4. Ms Alison Allen
MS ALISON ALLEN (affirmed).
Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Mr Llewelyn, you are chief executive of the Welsh Local Government Association. You took up office there in January of 2019, having joined the organisation as Director of Lifelong Learning, Leisure and Information in 2002, and you were also the deputy chief executive from 2010.
Mr Lloyd, you are chief executive of the Local Government Association, and you were appointed to that role in November of 2015, having previously worked in local government as chief executive of Cambridgeshire County Council and before that Durham County Council.
Ms Allen, you are chief executive of the Northern Ireland Local Government Association, a role that you have held since February of 2022. You have 20 years’ experience in public service, including a wide range of roles in Belfast City Council, Antrim Borough Council, and the Electoral Office for the Northern Irish Assembly. Is that right? Thank you very much.
I’m going to deal with the organisations that you represent in the same order.
The Welsh Local Government Association, Mr Llewelyn, is a membership organisation that represents all 22 local authorities in Wales, the three fire and rescue authorities and the three national park authorities as well. Is that right?
Mr Llewelyn: Yes, that’s correct.
Ms Blackwell: The Local Government Association is a cross-party organisation with the overall purpose to promote, improve and support local government. It has a membership body of all but two of the 333 principal councils in England, and indeed the 22 principal Welsh councils are also members through a corporate membership scheme. Is that right?
Mr Lloyd: Yes, other than from April 2023 there was local government reorganisation in parts of England that has now reduced the number of councils from 333 to 317.
Ms Blackwell: Right, thank you very much for correcting me.
The Northern Ireland Local Government Association is a council-led representative body for the local authorities in Northern Ireland, and the members are drawn from each of the 11 councils; is that right?
Ms Allen: That’s correct.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
For the sake of completeness, there is also a Scottish organisation called the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities or COSLA, to which mention may be made. Their representative is absent today.
I would like to begin by asking you, Mr Lloyd, how the local authority organisations work together, and to what extent there is a level of community between the four organisations.
Mr Lloyd: We think of ourselves as kindred organisations. We work together on a number of issues with the UK governments, the most current example being immigration and asylum, where we’ve got common cause in our negotiations with central government. And we’ve all got an interest in making sure that our local authorities do the best job they can for their communities.
Ms Blackwell: Now, you’re very quickly speaking. Can I ask you to slow down, please.
Is there a set agenda or timetable of how many times each year the four organisations would come together, or is it an ad hoc basis?
Mr Lloyd: It depends a little bit on the ambitions of our political leadership. We’ve just had a new chair appointed in our organisation who is very keen to further the relationship with our three sister organisations, and so I’m expecting the frequency of liaison to increase, but it’s been at least once annually together.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
The first topic is the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 and its associated guidance. My Lady has heard that the Act is the statutory framework in relation to civil contingencies, certainly in England and Wales, where all principal local authorities are Category 1 responders, but it does not apply in precisely the same way in Northern Ireland.
Ms Allen, is it right that there is a Northern Irish Civil Contingencies Framework that was brought into being in 2005 by the Office of First Minister and deputy First Minister, as it then was, as a reaction to the Act coming into force the previous year?
Ms Allen: That’s correct, and that document was subsequently updated in 2011.
Ms Blackwell: Right, and does that document note that one of its aims was to ensure civil protection standards in Northern Ireland were brought into line with those provided by the Act?
Ms Allen: I believe that was the ambition of the document.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
The Inquiry has heard evidence about the statutory duties that Category 1 responders hold, which include the duty to assess risk of emergencies and put in place emergency plans and share information and co-operate with other responders. But the Act does not prescribe specifically what the appropriate local structures are or should be for ensuring that any organisation is in compliance with the duties.
So there is, I’m going to suggest, a level of flexibility in how local authorities are able to deliver their legal requirements.
Mr Lloyd, do you view the fact that the Act doesn’t prescribe how much the duties are fulfilled and the fact that there is flexibility in interpreting and applying requirements and guidance as a positive or a negative?
Mr Lloyd: The Local Government Association has not called for significant changes to the Act, which I therefore conclude is a positive. We do have some – in the light of the torrid experience of our nation through the pandemic, we do think there’s some learning that needs to be taken into how the Act is constructed and delivered. I’d sum those up probably as three points.
Point 1, local government to be a properly trusted part of the civil response mechanism. We cannot respond unless local government is at the heart of it. If we want to stop, find, support and assist our communities, maintain business and community well-being, and recover, local government is at the heart of those responses. That’s point 1.
Point 2, the Act is silent on the involvement of local democratic leaders and we think that’s an oversight. They’re important, community leaders. They can also ensure that there is scrutiny and oversight of the proposals in a local resilience forum. So there’s more that we need to do to engage local leaders.
Point 3, government has increasingly looked to local resilience forums to respond to a range of issues that one wouldn’t naturally describe as an emergency. So EU exit, for example, the death of the monarch, for example. So we need to be clear about what they’re for. But with those qualifications I think we’re in a good place.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
One issue which you raise in your witness statement is the government’s willingness to share critical planning information with local responders, both in a timely way or indeed at all.
We’ll come to this in more detail later on in your evidence, but at a high level at this stage, what are the challenges in relation to ensuring that local government are in receipt of crucial planning information?
Mr Lloyd: Councils were expected to lead a response in their community to a whole range of issues. We were learning of the issues and the expected response in the afternoon press conferences in the same way as the rest of the nation. Our communities were looking to council leaders and senior officers for what that meant, what it was going to mean in their communities, and quite frankly we did not know.
So that’s at the highest level, but then we can go through all aspects of the response, like the support for businesses, what the furlough scheme was, what the expectations are around shielding extremely vulnerable people. Local government were not sighted on the detail and were having to interpret statements by way of local interventions and support.
Ms Blackwell: Was that experience during the Covid pandemic a reflection of what you would see as a lack of information provided to local organisations in the previous planning stages?
Mr Lloyd: Yes, I would. I’ve already mentioned the preparation for EU exit as an example. When it came to port authorities trying to access information about the likely impact on their transport infrastructure of a no-deal exit from the EU, we could not access, without extreme pressure, data from the relevant government agency. That was a standing example – a standing practice in our engagement with central government.
Ms Blackwell: Right, thank you.
Moving to look at local government emergency preparedness structures, Ms Allen, you outline in your witness statement to the Inquiry the series of changes that have occurred with the local government structures in Northern Ireland during the time period of Module 1, and it is right to say, I think, that as of January 2020 emergency preparedness functions at a local level in Northern Ireland were primarily delivered through what are called emergency preparedness groups, or EPGs; is that right?
Ms Allen: That’s correct.
Ms Blackwell: And there are three: north, south and Belfast.
Ms Allen: That’s correct.
Ms Blackwell: The regional resourcing model in place to support local multi-agency arrangements included a local government regional officer, and three resilience managers; is that right?
Ms Allen: That’s correct, yes.
Ms Blackwell: The EPGs fed into the Northern Irish EPG, which itself is a subgroup of the Civil Contingencies Group?
Ms Allen: Yes.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Did that structure allow for issues to escalate down from – or rather, cascade down from the central group to the local groups and also escalate up the other way round, and was that effective, do you think?
