Transcript of Module 1 Public Hearing on 22 June 2023

(9.59 am)

Lady Hallett: Yes, Mr Keith.

Mr Keith: My Lady, the first witness this morning is Roger Hargreaves, please.

1. Mr Roger Hargreaves

MR ROGER HARGREAVES (sworn).

Questions From Lead Counsel to the Inquiry

Mr Keith: Could you commence, please, by giving the Inquiry your name, please.

Mr Roger Hargreaves: My name is Roger Hargreaves.

Lead Inquiry: Mr Hargreaves, thank you for your assistance in this Inquiry, and for the provision of the multiple witness statements which you’ve provided. I think all of them are known as corporate statements because you have been good enough to make enquiries on behalf of the governmental department in which you work to set out for the Inquiry much of the history and the chronology of Britain’s approach to preparedness. So thank you for that.

Have you provided three witness statements? We won’t go to them all in detail. Each one has been signed by you, together with a declaration as to the statement of truth.

My Lady, may all those be published?

Lady Hallett: Certainly.

Mr Keith: And they’re dated 1 February 2023, 28 April 2023 and 26 May 2023.

Please whilst you give evidence, Mr Hargreaves, would you keep your voice up, so that we may hear what you have to say, of course, and that your account is recorded for the stenographer. If I ask you a question which is not clear, don’t hesitate to ask me to repeat it. We may get to the break with your evidence, in which case there will be a break mid-morning.

I’d like to commence, if I may, about asking you some questions about your role.

You are currently, are you not, the director of the COBR, the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms, unit, which is a directorate within the Cabinet Office?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes, that’s correct.

Lead Inquiry: Is that a role that you’ve held, in fact, since July of last year, 2022?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: Before that, were you the director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, of which we’ve heard much, and was that a post that you had held since October 2020?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: That is correct.

Lead Inquiry: So does it follow that you took over the role of director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat from Katharine Hammond from whom my Lady heard last week?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes, there was an interregnum of about four months, but yes.

Lead Inquiry: Following your appointment as the director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, the secretariat was split, was it not, and it was split into two parts: firstly, and it appears to be a more specific, or a more precise entity, the COBR unit, the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms unit; and secondly, the Resilience Directorate, which was then a new directorate formed within the Cabinet Office.

In general terms, why – and plainly it was post at least the commencement of the Covid pandemic – was that split effected, why was that done?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I think the simple headline would be, when you’ve got an organisation that does planning and response, there is always a risk that the response phase draws you in, and therefore people who are engaged in longer-term planning are disrupted to an extent, and that I think had been a bit of the history of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, that had happened over time – you know, this is the third – my third stint in this bit of the Cabinet Office, and I’d experienced it previously, as kind of – ever since the formation of the organisation. That has some benefits, you can draw staff across and it means the people who are thinking about planning have a real understanding of what actual response feels like, why they’re doing their work, but that separation of responsibility, that sort of specialisation was the rationale behind it.

Lead Inquiry: May we just look for a moment at that in more detail. So your evidence is, is it, that because part of the functions of what was then the Civil Contingencies Secretariat involved the maintenance, the running, the operation of the United Kingdom’s actual crisis management capability, the COBR room, the facilities, the secretariat around it, the provision of advice, the running of our crisis management system, alongside the general policy work and the supervisory work and the co-ordination liaison that was a necessary part of being responsible for the whole civil contingencies structure, it was sensible to split out that crisis management capacity out of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat? Is that correct?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yeah, I mean, to be clear, it’s quite a finely balanced decision. There were various reviews over the years that looked at this bit of Cabinet Office and thought about how it should be structured and settled on the side of keeping CCS as a single organisation. You know, there is a reason it endured structurally for 20 years. That’s a very long time in central government terms. The decision to split it apart, I think reflected not just the Covid experience but some of the other recent challenges and there was a view that there just needed to be a tighter focus on crisis management delivery, and there needed to be a view of resilience which was much less about detail and more about strategic resilience of the UK, and that would be better served by separating it out and connecting it a bit better into wider structure making in government.

Lead Inquiry: You say the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic; so that we may be clear about this, was it the experience that the Civil Contingencies Secretariat had of having to address the arrival of the pandemic and the response to the pandemic and of course those terrible days in January to March 2020 that led to an understanding that the system as it was currently formulated was not adequate to deal with the severe demands of such a pandemic? The system hadn’t, as it turned out, been designed or operated in as best a way as possible to be able to deal with managing a pandemic?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: It’s not sort of quite as straightforward as that. The crisis management system in government as, say, existed before the pandemic or, you know, if you go back five years or so, it’s there to try and deliver a crisis response over a relatively short timeframe. Perhaps two weeks, perhaps a month, and then you return back towards normal. That’s very good for a lot of emergencies. But it was also very well developed for civil emergencies, and a little bit different for security emergencies. So essentially the system got pulled out of shape by – by, I don’t know, a terrorist – a serious terrorist incident in 2017, by planning around Brexit, by Covid, by Afghanistan, by Russia/Ukraine, by a whole lot of things.

So when this question was looked at, it wasn’t looked at with specific reference to Covid, but Covid is an interesting example of why there is a strong case for having capabilities that are able to run an enduring response, not just a short-term response, and why upstream factors around prevention, risk reduction, and things like the general fitness of society to deal with crisis, are important.

So it was a rebalancing to try and achieve those things a little more directly.

Lead Inquiry: Your last answer is focused on the resilience side of it. How well did the specific crisis management capacity, that is to say the COBR briefing system, the COBR unit, the COBR room and the secretariat around it, perform in the early days of the Covid pandemic?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Well, obviously I wasn’t there, and I did think that was a sort of Module 2 matter. I think my one – I suppose –

Lead Inquiry: Mr Hargreaves, I’m so sorry to interrupt. You have been involved in this area of government for many years. You were a prime architect of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which is the legal framework for this system. You were the first director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat to have the unit split underneath you, and you are now director of the COBR unit part. So you know why the unit was split, do you not?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes. I think as I’ve explained there’s a range of factors which contributed to that decision. For some people who contributed to the review that led to the decision, Covid would have been prominent in their decision-making. For many people involved in it, it was actually about other kinds of emergency and the relatively poor performance in relation to international emergencies versus domestic emergencies that caused them to want a more common purpose around crisis management inside the centre of government.

