UK post-Covid plan will not keep public safe, expert tells inquiry

David Alexander of UCL says new framework merely ‘an attempt to tinker with the system’

Experts in national disaster preparedness have warned that the UK’s post-pandemic resilience plan requires “wholesale, radical rewriting” and said the government was failing to keep the public sufficiently safe.

Bruce Mann, former director of the Cabinet Office civil contingencies secretariat, told the Covid-19 public inquiry that changes called for in the new framework, published by Rishi Sunak’s government in December 2022, were “too slow” and it was “almost silent on resourcing”.