Ms Allen: Speaking from a local government perspective, if I start at the Civil Contingencies Group level, a lead chief executive from local government in Northern Ireland has a seat to represent the local government sector at that level, and it’s important in the context of providing a sectoral view in support of wider public services and emergency planning. The next level at the Northern Ireland emergency preparedness group level, each – each of those groups – sorry, the Northern Ireland group, is co-chaired by the police and local government, again by a lead chief executive. The three emergency preparedness groups are also co-chaired by council and by police.
So the prominence of local government’s role in facilitating information sharing both within the sector but also up and down through those structures was – I’m informed that it was effective in the context of our sector. I obviously can’t speak to others.
Ms Blackwell: Yes, of course you weren’t in position at the time.
Ms Allen: That’s correct, yes.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you for that.
Mr Llewelyn, the Inquiry has heard evidence in relation to the Welsh structures at a high level. Did they include the Wales Resilience Forum, the Welsh local resilience forums and also the Wales Resilience Partnership Team?
Mr Llewelyn: Yes, they did.
May I go back in terms of – I agree with my colleague’s comments in terms of the Civil Contingencies –
Ms Blackwell: Yes, certainly.
Mr Llewelyn: – Act, but I think it is important to recognise that the arrangements under the Act were put in place to deal with one-off time limited events, and emergency planning is a dynamic context. If you look at the changes since the Civil Defence Act in 1948, it’s a constantly changing environment which – and experiential learning is so central to it.
When the Civil Contingencies Act was passed, I don’t think the – an event like a global pandemic was conceived of where there would have been a national lockdown. Because it was seen as a response to, as I say, one-off, time-limited events, the democratic oversight wasn’t a particularly strong feature in it, and one of our concerns would be that the – moving forward, we need to recognise and learn from this experience, and accommodate greater democratic oversight, the involvement of local members, of leaders, and greater accountability through the political processes, rather than allow those to develop in a responsive and in an ad hoc way. The structures you’ve mentioned, the Wales Resilience Forum, and others, were in place, operated effectively, but had to be supplemented with other arrangements.
Ms Blackwell: Going forwards, if those relationships are to be strengthened, how is that best arranged? Is that through a series of regulations or by drawing up plans with the people who are in the roles that you’ve just set out, or is it something more dramatic than that?
Mr Llewelyn: I think we need a whole-system approach, we need to engage all partners in the way we reform or re-design those arrangements.
I think the – we know that the current model by and large works very effectively, which is why I’m suggesting supplementing or adding to it rather than changing it in a drastic way, but some of the principles we outline, I think, in our evidence, in terms of trust and confidence in the system, of subsidiarity, of devolving to a local – down to a local level as much as possible – as an association we often talk about – we reflect, you know, there, it’s not just in emergency planning, that the role of central government is to set the strategy nationally, and the role of local government is to interpret that national strategy and deliver locally based on local circumstances.
We know within a Welsh context local circumstances varied considerably, and especially at the outbreak of Covid, authorities and other partners had to respond very quickly before government was able to put guidance in place.
So the system going forward needs to learn from that experience and accommodate as much (inaudible) decentralisation, subsidiarity, allowing partners at a local level to make plans and to be involved in implementation as much as possible.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Mr Lloyd, the English system relies primarily on a series of local resilience forums, of which there are, I think, 38. Is that still right?
Mr Lloyd: That’s right.
Ms Blackwell: Yes. The Inquiry has heard some evidence about the local resilience fora structure. Are they multi-agency partnerships responsible for identifying and planning for local civil resilience risks, and do the local authorities work closely with other respondents such as the police and fire and rescue services and also the voluntary sector and business groups?
Mr Lloyd: Ms Blackwell, your description is perfect, yes.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you very much.
Key responsibilities of the fora include supporting the preparation of multi-agency plans and protocols, documents and, as we will come to, exercises and training.
What is, though, Mr Lloyd, the community risk register about which the Inquiry has heard a small amount of evidence so far?
Mr Lloyd: So we have the National Risk Register, and in the same way that Mr Llewelyn’s talked about identifying the things that could impact nationwide, the community risk register looks at the particular community that the local resilience fora serves, and spots things in that particular context that are a risk. So if we have rivers, if we’ve got large industrial sites, if – you know, the kinds of things where incidents are likely or possible to occur, it’s to make sure that partners locally understand all of those risks and have plans in place should the worst happen.
Ms Blackwell: In terms of geography, the local resilience fora are based on a police force area, so can they include vastly varying different numbers within them?
Mr Lloyd: Again, you’re exactly right. We have some parts of the country where the coterminosity between a local resilience fora, police force area and local authorities is tidy. There are parts of the country where that is not the case and we therefore have many local authorities engaging in a single local resilience forum. Overall, local government’s view in England would be that the arrangement works well still.
Ms Blackwell: Historically, am I right in saying that there was no funding provided to support the secretariats needed to run the fora, and is that still the position?
Mr Lloyd: Historically you are correct, the funding of the local resilience fora fell to the local partners. That changed during EU exit preparation when some resources came in.
During the period that you’re referencing, of course, local authorities were subject to significant financial pressures. During that period the resources that councils were able to invest in local resilience fora decreased by some 35%. Local authorities’ wider budgets faced very significant reductions as well. So the resilience, the capability and the capacity within local government to respond to events has been put under increased pressure throughout this time period.
So back to your core question, local partners needed to fund the LRFs, the amount we could put into them was reducing, some money came in during EU exit, and there are still some resources coming in, but at relatively modest levels.
Ms Blackwell: All right.
Did the input of funding in the way in which you describe during the exit from Europe confuse the situation or improve the situation?
Mr Lloyd: It helped. Partners were exercising more activity together, we were working together more frequently on that particular instance, which actually gave us a stronger platform for when we faced the events of the pandemic. So I think that’s a positive overall.
Ms Blackwell: Just focusing on planning at the local level for a moment, I want to ask you, first of all, Mr Lloyd, the extent to which government departments as risk owners at the national level are involved with those particular risks at a local level, because you describe in your witness statement that communication, for example, from the Department of Health and Social Care to non-health bodies such as the local resilience fora, was highlighted as being poor.
Would you expand on that, please.
Mr Lloyd: Of course.
So the principal link between national government and the local resilience fora comes through the Department for Housing and Communities, DLUHC as we now know it. They have officers that are linked to each of the local resilience fora, and that’s a strong link.
As we now know, when central government is acting on a national incident, much of the activity is driven through the Cabinet Office, and then the responsibility for a pandemic sits with the Department of Health and Social Care, so you can see the fragmentation immediately in the relationship and the work that we expect of our colleagues in DLUHC to manage that interface. So they’ve got a big challenge that I know you’ve explored with their witnesses to date.
So – and we’ve also got the added complication that DHSC would default to using their existing channels through the NHS for much of their communication, and to another partnership called the local health resilience partnership, that shares the same footprint as LRFs but has a distinct focus on health issues and health resilience. So the key thing we need to do at a local level is to make sure that the health resilience partnership and the local resilience fora integrate together, and the key person in this regard, when we were going into pandemic planning, is the director of public health, who play a pivotal and critical role.