But on your specific question, I mean, I wasn’t there, all I can do is observe from the outside. I think my reflection is consistent with the point I made a moment ago, which is it was a system designed to deal with relatively short-run emergencies. Through January, February, March of 2020 that is what people would have been experiencing, because at that point it was forming up, it wasn’t clear what was happening, and that’s why COBR met repeatedly, it’s why that bit of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat was so extraordinarily busy at that point.

Obviously as the pandemic then took pandemic form, there needed to be a more sustainable governance structure that could carry it through.

Lead Inquiry: Was the COBR structure utilised fully and consistently throughout the currency of the pandemic, or over time in practice was it replaced by other structures or other committees or groups?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes, it was replaced, because, as I said, the COBR function is there to deliver a crisis response to an acute moment. Something spins up, you establish control, it moves back to business as usual. A catastrophic emergency like Covid, and there are other emergencies that fall into this category, require a different kind of management. It’s not necessarily at the absolute pace that you get when you have a crisis, you need something which will keep going week after week, month after month, and that’s not really what the COBR structures are designed for. So, without wishing to kind of go into Module 2 stuff unduly, it was ultimately replaced by a Covid taskforce. There were a few sort of deviations along the way, but that is the model that – I mean, it’s the model essentially that was used in Brexit, it’s the model which we ended up using in Covid, and it’s now part of our standardised approach.

Lead Inquiry: Was it not, in effect, replaced, even during the crisis part of the Covid pandemic, by ministerial implementation groups and also by two committees, XO and XS, which were dealing with the crisis, the catastrophic crisis that was the Covid pandemic?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: XO and XS were Brexit committees.

Lead Inquiry: Yes, and how were they used, Mr Hargreaves, once the pandemic arrived?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Well, XO and XS, my understanding is that they continued to largely focus on Brexit.

Lead Inquiry: What, in January, February, March of 2020 –

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yeah, they would have –

Lead Inquiry: – after, in fact, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement was signed and Brexit was over?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: They would have met – right, if they were meeting, they met much less frequently. I mean, this is not – this is not a period about which the detail – you know, I’m not familiar with the detail of this period, and it isn’t something that you explained to me I’d be asked about. So it’s not in the evidence, I wasn’t there, there’s a limit to how much I can explain about the number of meetings of that committee.

What I would say, you know, in relation to your general point, is the early stages of the pandemic were handled as emergencies, national emergencies, are in government, using the COBR structures. They’re designed to deal with short-run emergencies, relatively short-run. What happens at the start of an emergency is essentially you’ve got a kind of moment of decision or a period of decisions: is this something that will flare up and then subside, or is this going to become a much longer term problem? If it’s going to flare up and subside, your assumption is that you will pass it back into business as usual structures. If it’s going to be a very enduring problem, then you need to create new semipermanent structures to deal with it while the crisis endures.

So that’s what we did for Covid. As I say, the journey through – the journey wasn’t a linear journey, we had the ministerial implementation groups, but now our doctrine would be that we would move straight into the sort of Covid taskforce-style structures, and if I think about some of the emergencies we’ve dealt with since the pandemic, I can see those patterns in how we’ve approached them, because some of them have been dealt with by a more enduring structure and some of them have been dealt with just using the Covid mechanism to stand up and stand down. COBR –

Lead Inquiry: Forgive me, the fault is I’m sure entirely my own. I asked you to what extent did the COBR unit function throughout the currency of the Covid pandemic, the crisis, and you said that it became apparent that once the crisis had passed, the initial crisis had passed, the need for COBR had fallen away, because it’s a crisis management capacity.

My question to you was: was COBR in fact started to be put to one side, was there an understanding in fact, in the early days of the Covid pandemic, that as a crisis management facility, it wasn’t sufficient, and therefore during the crisis part of the Covid pandemic alternative structures had to be found and were found – the XS, XO committees, the ministerial implementation groups and so on – because the COBR unit wasn’t functioning as well as it had been expected to do under the extreme demands of the Covid pandemic? That’s the question.

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yeah. So I think what, I suppose, what I’m trying to explain is the purpose of crisis management structures is to deal with crisis, so the COBR mechanism is designed for that purpose.

The pandemic was a particular kind of national challenge. It had an initial phase of crisis where we were standing up systems to try and understand and prepare to deal with an inbound pandemic, but then it takes the form of a kind of emergency which exists in the space between crisis, where you’re desperately trying to deliver control, and – and the kind of territory of business as usual, where you need to get into a rhythm and deliver things and work through problems and establish policies and so forth.

It’s not a permanent problem, that’s why it makes sense to create a semipermanent structure, and that’s what happened.

So COBR dealt with the initial phase. When it became apparent this was both an extraordinarily complex wide-ranging problem and one that was likely to endure, new structures were required.

Lead Inquiry: The COBR unit, when those extreme pressures were applied, was found not to be sufficient or adequate for coping with those pressures, was it?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I think my point is that it wasn’t designed for those pressures.

Lead Inquiry: Was it sufficient and adequate whether it was designed or not for those pressures?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I think I’m – I’m trying to explain, but possibly not successfully, that the Covid crisis went through different phases, and as a consequence COBR had a role in the early phase, it was then superseded by more complex structures with greater capacity, because that’s what the problem became.

Lead Inquiry: All right.

Mr Roger Hargreaves: It’s also the case that whilst the Covid crisis ran on, there was still the prospect of other emergencies, so in government terms it makes sense to be able to stand down the COBR function, so if anything else happens concurrently it’s able to deal with that.

However, I’d also say that it certainly wasn’t a smooth transition, from what I could see from the outside, from the COBR function to the more enduring structures, and what we’ve done since then is create a much clearer operational approach towards that transition.

So I think if we were going through the same experience again, from the off we would understand that we would need immediately to begin to prepare to deliver the Covid taskforce, or, you know, the pandemic taskforce, and COBR would fill the space until it was up and running.

Lead Inquiry: May I now ask you, please, about the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. My Lady’s heard a considerable amount of evidence from Ms Hammond and others about how this is the Act which provides the legal framework to the whole of the United Kingdom’s civil contingencies –

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yeah.

Lead Inquiry: – arrangements.

