"An Astonishing Failure" !!!

The verict of the Public Accounts Committee on the Government's unpreparedness to deal with the effects of Covid - 19.

I would be more inclined to label it a bloody shambles !!!



Government's Coronavirus Pandemic Planning Branded 'Astonishing Failure'
Influential committee say lack of preparedness could have a “long-term” impact on the economy, and raise fears of "irreversible" effects on children.

The government’s failure to plan for the economic impact of a pandemic like the coronavirus has been branded “astonishing” in a scathing report by financial watchdogs.


The influential cross-party Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said the economic reaction to Covid-19 was rushed and has left whole sectors behind. The report is especially damaging given that an extensive report in October 2019 gave the UK a high global ranking of countries’ pandemic preparedness.

The committee said lack of preparedness could have a “long-term” impact on the economy.

It said the Treasury waited until mid-March, days before the lockdown, before deciding on the economic support schemes it would put in place.

The committee also warned of the impact on children, saying: “It will be a huge task to ensure lengthy school closures do not have long-term or irreversible effects on children and young people’s future health and education.

“Yet, while school closures were predicted in pandemic planning, there seems to have been no plan for how schools and pupils would be supported to continue to learn.”

The PAC urged the government to “learn lessons” from its response and “ensure it doesn’t repeat its mistakes again in the event of a second spike in infections – or another novel disease outbreak”.

The report stated: “We are astonished by the government’s failure to consider in advance how it might deal with the economic impacts of a pandemic.”

Labour chairwoman of the committee, Meg Hillier, said: “Pandemic planning is the bread and butter of government risk planning, but we learn it was treated solely as a health issue, with no planning for the economic impacts.

“This meant that the economic strategy was of necessity rushed and reactive, initially a one-size-fits-all response that’s leaving people – and whole sectors of the economy – behind.

“A competent government does not run a country on the hoof, and it will not steer us through this global health and economic crisis that way.

“Government needs to take honest stock now, learning, and rapidly changing course where necessary.

“We need reassurance that there is serious thinking behind how to manage a second spike.

“This is not some kind of competition – this is our nation’s lives and livelihoods at stake.”
The report noted that the government had undertaken a pandemic simulation exercise in 2016 known as Exercise Cygnus.

However, it stated: “Exercise Cygnus may have been health-focused but it is astounding that the Government did not think about the potential impact on the economy, and that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy was not even aware of the exercise.

“Despite the first reported case of coronavirus being confirmed by the chief medical officer in England on 31 January 2020, the Treasury did not announce plans for significant funding to support businesses and individuals until the Budget on 11 March, and it did not become clear to the Treasury until the following week that a furlough scheme would be needed.

“The lack of prior thinking on the types of schemes that may be required led to a delay in implementation because the Government needed to design the schemes from scratch, particularly in relation to the self-employed scheme where it lacked sufficient, reliable information on who the recipients should be, causing unnecessary uncertainty for businesses and individuals.”

The report also called for more transparency in government decision-making.

It stated: “Decision-making on important issues, such as introducing the Test and Trace programme, has been slow.

“The government’s response in some areas has been poorly co-ordinated and has not adequately taken into account long-term impacts on people and communities.

“For example, the government’s ‘stop-start’ approach to school closures risks major harm to many children’s life chances, exacerbating already existing inequalities.”

The study added: “The cabinet office should review crisis command structures to ensure that longer-term decision making, as well as the immediate operational response, is properly informed and coordinated effectively across government.

The PAC report was also highly critical of how the issue of personal protective equipment (PPE) was handled.

The study said: “There were fundamental flaws in the government’s central procurement and local distribution of vital goods and equipment.

“We recognise that the government was faced with a massive challenge to procure a huge quantity of personal protective equipment (PPE) for 58,000 separate sites including hospitals and care homes. But, despite a pandemic being identified as the government’s top non-malicious risk, it failed to stock up in advance.

“The department of health and social care was not focused enough on the challenge of how to identify need in the care sector and ensure supply of PPE.”

The report also called for greater involvement with businesses regarding their needs.

It stated: “The Treasury should engage with key sectors and industries, such as the aviation sector, to develop bespoke support measures aimed at helping those businesses through the ongoing effects of the pandemic.”

It added: “Central government has not given local authorities the clarity or support they need over longer-term funding.”

A government spokesperson said: “As the public would expect, we regularly test our pandemic plans, allowing us to rapidly respond to this unprecedented crisis and protect the NHS.

“It was clear that coronavirus would affect all areas of the country, that’s why we immediately put in place an unprecedented initial economic support package for jobs and business worth £160bn.

“The next stage in our economic response will make a further £30bn available to ensure all areas of the UK bounce back.”

“We’re providing over £100m to support children to learn at home and a £1bn Covid catch up fund will directly tackle the impact of lost teaching time, as schools and colleges welcome children back in September,” the spokesperson added.

“In addition, we’ve committed almost £28bn to local areas to support councils, businesses and communities.”

 

Oh well, being incompitant still sounds better than the astonishing failure of which the UK is.

 

Deleted

 

Heh. Yeeeah. That's right.

 

Not really, INCOMPETENT is spelt with an 'e' not 'a' !!!

 

Hopefully, the UK government will learn from its initial complacent approach which gave disastrous results and put in a more professional front now to its covid-19 issue.

Irminsul is something of a tigress on the prowl probing you deeply for weaknesses. If you tickle her on the sides and belly though, you might make her your bosum chum. Hope your tiger handling skills learnt as an infant in India is still intact.

 

Matey your optimism over the scumbag 'hasty party' Government is sadly mistaken, - THEY NEVER LEARN !!!

 

English isn't my first language and I still do better than 90% of English speakers. So find something else irrelevant and small to pick on.