Ms Blackwell: Right, thank you.
Would better engagement between the Department of Health and Social Care and local resilience fora improve the position about which my Lady has heard some evidence of concern that’s been expressed in relation to preparedness and resilience of adult social care?
Mr Lloyd: Undoubtedly so.
Ms Blackwell: All right.
How might that be achieved?
Mr Lloyd: So I’ve already referenced the financial pressures that local government was under. Of course local government fund a significant proportion of the adult social care market, both care homes and domiciliary care. Those providers of that care are also – were also fragile at the period that we’re talking about as a consequence of what we’ll call austerity. Understanding how they can respond to a pandemic, how they can link in to the local resilience fora is absolutely key. We’ve got the Care Quality Commission, of course, that oversee and regulate the whole of the care market, and trying to knit together health and social care with the local resilience fora, with DHSC, CQC and others, is a key element of our response to a pandemic and it could have been better.
Lady Hallett: You’re going very quickly, I’m afraid. Sorry.
Ms Blackwell: Sorry.
We’re moving into local government public health. Before I ask about the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 and the fundamental changes that that brought, is there anything, Ms Allen or Mr Llewelyn, that you want to add to the evidence just given by Mr Lloyd?
Ms Allen: No, thank you.
Mr Llewelyn: Can I just add that I think the four police forces in Wales, the LRF footprint followed the police force footprints. In some instances there is coterminosity with other public service structures, but that isn’t the case in every instance. By and large the arrangements work very effectively. Sometimes it can be tempting to look to restructure or regionalise in response to crises and different events, but in this instance we think that the focus should be on making existing arrangements work as effectively as possible rather than trying to reform or restructure.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
The Inquiry has heard evidence about the Health and Social Care Act coming into force in 2012 and, as I have said, bringing with it fundamental change, because since that time local authorities and Public Health England, as it then was, jointly held primary responsibility for the delivery and management of public health.
You’ve already made mention, Mr Lloyd, of the directors of public health and the important role that they fulfil in terms of public health at a local level.
You say in your written evidence that the responsibilities imposed by the Act had a considerable impact on emergency planning, and you also say that there was some fragmentation of health protection, intelligence architecture and commissioning functions, and also some duplication and overlap which council public health teams have argued limited their capacity to effect the significant change that arrived.
That was in 2012. Are you able to explain to the Inquiry how matters have progressed between that date and now?
Mr Lloyd: So everything you’ve described reflects our evidence and we stand by that. But – and if I could underline that “but”, I would – the changes the Act put in and the transfer of public health back to local governments in 2013 is probably one of the best parts of that Act.
Local government across, I think, the whole of the UK would recognise that local government is all about the well-being of its place, including public health, and by bringing the public health function firmly back into local governments, it ensured that in everything we do around tackling homelessness, the work we do around employment and jobs, the things that we do to support anybody that has any kind of vulnerability, we started to view that through the public health lens.
So not only did we move the relatively small public health teams in, we turned councils in their entirety into public health organisations.
That’s a great big win.
Yes, there are still some join-ups that we have to work on from that point to today with our colleagues in the NHS, and making sure that the commissioning and the planning of a wide range of services is effective. But day in, day out, our colleagues that lead the public health function, together with regional health protection teams, deal with hundreds and thousands of incidents across the country that will never get the attention of groups like this.
So it’s a good – it was a good transition and one that we applauded, and we’ll keep working to join up the silos that it might have created.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Mr Llewelyn?
Mr Llewelyn: Yes, I recognise Mark’s comments and agree completely. The position in Wales is different, and we outlined the differences in our written evidence. Historically we’ve argued for a similar arrangement in Wales to that that exists in England. For some of the reasons that I’ve mentioned already, we think that local government is – it’s (inaudible) subsidiarity, we think that local government is so close to the communities and the people they represent that more of the public health function should reside within local government. Almost everything that local government does relates to public health and the health and well-being of the people that they serve. In this instance we think there’s probably an unnecessary fragmentation. We’ve got a tier of government which is close to those communities. There are other – there are environmental, health, trading standards, other support activities that local authorities discharge that align very closely with the public health function, and, as I say, historically we’ve argued for that to be returned into local government. There are aspects of community care which we think could be delivered by local government as well, and we think that the Covid experience emphasises the effectiveness of local government in that arena.
As I say, we outline this more fully in the written evidence.
Ms Blackwell: Yes, thank you very much.
I should say that, although I didn’t formally ask for your statements to be published, I will ask for permission for that to be done now. Thank you, my Lady.
Ms Allen, you appeared to be nodding in approval when Mr Lloyd was setting out his support for public health being managed at a local level. Is that right, and it is there anything else you would like to add from a Northern Ireland perspective?
Ms Allen: Thank you. I was nodding my support around the initial comments about the unique position of local authorities being embedded in their communities, both at a political and officer level, and how that places them in a very special position to understand the needs and to respond quickly. It’s not the position of local government in Northern Ireland that they are advocating for a transfer of public health powers.
Ms Blackwell: Right, thank you very much for clarifying that.
Mr Lloyd, back to you. Is it right that directors of public health do not sit on the local resilience fora?
Mr Lloyd: There is not one answer to that question. Each local resilience forum will have a different structure.
Ms Blackwell: Right.
Mr Lloyd: If we’re into a response mode, it would be unthinkable that directors of public health wouldn’t be in the strategic co-ordinating group that would be set up and leading very important strands of work, and in a long-term response to an event like a pandemic we do need to have a number of people taking on lead roles in the local resilience fora, including chairing them, and during periods through the pandemic directors of public health took on that most senior role, and rightly so.
Ms Blackwell: Right, so that isn’t a procedure that needs any further formalisation; it’s working well, as you’ve described? Thank you.
Staying with you, please, Mr Lloyd, I want to move on to local risk assessment and emergency planning, which we’ve touched upon in terms of the perhaps perceived difficulty of information flowing in to the Local Government Association members who have the responsibility of performing the community risk assessments.
Category 1 responders indeed do have a duty to undertake these risk assessments and to devise emergency plans within their areas. You say in your witness statement, Mr Lloyd, however, that there are a number of issues with the risk assessment processes which mean that risk assessments do not significantly assist an area’s ability to respond to an issue always.
What are those either perceived or actual concerns in terms of the efficacy of a local risk assessment and planning in that regard?
Mr Lloyd: So you’ve already asked me to expand on the purpose of the community risk register.
Ms Blackwell: Yes.
Mr Lloyd: In addition, councils, the local resilience fora, will want to respond, have plans in place to respond to issues identified in the National Risk Register. We had plans in place to respond to an influenza pandemic, we did not have plans in place to respond to a Covid-like pandemic. That’s the core issue that we have here.
The vast majority of councils, 87%, say that they adapted their flu pandemic plans well to respond to Covid, but quite simply a Covid-like response was not in the local plan.
Ms Blackwell: Right. I just want to focus for a moment on why that might have been, and whether or not there are problems that you have perceived from your role in the information that’s contained within the National Security Risk Assessment filtering down and being made available for those at a local level.