I think you were responsible for the team or you were part of the team that drafted the Bill originally between 2002 and 2004; is that right?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes, I led the team.

Lead Inquiry: You led the team. In very general terms, does the Act provide for a series of different legal duties on what are known as Category 1 and Category 2 responders, those responders are a mixture of local responders or, in the case of the DHSC, the Secretary of State and other departments, and those legal duties are designed to ensure that those bodies which labour under those duties are responsible for and are made to plan, to draw up risk assessments, to think about how they might respond in the event of an emergency, how to liaise with other bodies, how to inform the public, all the moving parts of a civil contingencies response –

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: – both planning and response? Is that a fair summary?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Well, to be very specific, the duties are largely in relation to planning. The Act does not contain a duty to respond.

Lead Inquiry: Respond.

Mr Roger Hargreaves: The reason for that is actually – I don’t know, it depends on the audience, sometimes people regard this as a complex explanation. It’s a sort of legal explanation, so you might receive a better –

Lead Inquiry: Well, my Lady is a former vice president of the Court of Appeal and a very senior judge, so –

Mr Roger Hargreaves: That’s why I’m hoping for an enthusiastic reception.

There is a broad public sector expectation of reasonableness, so if you have a duty to develop a plan, that broad expectation of reasonableness holds that you will implement that plan if an emergency occurs.

If you have a duty to respond then there is a risk that you create an unfulfillable obligation because of the circumstances at the time.

So the framing of it and the explanation accepted by Parliament was that the combination of the duty to plan and the expectation of public authorities acting reasonably would deliver the effect of response.

So that’s the kind of mechanism behind it, and that is what has happened in practice.

Lead Inquiry: But my question to you was simply designed to elicit that this is a system which imposes legal obligations for both planning and response, because one of the obligations on the variety of local responders, for example, is to plan as to how they may respond in the event of a crisis?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes, absolutely.

Lead Inquiry: Which is why it is a system designed to get ready as well as to plan?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes, and it’s – sometimes people say, “Why is there not an explicit duty to respond?” That’s why.

Lead Inquiry: Okay. After the Act came into force in 2004, how many reviews were carried out by the government as to whether or not that Act was still fit for purpose?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: So there would be various informal and formal reviews on the way. We’re now in a cycle of post-implementation reviews, which happen every five years, we did one relatively recently. That’s part of general best practice in relation to statute, that there is a review. So I suppose we’ve done maybe three of those, perhaps, but there have also been various internal reviews and considerations of the operation of the Act.

Lead Inquiry: You’ve just said that it was envisaged there would be a post-implementation review every five years; how many post-implementation reviews were there within five years of the Act, the 2004 Act?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: So the post-implementation review process, as I said –

Lead Inquiry: How many –

Mr Roger Hargreaves: – applies to all legislation.

Lead Inquiry: I’m so sorry, Mr Hargreaves. How many post-implementation reviews were there within five years of the 2004 Act?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I don’t think there were any, because it’s a system that postdates the five-year window.

Lead Inquiry: Could you elaborate on that answer?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: The post-implementation review process doesn’t just apply to this legislation, it is general best practice in respect of legislation to do post-implementation reviews, and there’s a process around that. My understanding is that that process, that general expectation of post-implementation reviews, was introduced at some point after the five-year – five years had elapsed from 2004, when the legislation was enacted.

Lady Hallett: So are you saying after 2009, say?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yeah, yeah. Yes.

Lady Hallett: So there wasn’t a policy of post-implementation reviews until after 2009?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes, I think so.

Mr Keith: So to say that there was a policy of having a post-implementation every five years after 2004, which is the question I put to you, wasn’t quite right. There was no review within five years of the Act because there was no policy of having a post-implementation review?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: No, there wasn’t at that point. Sorry if I’ve misunderstood your question. But that’s the present system.

Lead Inquiry: So there was a review, was there not, an internal review, called an enhancement programme review in 2012 and then a formal post-implementation review in 2017?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I thought it was a little before that.

Lead Inquiry: Was there –

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I might – if you’ve got the dates, then you might be correct, I thought it was 2015, but …

Lead Inquiry: In the documents with which you were provided by the Inquiry, Mr Hargreaves, there is a document INQ000056230, we needn’t bring it up, but it is the 2017 Civil Contingencies Act post-implementation review. So would you agree it’s 2017?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yeah, that’s –

Lead Inquiry: So it was 13 years after the Act was brought into effect. 2004 to 2017.

Mr Roger Hargreaves: If your question is – I don’t know what your question is, but if it is: is that an unreasonable long –

Lead Inquiry: No, I was just asking you to confirm that, despite the policy of post-implementation reviews, there was no post-implementation review, a formal review, between 2004, when the Act came into effect, as it says on the tin, and 2017; is that correct?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: If that’s the date for the post-implementation review, then yes. There is an awful lot of consideration of whether the Act works properly or not, and how it operates in practice. Post-implementation reviews are, as I understand it, designed to make sure that everyone across government is thinking hard about whether legislation works in practice, but I think it would be wrong to draw the inference from that that no one was thinking about whether the Act was working.

I mean, to give you an example of that very practically, between 2007 and 2008 I ran the team which supported Sir Michael Pitt’s independent review of some catastrophic flooding that had taken place in 2007. As part of that we reviewed – he, as an independent reviewer, looked at the operation of the Act. So it wasn’t the case that everyone just left it idle and it was not being thought about. It was very much a central part of the system and a central feature of debate.

Lead Inquiry: Can you recall, Mr Hargreaves, whether that semiformal, not the formal post-implementation review, but the semiformal enhancement programme review in 2012 recommended significant change to the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, or did it recommend a series of moderate changes, so no departure from the fundamental premise of the Act, which is that there were these legal duties imposed on Category 1 responders and different legal duties on Category 2 responders?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: My understanding is that none of the reviews have recommended a substantial departure from the broad framing of the Act.

Lead Inquiry: Did any review or did the government ever consider bringing together the legal duties on Category 1 and Category 2 responders so that they were similar, or perhaps even the same, or extending the legal duties or a variant thereof that were in the Act to central government?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: When was that considered?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Well, certainly when I was running the Civil Contingencies Bill team in 2004, 2003 –

Lead Inquiry: After the Act came into force. Sorry, Mr Hargreaves, I didn’t make it plain.

