
Risk assessment in 2018
Mr Swinney, who was then deputy first minister, commissioned the development of a Scottish risk assessment in 2015 and this was published three years later.
But the inquiry said it was extrapolated from the UK version and “there was no separate analysis for Scotland that adequately took into account specific factors that might particularly affect the population of Scotland”.
Mr Swinney said: “The Scottish Government will carefully consider the recommendations made by Baroness Hallett in the UK Covid-19 Inquiry report and provide detailed responses to the recommendations within the timescales that have been set out.”
He said implementing the recommendations would “require collaborative action with our counterparts across the four nations, and the Scottish Government is committed to working together, at all levels, in a way which allows us to best prevent, prepare for and respond to future civil emergencies”.