You may know that Catherine Frances, the director general for the Local Government, Resilience and Communities division, gave evidence to my Lady already, and she said to the Inquiry that the NSRA is shared with every local resilience forum in England. She made it clear that there are elements of it that have to remain secure, such as those parts which are deemed to be official-sensitive, but that they can be accessed through secure routes, and that local resilience fora nominate a person who has access to that interpretation.
It may be my interpretation, and I don’t put it any higher than that, but Ms Frances appeared to suggest that there was no difficulty with that process, and that it was effective as far as she was concerned.
Does that accord with your experience, Mr Lloyd?
Mr Lloyd: So, the trickiness in here is that the local resilience fora are planning entities, they are not legal entities in any sense.
Ms Blackwell: What effect does that have?
Mr Lloyd: That the responsibility for the actual response beyond the planning sits in the – with the Category 1 and Category 2 responders –
Ms Blackwell: Right.
Mr Lloyd: – and ensuring that information flows into those organisations in a way that means they can form proper, fulsome plans is a core issue here.
It does come back to the issue that I, Mr Llewelyn and I think Ms Allen have raised around trust and ensuring that we get to a place where local partners are involved in identifying the issues that should be in the National Risk Register and how we will be part of the response, in the way that Mr Llewelyn said, to those issues, and also ensuring that we provide the challenge to the approaches that are being proposed in the national register, like, for example, the omission of non-pharmaceutical interventions in that register.
So I just think whilst, of course, Ms Frances’s assessment of a flow is right, whether that allows for effective planning at a local level is the question that we should debate further.
Ms Blackwell: So there may not be much of a problem in the information cascading down, but I think – I’ve interpreted your evidence as meaning that there may be a continuing difficulty in allowing the information to flow sideways in to your partners?
Mr Lloyd: That’s right. With – there are instances where it’s been specified that a named individual receive information on a confidential basis. In a planning partnership that’s not an effective way of engaging a wide range of different organisations.
Ms Blackwell: What’s the solution?
Mr Lloyd: We need that trusted local relationship with the Category 1 responders, so that we are part of the solution, building from local to national to global in our response to issues facing our nation.
Ms Blackwell: Mr Llewelyn?
Mr Llewelyn: I wanted to respond to your point about information cascading down.
I think that there is an issue in relation to devolved administrations. It isn’t always clear that the UK Government shares information in non-devolved areas with local authorities and other public sector partners in those areas. Again, we mentioned this in our written evidence. I think we need to look at communication in a wider sense than just simply the one you were referring to in your last question. But I think there is a substantive issue and we need to develop better understandings and possible protocols in terms of how information is shared to whom, when and so on.
Ms Blackwell: So you would advocate a more substantial consideration, perhaps involving a structural change, or is it more of a clarity of understanding of roles and how the information needs to be shared?
Mr Llewelyn: Certainly clarity on roles and responsibilities. As I say, protocols, written, some kind of codification of how information is shared and the appropriate channels of information sharing.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Ms Allen, you tell us in your witness statement that a Northern Ireland risk register was produced by the Office of First Minister and deputy First Minister, as it then was, in 2013. But, as it was marked “official-sensitive” that wasn’t shared with all local government representatives, nor were local councils involved in its creation.
Do you have any views on the failure to share that risk register with the local government representatives?
Ms Allen: Thank you, and just, yes, to agree with the points that have been made by my colleagues, that it speaks to a need to improve the trust between regional government and local government, and that is something that’s very important in a Northern Ireland context as well.
I think the impact of that is the ability at an individual council level and both in a multi-agency context to be able to appropriately plan in the context of not fully understanding the level of risk that has been deemed to potentially exist. And I think in that context, just to speak that obviously pandemic planning in Northern Ireland context was deemed to be regional, so local government’s involvement in that was extremely limited and was limited to the areas in which we had statutory duties, which were around bereavement services. So that was the extent of our involvement in pandemic planning in Northern Ireland.
Ms Blackwell: So because the Northern Ireland risk register, the national document, and indeed the process that lay behind it, had no input at a regional or local level, and the product of it wasn’t shared at a local level, it was impossible for those with the responsibility at a local level to engage in that at all?
Ms Allen: To fully understand the risks as they were assessed at a regional level and, just to further emphasise some points from colleagues, obviously at a local council level but also on a multi-agency basis, understanding of the risks and analysis of risks are key to developing both emergency plans and business continuity plans, and that was done at a local level, but obviously there is a significant difference between the risks as understood at a regional or indeed national level and something which is local to a particular place.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
In terms of local emergency plans and moving back to England for a moment, I’d like to look at the extent to which the 2011 influenza pandemic strategy provided local planners with sufficient guidance to develop a pandemic plan that was suitable to respond to a pandemic such as Covid-19.
Mr Lloyd, was it suitable? You’ve mentioned already the fact that at a local level there was an inability to plan for non-pharmaceutical interventions, and of course that’s not something that is covered in any detail in the strategy. Did the strategy then guide the local plans, and was it possible for those responsible for drafting the local plans and taking things forwards to have an input of any areas that were missing from the strategy, or is that an unreasonable expectation?
Mr Lloyd: So, councils in England have not reported to us ahead of the Inquiry concerns about the strategy that you’ve highlighted, and the survey that we conducted on behalf of the Inquiry identifies that councils believed that they had plans and that they thought those plans were effective and that they’d been tested in a good number of cases. So I don’t have a more substantial response to your question. I’m happy to follow up afterwards, if it’s helpful.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Mr Llewelyn, the Pan-Wales Response Plan, did that in your view provide a particular focus to local planners on what local pandemic plans should look like?
Mr Llewelyn: I think – as has been expressed by my colleagues already, I think the scale and scope of the pandemic wasn’t anticipated and expected. Our survey shows that authorities thought that they were well prepared for an influenza epidemic, but the scale and scope of Covid was not something they had expected or had planned for.
There is, I think, significant evidence of the effectiveness of the emergency plans that were in place. The – at the start of 2020, I think it was Storm Dennis, the flood – the floods and the impact of that storm were widely felt in South Wales. Authorities were very effective in responding and were prepared.
It’s interesting to note as well that the arrangements that had been put in place through the WLGA for mutual support came to the fore, in that instance, so we had authorities from North Wales, Flintshire for example providing support for Rhondda Cynon Taf, when they had floods. So the arrangements that were in place, all the evidence suggests they worked very effectively. But, as I say, the scale and scope of Covid caught everybody by surprise.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Just returning to you momentarily, Mr Lloyd, if I may, in your witness statement you describe that many existing plans were ripped up when Covid arrived because they didn’t reflect the situation. Is that something which local authorities have reported back to you during the course of your survey, which, I think it’s right to say, was undertaken by both England and Wales in preparation for this Inquiry?
Mr Lloyd: So our plans were prepared for an influenza pandemic with no non-pharmaceutical interventions. We were in a different scenario. “Ripped up” is probably an emotive word in this. Councils definitely adapted, and adapted quickly, to make sure that they were in a position to evolve their influenza plans into a Covid plan, to deliver the financial support, to protect the clinically extremely vulnerable, to work with rough sleepers, to support our schools, to support businesses. So we adapted, I think would be my summary.
Ms Blackwell: All right, thank you very much.