Mr Roger Hargreaves: No, but –

Lead Inquiry: After the Act came into force, to what extent did the government or any of these reviews consider significant changes to those duties to bring Category 1 and 2 responders together or to impose a like duty on central government?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: The point I was starting to make is that these things have been features of the debate around the operation of the Act since its original design, and return from time to time as questions, and certainly when independent reviews or post-implementation reviews or anything else is carried out, these points tend to be considered.

There is obviously – you know, there are obviously design principles behind the Act that explain the difference in duties, that I’m happy to talk about more if that’s helpful, and the absence of duties on central government. But these are obvious sort of pressure points in the design of the system, and whether Category 2 responders are doing enough is always a key question, and whether central government needs more obligation around it is obviously a key question too when you’re thinking about how the Act works and how the civil contingencies system operates.

Lead Inquiry: So is the position that whilst there may have been some degree of debate before the Act was passed, following the enactment the government itself, either internally or by way of a formal or semi-formal review, has never suggested that there be wholesale change to those legal duties or the imposition of a duty on central government?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Well, as recently as the new national Resilience Framework, we talk about doing work to consider the case on whether there should be a duty on central government.

Lead Inquiry: Yes. What year, in that national Resilience Framework, is that work promised by, Mr Hargreaves?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I don’t think there is a specific date attached to it.

Lead Inquiry: Is it 2025 or 2030?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I’m not sure.

But there is a – there’s quite a good case for having a duty on central government departments. When the Act was done originally we didn’t do it because it was quite unusual to have duties on central government departments. The broad principle, the broad organising principle was that secretaries of state were able to determine their own priorities and therefore it wasn’t necessary to have a legal duty. I think just in terms of the broad shape in which law applies to government departments, there has been a general move towards having more duties described, particularly around topics which people believe to be particularly important and cross cutting.

So the balance has moved, I think, more, over time, in favour of having a duty of this kind. I mean, certainly in my nice symmetrical bureaucratic mind it would make sense for duties to apply evenly or for there to be a clear line of sight between obligations, but, as I say, it’s a matter that we think does need some proper consideration and should probably be the subject of a consultation, and that’s why there’s a general commitment in the framework.

Lead Inquiry: But despite that change in thinking, Mr Hargreaves, and the point, if I may say so, is well made that there is a case for having a legal duty placed on government, the government’s own 2022 post-implementation review made no such recommendation, did it?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: We said we’d consider it.

Lead Inquiry: Did it call for the legal duty in some form to be placed on central government?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: It said we would look at it. I mean, I … there is … I’ve given you my view, I suppose, on the shifting case, and there’s a commitment to do that. The sort of thing which requires – you know, any legislative change is going to require a consultation. It wasn’t so transparent from the responses to the framework, you know, consultation that there was an absolute expectation that people felt this was necessary, but I think there is a building case, a case that grows over time, to do something specific here.

Lady Hallett: Why do you think that, Mr Hargreaves? Just for those who are watching who aren’t familiar with the system.

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Possibly it is my nice neat bureaucratic mind thinking it, but … I think it is helpful where government cares about something in the round for there to be a consistent set of expectations, and I think one of the broad themes of this Inquiry might well turn out to be whether government takes civil protection seriously enough in the round. In fact not just government, but whether the UK does. On matters like that, sending a signal across government through a statutory obligation can be very powerful and the debate which accompanies it can be very powerful.

It’s also important that, I think, that there is transparency about what government does, so government can be held to account and, again, can foster political debate on the level of ambition. So a statutory obligation is a very effective way to do that. It’s not because I think that government departments don’t take that seriously, I just think there may be room to take it more seriously.

Mr Keith: Could we have, please, INQ000055883, page 1.

This is the post-implementation review of last year published by the Cabinet Office, is it not?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: It is.

Lead Inquiry: If we go forward one page, we can see that it comes from the Cabinet Office:

“Lead department or agency: Cabinet Office.”

It’s dated 29 March last year. It’s a statutory review. The objectives of the measure were, that’s to say the original Act, to: establish a consistent level of civil protection activity; encourage consistency between the responders; define the tasks; ensure local responders retain the ability to make decisions about what planning arrangements are appropriate; and to provide powers for the government to make temporary regulations.

That last paragraph, is that part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: Which provides for emergency regulations applied by a system of regional directors or perhaps governors, if the emergency arrangements are triggered. Has that part 2 of the Act ever been used in the United Kingdom?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: It’s not.

Lead Inquiry: No. Was it used at the time of Covid, Mr Hargreaves?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: No. When the Bill went through Parliament, this point was discussed – you know, when we would use it was discussed at some considerable length, and there was concern that government would use it too freely. There’s obviously a fair sort of back story on the use of emergency powers by government and so forth.

What government committed to Parliament at the time is that it would only use emergency powers where it was not possible to use normal constitutional routes. I think, in a sense, emergency powers are a bit of a – they’re a kind of constitutional aberration which has been co-opted into the constitution, it’s a device for making legislation when it’s not possible to do it through normal routes.

Lead Inquiry: Do you mean when it’s not possible to bring a Bill or statutory –

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: – legislation before Parliament?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: Right.

Mr Roger Hargreaves: So I think there is a misconception sometimes, people think it’s a list of things government can do and it just picks and chooses. Actually, it’s a mechanism for making emergency legislation at high speed through secondary legislation, but often with the kind of reach of primary legislation, and it’s designed to be temporary, and designed to have just a much more – a much faster mechanism for delivery.

Lead Inquiry: All right.

Could we go over the page, then, please.

“What evidence has informed the [post-implementation review]?

“The National Resilience Strategy Call for Evidence public consultation … Workshops and engagement events …”

There were, were there not, as it says, there was a call for evidence and I think there were some surveys done, and individual workshops and engagement events carried out?

Then this at 3:

“The Act continues to achieve its stated objectives. Duties are placed upon local responders, with the principle of subsidiarity ensuring they retain the flexibility to collaborate in a way that is suitable to their specific needs. The recommendations made (including changes to the guidance) aim to strengthen the fulfilment of the Act’s objectives, but there is no case at this stage for a fundamental overhaul of the legislation. Whilst the objectives and the Act’s fulfilment of them are broadly fit for purpose at present, the evolving risk landscape, as well as work on the Integrated Review commitments to consider strengthening LRFs and develop a National Resilience Strategy, may create a need for further changes to the Act in future.”

