Covid inquiry: Quarantining could have held off first lockdown, Jeremy Hunt says

ITV News Political Correspondent Romilly Weeks reports on Jeremy Hunt's appearance in front of the Covid Inquiry

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has told the UK Covid-19 inquiry that quarantining people sooner “might have avoided” the first coronavirus lockdown.

Giving evidence at Wednesday's hearing, Mr Hunt, who was health secretary between 2012 and 2018, said the government failed to learn lessons from East Asian countries, such as South Korea, about the importance of quarantining to stop the spread of non-influenza viruses.

He said: “One of the very first (questions) we should have been asking ourselves is, ‘is this one of those pandemics that you can actually slow and save lives early on or not?’ And I don’t think we had asked those questions."

The chancellor noted lockdown in the UK didn’t happen until March 2020, adding: “In that period, transmission had increased to about 5,000 a day, and then it was inevitable that you were going to have to use a lockdown."

He also said there was not “nearly enough thought” put into preparing Britain for a pandemic not based on flu.

“There was another assumption that we were very good at dealing with pandemics. We all thought it.

“By the way, it wasn’t just us. Johns Hopkins University in America said that the UK was the second best-prepared country in the world in the global health security index in 2019.

“They had subcategories and one of their subcategories was which countries were best prepared for preventing the spread of a virus and scaling up treatment quickly, and we were top. We weren’t second best, we were top.

“And so there was I think a completely wrong assumption and I think the truth is we were very well prepared for pandemic flu because we had put a lot of thinking into it. Exercise Cygnus was a huge thing.

“But we hadn’t given nearly enough thought to other types of pandemic that might emerge and that was, with the benefit of hindsight, a wholly mistaken assumption.”

Mr Hunt also defended his time as health secretary, admitting he felt “concerned” about the “fragility” of the NHS and Social Care systems after Exercise Cygnus in 2016 and announced an increase in funding in June 2018.

Asked whether this funding announcement was too close to the pandemic to address problems in the NHS, he said: “When I arrived NHS budget was £101 billion; when I left it was £124 billion. That was negotiation for an additional £33 billion.

“As a country, we had very fragile finances in 2010 following the global financial crisis, and we had to do some work in order to get ourselves in a position where we could afford the big increase that I negotiated in 2018.

“I don’t think it would have been possible to negotiate that increase any earlier because I don’t think the funding existed to do so.”

Earlier in the day, Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden told the inquiry he was reassured during his time in the Cabinet Office that the UK was in a “pretty strong state of preparedness” for any future pandemic.

Mr Dowden, who was minister for the Cabinet Office from July 2019 to February 2020 and had previously worked in the department, said he had taken an interest in planning, including for a possible flu pandemic.

He said: “I asked for further specific briefing on that – received that briefing – and indeed, throughout my time as a minister, received further briefings, all of which were consistent with advice that we were broadly in a pretty strong state of preparedness.”

Former PM David Cameron earlier admitted to the inquiry 'so many consequences' follow the decision not to plan for pandemics other than flu while he was in Downing Street

He also told the inquiry preparations for a no-deal Brexit put the country in a “strong position” to respond to other challenges.

On Monday, former prime minister David Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, rejected claims at the inquiry that their austerity measures left the UK exposed to the pandemic.

Medics and unions have argued that cuts to public services under their leadership between 2010 and 2016 depleted health and social care capacity.

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