Ms Allen, you explain to us in your written evidence that post local government reform, each new council in Northern Ireland developed its own internal emergency plan, and that in relation to multi-agency plans, each council now participates as a partner in its local emergency preparedness group, which we’ve already described.
Are you aware of any concerns in respect of local emergency plans in Northern Ireland and their ability to withstand what’s described as an unforeseen challenge posed by Covid-19?
Ms Allen: That’s quite difficult to comment on, and I say that specifically because the direction give to us was that pandemic planning would be undertaken at a regional level, and that was made on a number of occasions. Indeed, in the local government division circular 07/06 it specifically recognises that a communicable disease pandemic should be dealt with by the Department of Health, so local government was very much told to plan on the basis of its own services and business continuity, which it did.
Ms Blackwell: Right, thank you.
I’m moving on now to look at some of the exercises about which the Inquiry has heard, and turning first of all to Winter Willow, which is at INQ000056627, reminding ourselves that this was an influenza pandemic exercise in 2007 but a number of points of learning flowed from this exercise which are relevant to the local authority planning.
If we turn to page 4, first of all, please, so that we can set the scene, it was an exercise delivered in two stages. Stage 1 was held on 30 January 2007 and comprised a national-level tabletop exercise meeting of the Civil Contingencies Committee that simulated a United Kingdom alert level 2 of World Health Organisation Phase 6.
Then there was a second stage between 16 and 21 February which followed up the decisions taken in stage 1, with a full national exercise held over several days.
Now, if we move, please, to page 5 and paragraph 5, we can see that – thank you.
“The Exercise also highlighted the need for better engagement with the public and communities and particularly community responsibility for vulnerable people. There was a need for clearer advice to the public on the use of antiviral drugs, facemasks and other measures and on the stocking of home supplies.”
If we can move to page 11, please, and look at the fifth bullet point. Thank you.
“The Exercise also showed the need to improve linkages between the established regional and local resilience structures and their equivalents in the National Health Service … In particular, a better separation needed to be created between crisis response and recovery roles at the local level. It was recognised that the management of a ‘rising tide’ event was significantly different to a sudden incident and some regions identified the need for greater clarity in individual roles and the trigger for establishing Regional Nominated Co-ordinators, and their equivalents in the devolved administrations, under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.”
Finally, then, page 12 and paragraph 4, please:
“The Exercise highlighted the need for the process for the collection of regular data and information at the local level, and its collation into reports to the centre, to be reviewed. There were several possible communication routes between local responders and the centre with the potential to lead to confusion. The templates for reporting data also needed some revision to ensure a consistent picture of the emerging situation.”
Now, these were all areas in which issues remained in January of 2020, some 13 years after this exercise took place.
Mr Lloyd, coming to you first, would you agree with that?
Mr Lloyd: I would. The report helpfully reminds us of the difference between a blue light emergency services led situation and what it calls a “rising tide” situation, like the spread of a pandemic, and it does require a different kind of response.
And, Ms Blackwell, I think when we get to the recommendations in the Winter Willow evaluation, it highlights the need for national/local links to be improved around policy and information, and we agree, in English local government, as I’m sure my colleagues will in Wales and Northern Ireland. So there are lessons that were highlighted that have not been learned as we have gone forward over the years, and we will come to other exercises that perhaps trigger even deeper emotions in due course.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Mr Llewelyn, is there anything that you would like to add?
Mr Llewelyn: No, I agree with those comments, nothing to add.
Ms Blackwell: Ms Allen?
Ms Allen: Just to advise that participation in Winter Willow did not extend to local government in Northern Ireland, it’s our understanding that took place at a regional level, so we are not aware of the recommendations in any detail.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
There was limited local resilience fora involvement in Exercise Cygnus and, Mr Lloyd, you tell us in your witness statement that only eight of the local resilience fora took part in the exercise. Is it possible that some of the other local resilience fora may have had some informal engagement with the exercise about which the LGA may not be aware?
Mr Lloyd: So the exercise was first planned in 2014, with a larger number of local resilience fora lined up to participate, delayed and delayed and eventually exercised in 2016, by which time some had dropped out. To the best of my knowledge, there were eight that participated in the final exercise.
Ms Blackwell: Do you think that there should have been a more formalised arrangement for the remaining local resilience fora to be part and parcel of the exercise?
Mr Lloyd: Well, we hope that the Inquiry will conclude that we need a systematic approach to rehearsing a whole set of potential incidents across the country, that are planned involving local as well as national, so that we can know what we’re going to deal with over the five or ten years.
So, yes, of course we would like to have seen more involvement, and Ms Blackwell, I guess the core thing that creates a reaction in English local government is the fact that Exercise Cygnus, the conclusions of it, its recommendations, were kept secret from local government.
Ms Blackwell: Well, I’m going to come on to that in a moment, but the poor attendance – and I don’t mean that in any pejorative sense, but the numbers of local resilience fora and their involvement being so low is particularly concerning, isn’t it, given that the – well, one of the overarching findings of the report was that the United Kingdom was not equipped for a pandemic?
Mr Lloyd: Yeah, and I think it comes back to the recommendations that Bruce Mann’s put to you about needing a more people-focused resilience structure in our country.
If in an exercise like Cygnus we recognise this is actually about every community across the country, you would want your local communities and their response mechanisms involved in an exercise like this. But at the moment it’s seen as a top-down approach to these kinds of events and local government is brought in as a participant on a small scale rather than at the core of the exercise.
Ms Blackwell: Before we break for lunch, I’m going to ask you to expand on the evidence that you’ve just given about the fact that the report was kept secret from you.
Explain to the Inquiry, please, Mr Lloyd, the circumstances of that and what efforts were made by the Local Government Association in order to attempt to obtain a copy of the report.
Mr Lloyd: So in – the exercise, as you’ve said, was planned in 2014, took place in 2016, involved some local resilience fora. The plan to evaluate the effectiveness of the exercise didn’t include those LRFs in every element of evaluation, it was only some.
The feedback, as far as we’re aware, to the LRFs was limited, if at all. Careful choice of words for the Inquiry. The Local Government Association was not sighted on the exercise’s conclusions and we only became aware of the detail when judicial processes were triggered in 2020 that, before their conclusion, resulted in DHSC’s Secretary of State releasing the report. Its recommendations are significant in terms of pandemic planning and all local government wishes we were sighted on those recommendations earlier.
Ms Blackwell: When you say it was released during the course of the approach to judicial processes, what do you mean by that?
Mr Lloyd: We didn’t get to a final ruling. The department decided to publish before the judicial processes reached a conclusion.
Ms Blackwell: But those were judicial processes which had been commenced by the Local Government Association?
Mr Lloyd: No, that’s not the case, they were commenced by members of the legal profession – sorry, the medical profession, forgive me.
Lady Hallett: So they started judicial review proceedings?
Mr Lloyd: (Witness nods)
Ms Blackwell: Is that a convenient moment?
Lady Hallett: Certainly. How are we doing for time?
Ms Blackwell: I think we’re all right, actually, having a normal length of lunch break, thank you.
Lady Hallett: I shall return at 1.45.