Mr Hargreaves, in relation to your earlier answer that this post-implementation review stated that there would be and there was a debate to be had about the imposition of legal duties on central government, where is that reference? Where do we find the reference in the review to that debate to which you said it made plain reference?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: It’s the reference to the national resilience strategy, which emerged as the UK Resilience Framework, which includes the commitment to look at that.

Lead Inquiry: This review, if we go back to the first page, was in March of last year. The framework, the national Resilience Framework, was published in December.

Where is the reference in this review, the reference which you said was in it, to debate being given, consideration being given and a debate revolving around the imposition of a legal duty on central government?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: It would be a point raised in consultation responses from local resilience forums.

Lead Inquiry: Where is it in the review, Mr Hargreaves?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I’d have to look through the review and find it.

Lead Inquiry: So the position of the review was that no fundamental change was recommended, there should be no significant overhaul, there should be no imposition of legal duties on central government, and no real change to the relative legal duties imposed on Category 1 and Category 2 responders; is that correct?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yeah. I mean, the Act provides for local response organisations to carry out civil protection in a systematic way, assess risks, develop plans, and so forth, and that holds good. It provides for an emergency legislation-making mechanism, and that holds good. Over time, and, you know, partly from the responses to the consultation around the review, partly from policy debates inside government, partly in response to events, we will contemplate extending elements of the Act, or other bits of legislation that apply to emergencies.

So … so this does hold good as a piece of legislation, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t necessarily room for change.

Lead Inquiry: Coincidentally last year in March your predecessor, Mr Mann, from whom the Inquiry heard, co-chaired a National Preparedness Commission review of the CCA 2004, did he not?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: So I understand, yes.

Lead Inquiry: Have you read that review?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: His review?

Lead Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I have looked through it, yes.

Lead Inquiry: Yes, because, of course, it’s fundamental, is it not, to any proper consideration of the CCA 2004; would you agree?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Well, not quite.

So we get very many think pieces from consultants, academics and so forth, on how the system of civil protection should be organised, which reflects their views. The National Preparedness Commission, the lay observer might conclude from the name that it has some government status or official role. It doesn’t, it’s a sort of think tank. And the independent review is independent in the sense that it has nothing to do with government, not in the sense that this Inquiry is independent, for example.

Lead Inquiry: That’s good to hear, Mr Hargreaves.

The document that you describe as a think piece was a document prepared by the National Preparedness Commission, a relatively august and independent body, and the report which I’m holding up in my hand by Bruce Mann, Kathy Settle and Andy Towler, ran, perhaps in a way analogous to Mr Mann’s expert report for this Inquiry, to some 351 pages.

It was an extremely complex, detailed, thorough investigation of the workings of the CCA 2004 prepared by an independent body which is solely concerned with national preparedness.

Is it just a think piece?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes. Yes, it is. And if – look, there are many organisations that operate in the field of civil protection, many of them are able to draw on people with a great deal of expertise, and in government you get many – many of these sent to you, and you need to have a look at them. In the context of an ongoing statutory consultation, you have to take some care around what you get, and you have to give fair balance to everyone who might wish to contribute.

The National Preparedness Commission is a relatively new organisation. It has some august people on it, but there are other – other similar bodies available, and it is a very long report, which I looked through with interest because I have a great deal of respect for Mr Mann, but I did not prioritise its comments over anyone else’s, because that would not be proper.

Lead Inquiry: What was the core finding of your predecessor’s National Preparedness Commission report, the primary finding in relation to UK resilience and the legal framework, the structure, the CCA, that underpins it?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I don’t know.

Lead Inquiry: You don’t know the main conclusion or finding of this piece of work done by your predecessor and the Preparedness Commission into resilience and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I could give you a broad description of the findings, but I couldn’t tell –

Lead Inquiry: Please. Could you tell us, please, a general description of the findings?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Well, they’re in the similar vein to the expert report produced by Mr Mann and Professor Alexander, that they seek a reform of aspects of the system. Some of it relates to the fine detail of how civil protection work is done. There are some broader proposals. It’s slightly different in focus to what we think the focus should be inside government, and what we concluded through our public consultations and statutory reviews and so forth. There is a slight – you know, there is a slight difference of opinion between us and the team that did that about where the focus should lie.

Lady Hallett: Can you analyse or summarise the focus, difference in focus?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: In very simple terms, the people who wrote that report are people who specialise in providing quite detailed advice to people around quite detailed tasks. The main thrust of work in government is focused on getting more upstream of emergencies, doing more preventative work, trying to ensure that there is a very, very broad public understanding and greater public and political engagement in risk, because that’s what shapes outcomes.

I think we are interested in moving the whole system to a better place, and their report is focused on moving the operation of those bits of the system that do specific civil protection work to a better place.

Mr Keith: Mr Hargreaves, you’ve just stated that there was a – I didn’t quite catch the word, but there was a difference of view:

“… there is a slight difference of opinion between us and the team that did that report about where the focus should lie.”

The post-implementation review carried out by the government last year, as we’ve seen, said there is no case for a general overhaul.

The primary finding – and we’ll have, please, page 10 of INQ000187729 – is that whilst the Act and the resilience arrangements it introduced were a “vital step down the road to building a Resilient Nation”, and whilst they’ve “served the [United Kingdom] well over the past 18 years” and provided a “sound basic framework”, the:

“… pace of development has not been sustained over the past decade. In some important areas, quality has degraded. As a result, UK resilience today has some serious weaknesses. It is not fit for future purpose in the world the [United Kingdom] is moving into.”

Is that a slight difference of opinion?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I think there’s a lot of that which I would agree with.

Lead Inquiry: And the recommendations, could we have, please, 272. Summary of recommendations, the authors of the report make 117 recommendations, but two are of particular importance. 275, please. Recommendations 29 and 30. Who should have legal duties? 29:

“The full suite of Category 1 responder duties should be placed on the organisations currently designated under the Act as Co-operating Bodies … The [United Kingdom] Government should pursue and capture in statutory guidance ways in which the additional burdens of fulfilling the new duties might be reduced for example by activity undertaken at multi-[local resilience forum]/regional level.”

