Brexit hit UKs pandemic response, Covid inquiry finds – POLITICO Europe

Chaired by crossbench peer Heather Hallett, the inquiry pointed to Britain's preparations for a no-deal Brexit, which were taking place around the time of a major government training exercise on responding to an influenza pandemic.

After the training operation named "Exercise Cygnus" in 2016, 22 recommendations were made to improve the U.K.'s response to a pandemic. Just eight of these were completed by June 2020, six months after the pandemic began and the inquiry cites the competing demands of no-deal Brexit planning as a reason for this "inaction."

Other avenues of preparation for potential pandemics were also paused due to "Operation Yellowhammer," the codename for Whitehall's contingency planning for a no-deal Brexit.

The existence of the Yellowhammer operation was leaked in 2018. It covered actions to be taken if Britain had crashed out of the European Union without a deal, identifying areas of risk.

"Several witnesses from the U.K. government and devolved administrations told the inquiry that a number of workstreams for pandemic preparedness were paused due to a reallocation of resources to Operation Yellowhammer," the report states.

Elsewhere, the inquiry pointed to "several significant flaws" in the U.K.'s systems of building preparedness, including an "outdated" strategy, a failure to account for "pre-existing health and societal inequalities and deprivation" and a "lack of adequate leadership."

Read the rest here:

Brexit hit UKs pandemic response, Covid inquiry finds - POLITICO Europe

Related Posts

Comments are closed.