(12.45 pm)
(The short adjournment)
(1.45 pm)
Lady Hallett: Ms Blackwell.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you, my Lady.
Just before we broke for lunch, Mr Lloyd, we were discussing the fact that few local resilience fora were involved in Exercise Cygnus, and you were telling my Lady that in fact it took a JR, a judicial review process being launched in order for the report from Exercise Cygnus to be provided, which I think was eventually done in June of 2020.
Taking place during the same year as Exercise Cygnus was Exercise Alice. Is it right, Mr Lloyd, that the Local Government Association did not become aware of Exercise Alice taking place until the autumn of last year, 2022?
Mr Lloyd: That is correct.
Ms Blackwell: All right.
You tell us in your witness statement that the fact that the exercise taking place was kept a secret from the Local Government Association was itself surprising and regrettable. Why was it regrettable?
Mr Lloyd: So Exercise Alice was a desktop exercise exploring the consequence of the UK experiencing a SARS, MERS outbreak. The local government family, I think that applies to the whole of the nation, didn’t become aware of the exercise having taken place, nor its conclusions, until the report became known through the work of this Inquiry.
Why it matters, having now retrospectively seen that work, it was the first time when issues like quarantine featured in planning. It would have changed what we were doing in our local planning to have knowledge of that kind of intent should we experience a pandemic of those strains.
Ms Blackwell: Is there a culture of secrecy, do you think, that exists between what’s going on in central government and what is allowed to be known at the local level?
Mr Lloyd: So Exercise Winter Willow conclusions were shared without negative consequence back in 2017. Cygnus wasn’t, Alice wasn’t, more recently. I think that takes me to answer your question as: yes, there is an approach to secrecy around the conclusions.
Ms Blackwell: And the ramifications of not disclosing, I mean, the existence of an exercise but, perhaps as importantly, the report that flows from the exercise to local government level, is that there is a lack of knowledge which affects the level of preparation and planning?
Mr Lloyd: So, as I think as all three of us have made clear, the local-national interface – this is a shared endeavour to manage the nation through events, like the tragic event of a pandemic. If we’re not sighted on the recommendations like the 22 set out in Exercise Cygnus, like recommendation 21 around excess death management and the consequences for us at a local level, we’re not planning in the way that we should be. So you’re absolutely right, it has significant consequences.
Ms Blackwell: Mr Llewelyn?
Mr Llewelyn: Thank you.
We weren’t sighted on Alice, as was the case with the NJ(?), but I think it is interesting to note that Wales ran its own Cygnus exercise in 2014, in October of that year. It was a Wales-only exercise, it was national and local, and the collective recommendations were shared and were discussed within the Wales Resilience Partnership Team.
It’s also interesting to note that the recommendations refer to preparations for an influenza outbreak, which would not have helped in preparation for Covid, but there was nothing – none of the recommendations covered non-pharmaceutical interventions or made reference to, for example, schools closing. So in that sense perhaps the recommendations might not have been as useful in preparedness for Covid, but it is interesting to note, I think, that the recommendations were shared collectively. It didn’t cover things like an all-Wales risk register, which in hindsight would have been useful as well.
Ms Blackwell: Ms Allen, is there anything that you would like to add?
Ms Allen: Thank you. Just speaking to the difference in public services delivery in Northern Ireland, particularly with the public health function being managed by a separate organisation, however NILGA would feel that the public have a right to integrated public services, and that no matter how difficult we find that as public servants that we should be able to find a way to manage that.
Our experience certainly is there have been significant improvements in the revised Civil Contingencies Framework in Northern Ireland in 2021, which we feel properly reflects the contribution that councils and local multi-agency structures can make in an emergency response.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Lady Hallett: Can I just go back to Exercise Alice.
You said, Mr Lloyd, the Local Government Association only became aware and, by the sounds of it, so did other local government associations. Does that mean that no local bodies were involved in Exercise Alice? Cygnus you said eight, I think it was.
Ms Blackwell: Yes.
Mr Lloyd: That’s right, so in Cygnus there was the engagement of eight local resilience fora. To the best of my knowledge there was no local government involvement in the desktop exercise known as Exercise Alice.
Lady Hallett: So no input and then you’re not even told what the recommendations are?
Mr Lloyd: That’s correct.
Ms Blackwell: Or even the existence of the exercise having taken place.
Moving towards from 2016 and from Exercise Cygnus which we know took place in October of that year, a key workstream included the development of a pandemic flu standard as part of the National Resilience Standards, intended to assist the local resilience fora with planning, but, as we know, that workstream was delayed due to preparations for a no-deal EU exit.
I would like to look, though, at a local resilience forum pandemic flu preparedness report which we have at INQ000023154.
This is a report that is England-centric and it was prepared by RED. It was, as we can see from the executive summary, a questionnaire which was developed and commissioned to support the work of the Pandemic Flu Readiness Board prior to Covid, and:
“This summary of the LRF responses represent the situation at the point of collection in February 2020 …”
So outside, just, of our time period. But it:
“… has been repurposed to support preparations for Covid-19. A range of actions are recommended that fall to the local and national tiers to take forward …”
I’m particularly interested to go to page 6, please, and to look at what the LRF concerns were.
If we can highlight the paragraph under “LRF concerns”, please:
“Recommendation 9 – government to continue to share guidance on pandemic preparedness to allow refers to review their arrangements.
“Concerns broadly covering one or more of the following, often interlinked, areas [were these]:
“Excess Deaths; “Supply of Appropriate Equipment/Medicines; “C3; “Logistics; “Information/guidance from Central Government; “Health and Social Care sector capacity; “Ethics/Complex Decisions; “Skilled staff; Roles & Responsibilities; “Critical Care; “Testing/’First few hundred’; “Finance; “Legislation; “Essential Services; “Business Continuity; “Planning assumptions … “Scope of Plan; “Communications;
“Recovery;
“Quarantine;
“Vulnerable people;”
If we go over the page:
“Bereavement and social issues; and
“Discharge protocols.”
Now, these matters, some of these matters we now know, from our discussion of the recommendations in Winter Willow, and of Cygnus and Alice in more recent times, some of these issues had been flagged for many years.
When, Mr Lloyd, did you first become aware of this report from RED?
Mr Lloyd: My short answer is: in preparation for this Inquiry.
Ms Blackwell: Right. Did you know of its existence prior to that?
Mr Lloyd: Personally I did not.
Ms Blackwell: Right. Would you, as chief executive of the LGA, expect to have been informed, firstly, that a report of this nature had been prepared and, perhaps taking it back a stage, that the local resilience fora had been engaged with RED in order to provide their opinion on these matters?
Mr Lloyd: Yes. There would additions to this list from local resilience fora, for example working with the voluntary community sector’s an omission, so we would have added some value to this document.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
I want to move on to deal with the abolition of the Government Offices Resilience Manager role, which you talk about in your witness statement, Mr Lloyd.
Do you think that there is an argument for a regional level approach and that particular office, of Government Officer of Resilience, to be – well, consideration at least to be given to its reinstatement?