Then this:

“The full suite of Category 1 responder duties should be placed on the [United Kingdom] Government.”

So to the extent that the 2022 post-implementation review by the government said there was no case for overhaul, is it your position now that you don’t agree with that conclusion and you do agree with the National Preparedness Commission view?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: No, my position is consistent. What – some of this is about how to achieve the ends. Right? The Act is the Act and describes the obligations that fall on people at the local level. When it comes to the post-implementation review and testing the fitness for purpose of those obligation, the conclusion of our post-implementation review reflected – which reflects the consultative process that we ran, to which Mr Mann contributed through this report, concluded that what we had was broadly fit for purpose but suggested some small changes.

I don’t disagree at all that Category 2 responders should absolutely take civil protection seriously. The problem with the analysis is that that doesn’t necessarily mean you do that through the Civil Contingencies Act.

Category 2 responders are generally regulated utilities or other service providers of critical infrastructure. They are subject to incredibly detailed regulatory regimes which impose a wide variety of different burdens and expectations on them, through very carefully calibrated regulatory frameworks that balance the cost to the customer with service delivery, with how they perform in emergencies, for example.

Therefore I think we remain of the view that the obligations on Category 2 responders are, on balance, best delivered through those regulatory frameworks.

I do, however, think there is a case for contemplating whether those regulatory frameworks, in light of the Covid experience and other recent emergencies, are clear enough and enforced with sufficient vigour.

But if you place Category 2 responders in Category 1, you place quite a substantial burden on them to get involved in emergencies which have little to do with them.

So, there are different ways to cut the cake, and there’s where I think we disagree, but I don’t think we disagree on whether Category 2 responders who provide essential services should have clear civil protection obligations, it’s just that we disagree about whether they should be in the Act, the Civil Contingencies Act, or not.

Lead Inquiry: What about the imposition of legal duties on the United Kingdom’s central government? You are now recorded as saying that, although it finds no reflection on the face of the 2022 review, the governmental review, that it was apparently raising that as an issue for debate?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: Although, as I say, we can see no reference to that being the position of the government in the review. And you say that that is something which the December 2022 Resilience Framework has in mind. Is that right?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: So, again, the post-implementation review is about how the Act operates. As it says in the passage that you put up, highlighted, potential extensions to the Act would be a matter for the national resilience strategy, as we were saying, called, now, UK Resilience Framework. As I also said earlier, I myself am pretty sympathetic to that recommendation, and think it has merit and probably more merit than it has when we did the original Act.

So I think there I’d be in agreement. I mean, you know, just to say in the round, it might be helpful to say, Mr Mann and Professor Alexander and I agree on almost everything. We are after the same thing. There are some constraining factors that fall on you when you are an official in government, as distinct from when you are a consultant in the field of civil contingencies, whatever your background. Like, for example, resource.

Lead Inquiry: So if you agree on almost everything, do you agree there is an unanswerable case for the imposition of legal duties on central government?

Lady Hallett: I think you’ve got your answer to that, Mr Keith, to be fair.

Mr Keith: All right.

Shall we have a look, then, at the document itself.

INQ000097685, the Resilience Framework of December 2022, page 1, please.

So this was a document produced by the Cabinet Office. We heard evidence from the Deputy Prime Minister yesterday that he wrote – I think he said he wrote the foreword or he certainly appeared in the foreword, along with his photograph.

This is a document which plainly has the involvement of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat in it before the split occurred between the COBR unit and the resilience function, now in the Resilience Directorate, the national security directorate. Presumably you had a great deal of involvement in the production of this framework?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: A very great deal. So I was involved very heavily – you know, I oversaw the work on this through till the summer of 2022 and after the split, obviously I retained an interest but I didn’t produce the very final, final draft.

Lead Inquiry: No, you left in July 2022. But it must stand to reason that this document which is – well, in terms of pounds and kilograms, it’s a less weighty document than the National Preparedness Commission report, but it’s a sizeable beast. Presumably the first draft was drawn up before July 2022 whilst you were still the director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Absolutely. I think that if – the government experienced a bit of turbulence in that period. I think if it hadn’t, we might well have published it within my tenure.

Lead Inquiry: All right.

Could we look, please, at page 5. We can see in the contents page the way in which the report is divided: there is an executive summary, and then the action plan from the government for risk, responsibilities and accountability, partnerships, communities, investment and skills, and there is a summary of the framework actions, as they’re known, on page 72.

Did your then department’s framework document divide up the actions by timescale? So it identified a number of things that the government was already doing, and a number of things that would be done by 2025 and a number of things that would be done by 2030?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: Perhaps we could just look at some of the things in relation to which the United Kingdom government is – that it is already taking action.

So in fact Mr Dowden was asked about this yesterday. Under the broad heading of “Risk”, there’s a reference to:

“Refreshing the … (NSRA) process, so it will look [at] a longer timescale … multiple scenarios …”

Indeed, the 2022 risk assessment process last year was significantly different from the 2019 version because of the reference to multiple scenarios?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: Then this:

“Creating a new Head of Resilience to guide best practice, encourage adherence to standards, and set guidance.”

In which part of the government has a new head of resilience been created? And the emphasis is “created”. In which part of the government has a new head of resilience been created?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: The head of resilience is – leads the Resilience Directorate inside the Cabinet Office.

Lead Inquiry: There was already a director of national resilience in the Cabinet Office, a full-time post, from March 2020 to May 2022. So to what extent was a new head of resilience created, Mr Hargreaves?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: It is an entirely new role.

Lead Inquiry: In what regard is it an entirely new role?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: In the sense that it didn’t exist before and now exists.

Lead Inquiry: So –

Mr Roger Hargreaves: It is the part of the job that I did as CCS director separated out, in the fashion that we talked about earlier –

Lead Inquiry: So it’s a job that was already a job being done by you when you were director, it has simply been hived out from your old job, but it is a head of resilience.

To what extent is a head of resilience different from a director of national resilience, which was a pre-existing full-time post?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I think that was a role in the national security field less related to this kind of resilience. This is about a head of resilience that superintends our national civil protection system, particularly in relation to civil emergencies.

