Nuffield Trust response to the first Covid Inquiry report

Commenting on the first report from the Covid Inquiry, Thea Stein, Chief Executive of the Nuffield Trust said:

“This sobering report forensically details the tragic consequences of multiple failures of the British State to adequately prepare for the Covid-19 pandemic. The recommendations will require careful consideration at all levels of public policy to fully understand how we can manage future pandemics and prevent such devastating loss from ever happening again.

“Our evidence to the Inquiry showed that the overall picture for both the NHS and social care was one of funding not keeping pace with need, chronic short-termism and inadequate investment in measures that would have made the NHS and social care more resilient to the pandemic. It is hard to have confidence that things would be any better today.

“In particular we highlighted the poor state of buildings across the NHS and in social care to allow for social distancing and air flow. We chronicled lower numbers of hospital beds than international counterparts – and a pattern of running hospitals at overly high levels of bed occupancy. We highlighted a woeful lack of planning to secure the workforce either sector needed. And we showed a failure to invest in care closer to people’s homes to create more capacity in a system under strain.

“While the NHS suffered from short-termism, social care suffered from long-term neglect: it was overlooked far too many times when important decisions, preparation exercises and plans were made to contain the spread of Covid-19. Much-needed reform was consistently ducked in the preceding decades.

“The worrying reality is that, four years on, neither the NHS nor social care are in a much more resilient state and in some areas they are weaker. While there has been a workforce plan for the NHS, there is no funding set out to pay for the new staff it seeks to attract, and short-termism and ad-hoc funding decisions remain rife across both sectors. Social care has crept up the political agenda since the pandemic, but the much-needed urgency to reform it still remains far too elusive and it is imperative that the new government does not wait too long to take action.”

“As this important report argues, the question is not if another pandemic will happen, it’s when. Right now, we see no evidence that we have learned the lessons of the dark days of 2020 and 2021 when it comes to the resilience of the NHS or social care.”