Mr Lloyd: My answer isn’t straightforward. So the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities does have link officers with local resilience fora. They do a good job of acting as a liaison point into that department. The core issue, if we believe that our response in this country should be local to national, the question really relates to what does each local resilience forum require to be more effective. Some have mass and scale. I immediately think of Greater Manchester when I say that. Some are smaller and could benefit from mutual aid and support from near neighbours. So I think there’s – arrangements may vary across the country to allow the scale and capacity to respond to incidents. I wouldn’t simply say it must be a regional answer. It’s what will work in each circumstance.
Ms Blackwell: Remaining with you for the moment, if I may, Mr Lloyd, I also want to ask you about assurance, because when Catherine Frances gave evidence to the Inquiry, she confirmed that, in terms of plans, the central government organisations and groups do not have any level of assurance role over the local government plans.
Is there a need for there to be any level of assurance provided by central government or, in your opinion, is the local assurance working and there’s no need for looking at altering or potentially improving the system?
Mr Lloyd: So I think my answer to both of your questions is no. So I think what’s missing at the moment is, as Mr Llewelyn said earlier in our evidence session, the engagement of democratically elected leaders in a place who can provide both leadership for community, oversight of the work of local resilience fora, scrutiny and challenge around what the plans look like. Point one.
Point two, I think there’s the potential for LRFs who are all trying to do the same thing in their different ways to peer review each other’s activities. This is something the Local Government Association has proposed on previous occasions, and has not been taken up by our central government colleagues, to put in place an arrangement that would allow competent, able, experienced people in the local resilience fora to go to other places, test plans and check. I would start there before introducing some kind of top-down assessments.
Ms Blackwell: Is it right that in fact – I don’t mean this in any critical way, but at the moment all that’s happening is that each local resilience forum is effectively marking its own homework, they are assuring their own plans?
Mr Lloyd: That plays exactly to the point I’m making. By inviting other experts in the field, other LRFs, who know the issues they’re grappling with in their local community risk register, to look into other LRFs and test whether their plans are robust, comprehensive, inclusive, include the voluntary community, et cetera, et cetera, we don’t have that arrangement at the moment, and it would add value.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Mr Llewelyn, do you want to make any comments on assurance?
Mr Llewelyn: In terms of arrangements in Wales, and the political engagement in particular, we recognised the democratic deficit early on within the – and during the Covid crisis, and as an association put arrangements in place to provide greater member oversight and cover of the response, but also close engagement with the Welsh Government as well. So in a sense we almost initiated a parallel democratic process to sit alongside the arrangements under the Civil Contingencies Act. I think those arrangements worked very effectively. They’ve continued post-Covid, and they’ve been part of the Wales response to the Ukraine humanitarian crisis and, more recently, the cost of living crisis as well.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Ms Allen, is there anything which you would like to add?
Ms Allen: Just to specify, the arrangements for assurance in Northern Ireland are slightly difficult. Each council obviously has its own internal audit function, which its emergency plan and business continuity plan will be scrutinised through, which does – is overseen, obviously, by democratically elected officials.
There is an arm’s length body of government in Northern Ireland called the Northern Ireland Audit Office which is an independent arm of government which provides that scrutiny over councils and the activities of councils as well.
Ms Blackwell: All right, thank you very much.
Lady Hallett: Sorry, could I go back to Mr Llewelyn.
You said that you had added democratic process. What do you mean in actual terms, what happened, what did you change?
Mr Llewelyn: So what we – at some points during the Covid crisis we would arrange meetings of the 22 local authority leaders with government ministers which provided, as I said, democratic oversight, an alternative forum for discussion of various aspects of the response. At key stages during the crisis these meetings took place on a daily basis, on weekends. We were able to respond as and when. As we went through the crisis they occurred less frequently but we were able to stand up these arrangements at incredibly short notice, sometimes within a matter of hours.
Lady Hallett: Thank you.
Ms Blackwell: Mr Lloyd, Catherine Frances explained to the Inquiry that ResilienceDirect is the key platform to share strategy and planning documents between central government and the local resilience fora.
Is that, in your opinion, an effective platform for the sharing of such documents?
Mr Lloyd: So I think it’s important I put on the record that I personally do not have access to that platform, so I’m sharing reports with you. Access to documents is restricted to certain people within a local resilience forum or within some of the Category 1 responders.
Then, during the EU exit preparations and during Covid, other channels for sharing documents and information were used by our colleagues in Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, so it wasn’t consistently through ResilienceDirect, but I don’t have a critique of the system to share with you from those people that do have access.
Ms Blackwell: Right.
Do you think, from your point of view and from your position, that consideration might be given to expanding the pool of organisations and partners that might have access to it?
Mr Lloyd: That’s implicit in my answers. Let me make it explicit. I have said earlier on in my evidence that local resilience fora are a planning partnership. They are utterly dependent on the Category 1 and sometimes Category 2 responders to bring to life those plans, so ensuring the key personnel within those responder organisations have sight of key documents is very important.
Ms Blackwell: Have your members made any comments to you about the length and complexity of planning documents?
Mr Lloyd: There’s a call for documents to be consolidated in one place, which plays to your core points, for them to be simplified and for them to be up to date. So yes.
Ms Blackwell: So those three aspects.
Mr Llewelyn, is that mirrored in your knowledge from your members?
Mr Llewelyn: Yeah, more or less, I think, yes.
Ms Blackwell: And Ms Allen?
Ms Allen: Yes, particularly the point about documents being kept up to date.
Ms Blackwell: Up to date, thank you very much.
Inequalities and vulnerabilities should form part of the consideration for preparedness response and recovery. So you say, Ms Allen, in your witness statement to the Inquiry.
You also refer to the fact that the CCG(NI) Vulnerable People Protocol, which was established in 2016, should form a normal part of all preparation and activation.
Is that currently being done, do you think?
Ms Allen: Speaking from a local government perspective, I can say that our preparation is very much person-centred, which is how we plan and respond, particularly as councillors are democratically elected and are held very accountable at that local level.
I think in a Northern Ireland context that is brought to life with additional legislation via the section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 which, rather than just being a protocol, places a statutory duty on all public bodies to give due consideration in the delivery of public services to any disadvantage that may be felt by protected groups, of which there are a number, and I think also that is brought to life through the involvement of the voluntary community and faith sector, which bring important insight in supporting vulnerable people, and I can give you the assurance that those sectors are very heavily represented at a sub-regional and regional level in our responses.
Ms Blackwell: The Inquiry has heard evidence from witnesses who say it’s impossible to fully pre-empt the groups of people who will be most severely affected by an incident such as a pandemic. However, do you believe that in the work at local government level there is much that can be done in order to identify which vulnerabilities are likely to be most exacerbated by the onset of a pandemic?
Ms Allen: The answer is yes, and I’ll explain that answer. First of all, local government is completely embedded in the communities it serves. Our councillors and our officers know very deeply the needs of those communities and can represent them very effectively, and connect with other organisations who can share their experiences. So I think the ability to be able to fully try and anticipate their needs is core to any effective emergency plan and response.
What I would say is obviously, from our own perspective, some of the impacts of Covid-19 weren’t anticipated. I think that’s reflective of my colleagues’ contribution as well. But the – our experience in local government is that the training and experience of emergency planners is a very unique – it’s a very unique method of doing a full 360 to understand what the potential direct impacts may be, but, more importantly, some of the unintended consequences of decisions. It’s a very valuable insight that we very much value in our sector.