Lead Inquiry: No new post was created, was it, Mr Hargreaves, other than insofar as an existing post was given a different name?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I don’t know how more plainly I can say this, it’s literally a new post. It’s a new post on headcount, it’s a new person, it’s a new title. It carries out some of the functions that were done previously, but because it is a separately identified post, the person is able to do that with more focus and weight that I was able to do, or Katharine was able to do, or even Mr Mann was able to do, when they were together.

Lead Inquiry: The reason it’s a new person, Mr Hargreaves, is that the previous incumbent of the post of director of national resilience happened, coincidentally, to leave that post in May 2022, before this report was even published, to go to join a job in the Ministry of Defence. So it’s not that there is a change of person because a new post was created, it’s just that the previous incumbent happened already to have left the post. Isn’t that correct?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: It’s just not correct.

Lead Inquiry: All right.

Mr Roger Hargreaves: This is in a different bit of the forest. The fact that the two titles include the word “resilience” does not mean they are the same thing.

Lead Inquiry: All right.

The government is:

“… already taking action by:

“Strengthening [United Kingdom] … resilience structures by creating a new resilience function …”

You have given evidence how the existing Civil Contingencies Secretariat was split into the more practical side, the crisis management side, the COBR unit, and the Resilience Directorate within the Cabinet Office. Both parts, the COBR unit and the Resilience Directorate, are both formed from the pre-existing Civil Contingencies Secretariat, are they not? There is nothing new in either part that wasn’t already in the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, is there?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Not quite – that’s not quite right. So some of this is about the purpose and the focus of the Resilience Directorate, and that in turn is shaped by the Resilience Framework. Our ambition is to be more expansive and more – I suppose the term we would use is “upstream”, but preventative in our approach to civil protection. So that directorate spends less time looking at the detail of policy and procedures, and – on balance, and more time trying to think about the broad operating context of the UK and whether you can solve problems.

So do you want to put your effort into, for example, having very detailed plans to deal with an energy security problem, or do you want the UK to have better energy security in the first place?

Lead Inquiry: Is that reference to a new resilience function simply a reference to part of the old civil contingencies directorate which has been renamed as the Resilience Directorate?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: That’s where it starts from, but in terms of its purpose and its focus, it is evolving to a different place.

Lead Inquiry: In terms of headcount or objectives or legal scope, in what way has it changed?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: It would have a different – slightly different framing in terms of its objectives, to be more clearly focused on system-wide reform and prevention. But in terms of headcount, it is very similar to what was there before.

Lead Inquiry: Page 73, please.

But:

“By 2025, the [United Kingdom] Government is committing to take the following actions:

“Clarify roles and responsibilities in the UK Government for each NSRA risk …

“Conduct an annual survey …

“Introduce an Annual Statement to Parliament …

“Develop a measurement of socio-economic resilience …”

What is that a reference to? What is a measurement of socio-economic resilience?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: When you have an emergency there are – vulnerabilities manifest in different forms, and obviously you’ve heard from expert witnesses who have talked about this.

In very sort of brief terms, there are three kinds of vulnerabilities we observe in emergencies. The first is sometimes an emergency just affects a particular category of people. Covid is a very good example of that, because there’s one particular group profoundly affected and that was the elderly, and they were affected disproportionately.

Sometimes you have vulnerabilities that arise because they pre-existed and were carried into the emergency. That’s a lot of what Professors Marmot and Bambra talked about. If someone struggles to access public services because English is not their first language before an emergency, they will continue to struggle and may even struggle more profoundly during the emergency itself.

The third kind of vulnerability relates largely to people’s ability to shape their own destiny, which largely comes down to how wealthy people are and how healthy people are.

So, understanding the landscape of areas that are impacted by emergencies and knowing that if we are – you know, if we face a particular problem in a particular area, it will be hit more badly than if that same problem was to arise in a different place. It’s a very helpful way to make sure we’re managing the emergency very effectively and we get further ahead faster on the protection of people with vulnerabilities during a moment of crisis. So that’s the kind of work that we are now advancing.

Lead Inquiry: “Partnerships”, further down the page, the government is committed to providing by 2025 a:

“[Growing in] the [United Kingdom] Government’s advisory groups made up of experts, academics and industry experts in order to inform the NSRA. This may include establishing a risk-focused sub-group of the UK Resilience Forum.”

Now, in the body of the report, I won’t take you to it, Mr Hargreaves, paragraphs 130 – and these are the paragraphs in which this conclusion is drawn – 131, 132, 133, 134, 135 and 136, there are references to how the government will do this, what ways in which the advisory groups will grow. But all those paragraphs do is make reference to the existing structures, to SAGE, to STACs, to the United Kingdom resilience function, the UK Resilience Forum, and they say:

“… the Government is committed to inviting expert challenge and input …”

It will “actively and regularly draw on … expertise”.

So the question for you is this: in what way over the next three years, two years, does the government envisage that the advisory groups will be grown? Do you have it in mind to start, to put into place from scratch a new expert body, a new forum for expert advice? What did you have in mind when you wrote this report?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: It was my view when I arrived in post at the end of 2020 that one aspect of our work that was not fully developed was how we made best use of experts. There were some places where we did it really well and had very well developed structures, SAGE is quite an interesting example of that, but more generally there was a question of whether we were tapping enough into that expertise. So I was quite keen to pursue relatively ambitious change on this. A lot of it had already been done.

We shifted, with helpful guidance from the Royal Academy of Engineering, how we were using experts in the risk assessment process, to really sort of aggressively broaden it out and to try to maximise the number of external experts who could challenge what we were thinking within that process.

We established the UK Resilience Forum, which is designed to allow representatives of all parts of society to come and sit with government and talk about resilience challenges.

So I was quite keen to embrace quite quickly some quite big shifts in how we used experts.

I think my expectation would be that that establishes a trend and we find more and more ways to involve them over the coming period.

So, to the extent that this recommendation represents radical change, we’ve already done that. It’s now a case of evolving that further in the same direction, I’d hope.

Lead Inquiry: Three final areas, please, Mr Hargreaves. On page 74 we have the list of actions that will be done by 2030, eight years hence from the date of the report, to nine years hence from now.