 

Vindicated !!! - I criticised this scumbag 'nasty party' Government and received some flak for doing so from certain 'right wing' quarters (not that I was very concerned about this - I fully expected it). Now the influencial Public Accounts Committee has also voiced the same criticisms of this scumbag 'nasty party' government.



Coronavirus: MPs accuse government of ‘slow, inconsistent and at times negligent’ approach to social care
Decision to discharge patients from NHS hospitals into care homes was ‘appalling error’

Ministers have been accused of a “slow, inconsistent and at times negligent” approach to social care during the coronavirus pandemic that has exposed years of delayed reforms to the sector.

In a damning report, the cross-party Public Accounts Committee said the decision to discharge around 25,000 patients from NHS hospitals into care homes – without first testing them – was “an appalling error” in the initial weeks of the outbreak.


On personal protective equipment for social care staff, the committee chair Meg Hillier said that failure to provide kit for workers and volunteers who risked their lives through the first peak of Covid-19 was “a sad, low moment in our national response”.


“Our care homes were effectively thrown to the wolves, and the virus has ravaged some of them,” she added.


The Alzheimer’s Society said care homes had been “abandoned” at the start of the coronavirus epidemic, allowing outbreaks to spread unchecked and causing “catastrophic loss of life”.


The charity’s director of research Fiona Carragher said: “Right from the start, we raised concerns about discharging patients into care homes hastily and this report sadly vindicates these concerns. Too late for the thousands of people who have died, the largest number of whom have been people with dementia, each death leaving behind a heartbroken family.

“Coronavirus has laid bare the impact of decades of underinvestment in social care. With the threat of a second wave, the government must take action to protect this vulnerable group and ensure another tragedy like this doesn’t happen again.”

And the Age UK charity director Caroline Abrahams said there was now no doubt that “catastrophic mistakes have been made by decision-makers, with tragic consequences for older people, their families and friends, and care staff”.

“Thousands of older people and hundreds of care workers died whose lives might have been saved had we reacted faster to the emerging threat to care homes here, as similar problems played out in other countries a few weeks ahead of the pandemic’s trajectory here,” said Ms Abrahams. “Never again can we let down social care, its staff and the older and disabled people who depend on it like we have done this year.”

According to the latest provisional figures from the Office for National Statistics, there were 19,394 deaths in care homes in England between 2 March and 12 June involving Covid-19 – nearly 30 per cent of all registered deaths of care home residents.

Publishing their report, MPs on the committee said the pandemic had highlighted the “tragic impact” of successive governments delaying widespread reform of the sector and treating social care as the NHS’s “poor relation”.

In their first examination of the health and social care response to the crisis, they added: “Years of inattention, funding cuts and delayed reforms have been compounded by the government’s slow, inconsistent and, at times, negligent approach to giving the sector the support it needed during the pandemic.

“This is illustrated by the decision to discharge 25,000 patients from hospitals into care homes without making sure all were first tested for Covid-19, a decision that remained in force even after it became clear people could transfer the virus without ever having symptoms”.


The report said that “shockingly” the government’s policy of not testing all patients for Covid-19 before discharging them into care homes continued until 15 April, when the government announced everyone would be tested prior to being discharged and regardless of symptoms.

“The Department [of Health and Social Care] says that it took rational decisions based on the information it had at the time, but acknowledges that it would not necessarily do the same thing again,” the MPs said.

Watch more

• 
  Whitty dismisses PM’s claim care homes to blame for Covid-19 issues

Going forward, the committee urged the government to prepare for a potential second wave, and said no one would have expected ministers to get every decision right during the initial months of the pandemic. “Rather than seeking to give the impression that it has done so, the government urgently needs to reflect, acknowledge its mistakes, and learn from them as well as from what has worked,” the report added.


It also said it was concerned about a “scarcity of information on contracts and costs” during the period, when NHS England and Improvement said hundreds of thousands of patient treatments had been secured through independent hospitals.

The committee said it was concerned that NHS England and Improvement had not provided a rough estimate of costs. And it said allowing the Nightingale hospitals to remain empty while the NHS requires additional capacity for routine services “will not be a good use of public money”.

Committee chair Ms Hillier added: “Vulnerable people surviving the first wave have been isolated for months, in the absence of a functional tracing and containment system. Yet there were bold and ambitious claims made by ministers about the rollout of test, track and trace that don’t match the reality.


“The deaths of people in care homes devastated many, many families. They and we don’t have time for promises and slogans, or exercises in blame. We weren’t prepared for the first wave. Putting all else aside, government must use the narrow window we have now to plan for a second wave. Lives depend upon getting our response right.”

Just last week Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, told a Commons committee that major risks in social care settings were not considered early on in the crisis, including staff working in multiple locations and those not paid sick leave.

“I think it is clear that every country that has a care sector has not handled this well,” he told MPs. “The UK is one country that has not handled this well in terms of issues in social care, but the same is true … the numbers are very similar, or even higher, in terms of proportions of deaths in almost every country you look at this.”


In frank remarks, he added: “There are a lot of things we have learnt that we can now do a lot better in social care and I don’t think any of us will look back at what happened in social care and say the ideal advice was given and this was the fault of anyone.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “Throughout this unprecedented global pandemic we have been working closely with the sector and public health experts to put in place guidance and support for adult social care.

“Alongside an extra £1.3bn to support the hospital discharge process, we have provided 172m items of PPE to the social care sector since the start of the pandemic and are testing all residents and staff, including repeat testing for staff and residents in care homes for over 65s or those with dementia.

“We know there is a need for a long-term solution to social care and we will bring forward a plan that puts social care on a sustainable footing to ensure the reforms will last long into the future.”