The communication on risks, proposals to make communications on risks more relevant and easily accessible will be drawn up. Work will be done across the three pillars of reform to strengthen LRFs. Standards on resilience will be introduced across the private sector. Better guidance will be provided to the wider private sector. Resilience standards for the CNI and a review of existing regulatory regimes on resilience, to ensure that they’re fit for purpose.

To what extent has the government agreed by 2030 to impose any sort of significant change on the government itself, either in terms of its legal duties or core discharge of its primary functions?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: There isn’t a firm commitment in the way that we might have in some areas, but, as I’ve explained in previous answers, it is something which I expect us to pursue in a – through discussion with those people who are – who have an interest in it. And as I’ve explained, my personal view is that there is a strong case for moving in that direction.

Lead Inquiry: The bottom bullet point under “Partnerships” says the government by 2030, so in seven years’ time, will “review existing regulatory regimes on resilience”.

Does that simply mean it will again review the Civil Contingencies Act 2004?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Well, it will again have to do a post-implementation review, but this is about the regulatory regimes which fall on those outside government, who are adjacent to government. That’s the kind of point about the partnerships bit of the report.

The idea that the framework introduces is essentially you’ve got government, which has sort of formal responsibilities, and then you have the sort of public at large, which includes communities, smaller businesses and so forth. But you’ve got this category which we talk about as – in the “Partnerships” section, which is essentially things which are adjacent to government and deliver services that the public, I suppose, regard as public services but are not of the public sector. So a lot of these recommendations are about the regulatory and other statutory regimes that exist and the strengthening of those.

This is the point that the Civil Contingencies Act doesn’t need to cover everyone everywhere on everything, because there are lots of other statutory and regulatory regimes that sit alongside it. And our organising principle around the supply of public utilities, say, is that we regulate a sector and its delivery. So we regulate the water sector, and that includes how much people pay and supplies of water and maintenance and all kinds of things. And part of that overall framework is obligations in relation to risk and emergencies. And it’s that bit which can be tested.

Lead Inquiry: At paragraph 60, on page 29 of the Resilience Framework, it is said – this is said:

“The [United Kingdom] Government will consider a range of options for improving this and develop an action plan to deliver these, including by developing proposals for formalising duties on the United Kingdom Government departments, particularly in respect of working with Local Resilience Forums and wider local responders … on resilience across the whole resilience cycle. Any new duty would be subject to an impact assessment.”

So is the government’s position that it will either consider a range of options for developing proposals for formalising duties, which may consider – may recommend a new duty, or is the government committed (b) to the imposition of a new legal duty on central government?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: I think the position is as described there, which is there will be a process to weigh up the case for imposing those obligations. The detail here specifically is reference to, if you impose those obligations, doing it in the right way.

So, for example, you would not make every government department a member of every local resilience forum, because they would collapse under their own weight. There is a means for co-operating with the local level through the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, so it’s not about replacing that, say.

Lead Inquiry: All right.

Resourcing. One of the points made to my Lady in the expert report from Mr Mann and Professor Alexander was that this Resilience Framework is silent on resourcing.

Now, a little research demonstrates that the word “resource” or “resourcing” appears 19 times in the report. Page 58, I won’t bring them all up, it says it is “important that investment in resilience is considered and co-ordinated”. “Implementation will be iterative and will take time”. There must be a “co-ordinated approach to our investment in resilience”. Resilience investment within the United Kingdom government must be mapped. The government will “consider options for funding models for any future expanded responsibilities and expectations”.

Is the position of the Resilience Framework that there is no commitment yet to increased resourcing, there is instead a commitment to consider options for future resourcing?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: Yeah, I think that would be fairly summarised as: there’s no new money, there might be less money, but if there are good proposals, who knows, there could be more money. That is the kind of honest answer on that point. Government is very good if it is spending more money in telling you it is spending more money. It is not spending more money here and might spend less.

Lead Inquiry: That, if I may say so, Mr Hargreaves, is an excellent summary.

The last question concerns inequalities and vulnerabilities. Is this the general position, that none of the planning or the guidance or very little of the planning or the guidance pre-Covid pandemic, in relation to civil contingencies and preparedness across the nation, paid any regard to the individual circumstances of the vulnerable or marginalised sectors in our community? There were references to the important legal obligation under the Equalities Act of the public sector equality duty, but that in no part of this complicated factual and legal policy-driven process for contingencies was any duty imposed on anybody to consider the specific needs of particular parts of the community?

Mr Roger Hargreaves: The way in which all of our civil protection is organised is to run with the flow of existing functions. So we think that the people who are best placed to plan for the delivery of local public services in an emergency are those people who have those functions day to day. It kind of runs through everything that we do. When it comes to vulnerable groups – it’s like a central organising principle.

When it comes to vulnerable groups, there is a great deal of expectation on those organisations already, and if you talk to any local authority or public health organisation, the needs of vulnerable people is very, very central to their kind of existence and their focus.

The expert report on this talks a lot about the very wide range of guidance that is available. It is all framed by that idea, though, that we are asking, reminding, telling people that they need to, as they would do ordinarily, factor the needs of the vulnerable into their emergency planning, and then, by extension, their response.

The pandemic is quite interesting in these terms, because of its duration. It’s very difficult to engage in social engineering, improve social outcomes during a two-week emergency. But where you’ve got an emergency that runs over a year or two, you’re making a different kind of decision. You’re not just pulling operational levers to restore control. You’re actually shaping a response over time. And in terms of the mechanics of how government works, it’s less simply an operational task and has more of a policy element.

So what was described by your expert witnesses is really very interesting and thought provoking about how government introduces the best practice it would apply to policy during the policymaking in normal day-to-day business into emergencies of long duration where vulnerabilities may emerge and there is enough time for a kind of feedback loop: we did this, it didn’t work properly, let’s redo it again. Which you wouldn’t get in a tighter crisis.

Mr Keith: My Lady, there are no questions posed by the core participants which I have not already addressed in my own examination, or in relation to which you have declined permission. That being so, there are no further questions.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, in which case we shall break now, I will return at 11.35.

Thank you very much indeed for your help, Mr Hargreaves.

The Witness: Thank you.

(The witness withdrew)

(11.18 am)

(A short break)

(11.35 am)

Lady Hallett: Mr Keith.

Mr Keith: My Lady, the next witness is Professor Sir Chris Whitty.

Sir Chris, if you could be sworn, please.