Ms Blackwell: Mr Llewelyn, is there anything that you would like to add?
Mr Llewelyn: I think this is – vulnerability is a very difficult and complex issue, and the reality is – I think you were alluding to this – that we’re all vulnerable in different settings and in different contexts and, depending on the nature of the emergency or the crisis, there is a significant contextual dimension to it. Our survey reflects the local authority views in terms of their preparedness and the way they responded.
There is a high degree of awareness of the public sector equality duty under the Equalities Act and the need to respond to the needs of those with protected characteristics, and again those needs will vary according to the nature of the crisis, which in turn determines the vulnerability.
What I think is clearly evident from the Covid experience is, as has been mentioned, that local authorities are embedded in their communities both in terms of elected members and officers, and I think the evidence of the way – certainly in Wales, but I believe it’s the case across the United Kingdom – when we look at the initial interventions when schools were closed, the first Monday of the closure, local authorities were able to provide school meals to vulnerable children, those in receipt of free school meals, care workers and so on.
The shielding scheme, similarly, the local authority assessment of vulnerability was able to extend far beyond any statutory responsibility. Because those officers and members were rooted in their communities, they were able to provide bespoke responses before any government guidance had been provided.
It’s part of that thread of subsidiarity that runs through our evidence. Central government is well positioned to provide strategic direction, but it’s only those bodies – local authorities but also their partners, the voluntary sector, the business sector – that are able to interpret that strategy and provide a response which is bespoke to the needs of their community.
So I think in every instance authorities were able to go beyond any immediate or proscribed definition of vulnerability.
Ms Blackwell: Mr Lloyd, is there anything which you would like to add?
Mr Lloyd: To amplify, if I may, the dynamic nature of vulnerability in an incident. So it does depend on what’s happened, what the response is, what the circumstances are of the affected individuals and what their support systems look like.
An example that springs to my mind from running councils is dealing with flooding, and I’m immediately concerned about homelessness. But if the flooding takes out the power supply, I become concerned about the people in the care home up the hill. So it changes depending on what’s happening.
That was certainly the case in councils, as both my colleagues have illustrated, during the pandemic, with elected councillors rooted in their communities being absolutely sighted on the issues in their community and the need for a council to bring a whole organisation, a whole partnership response, including the voluntary and community sector, to supporting the community through what was, as I said earlier, a torrid time for us all.
So I do think councils responded effectively to vulnerability, but recognising there’s more for us all to do, much learning for us, around understanding in the Covid context the different transmissions, the different vulnerabilities, the different susceptibilities and the different treatments.
Ms Blackwell: All right.
Now, Mr Llewelyn, you mentioned the survey, and we’re going to come to that shortly, but before we do, I’d just like to ask about the impact of preparing for a no-deal EU exit and what level of local authority resources were funnelled into that and away from preparedness so far as your experience or the experience of your members is concerned.
Mr Llewelyn: The immediate thing to say is that local authorities are incredibly flexible and agile and fleet of foot and are able to respond with some immediacy to changing circumstances and demands made of them. Because they are so service and delivery focused, I think that they’re able to respond in a way that perhaps other tiers of government aren’t able to.
So in – it’s clear that the possibility of a no-deal departure from the European Union had an impact on local government in terms of preparedness. Concerns about supply chains and workforce issues were clearly evident.
Local authorities in Wales worked very closely with the Welsh Government in terms of that preparedness, but for most of the time it would have been an operational focus. And, as I say, authorities are able to – they are incredibly fleet of foot and are able to adapt and respond to changing circumstances very, very quickly.
I mentioned earlier the response to Storm Dennis at the start of 2020, and it’s an interesting example of the way local authorities were involved in recovery following the floods of Storm Dennis but also equally involved in the response to Covid, and that’s the same principles apply in terms of a no-deal Brexit. Authorities were making preparations, their emergency planning teams were focused on it, but they were also focused on other areas as well.
Ms Blackwell: Right, thank you.
Mr Lloyd, in your witness statement to the Inquiry, you tell a slightly different story in terms of the experience of one council officer and the advice that he was receiving from central government, in that he had contacted government about an area of risk away from Brexit and was told: if it’s not Brexit, it’s not happening.
Is that also an experience that has been reflected to you by other members?
Mr Lloyd: I think it’s important I say that my organisation on the issue of Brexit had no political position, we just set out to deal with the consequences.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Mr Lloyd: So, having said that – so there’s a plus and a minus on this. So the plus, the work on no-deal Brexit preparation actually brought partners together and meant that we were working on issues that provided a helpful starting point for the very, very significant challenges that then came our way.
On the negative side, the consequence of that focus so rigorously on no-deal preparation did mean that routine activity, the reviewing of plans, the testing and training, work on pan flu, et cetera, was deferred.
There is a definite consequence. Local government, as Mr Llewelyn has said, is very dynamic and we will move resources around to the issue that’s presenting to our community, but we in the main have to do it with the resources that we’ve got. You’ve had previous witnesses that talked about the increase in capacity in central government to deal with Yellowhammer. Local government didn’t increase its capacity, we had to move staff around. The consequence of moving staff around was some things had to go. Add to that my previous reference to the impact of financial cuts in councils, typically emergency planning staff halved during that decade, so there was less capacity anyway going into no-deal planning.
Ms Blackwell: Ms Allen, anything which you would like to add?
Ms Allen: Just to agree with Mr Lloyd’s comments.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you very much.
Then let’s turn, please, to look at the results of the survey which the Local Government Association and the Welsh Local Government Association have conducted specifically in preparation for my Lady’s Inquiry.
We can see if we look at page 42, please, and table 18, the results of the survey in terms of adequacy of funding. Thank you.
If we look at table 18, at the lower part of the page, we can see that less than a fifth of respondents, that’s 18% in England and 14% in Wales, considered that in January 2020 they were adequately funded for a national emergency, and in England the proportion was slightly higher in shire districts than single tier authorities and counties.
Mr Lloyd, is there any reason for that, that springs to mind?
Mr Lloyd: So if I may, please, record my thanks to Covid Bereaved Families for Justice UK for highlighting an error in the original version of this survey. We transposed those numbers. The results, as they show at the moment, illustrate the fact that councils were financially stressed with, say, over four-fifths saying we don’t have resources in place to deal with a national emergency and we do need to look to national government to respond. Councils have limited access to financial reserves, and once they’re gone, we can’t use them for other critical vital services.
So this highlights the overall stress that was facing councils financially, and the need then for government to help us in our emergency response – which did follow, I hasten to add, but that will be Module 2.
Ms Blackwell: Right.
In terms of the fact that the proportion was slightly higher in shire districts than single tier authorities, is there any point to be made about that?
Mr Lloyd: So different roles and responsibilities, so the single tier councils carry responsibility for adult social care and children’s services. District councils have vital services in their communities, but they don’t have those demand-led services around adult social care or children’s.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Could we now go to page 46, please, and look at some of the underlying responses from the survey respondents, which I think reflect upon what you have just set out.
In fact, can we go to the next page, please. Thank you.
What do we see in table 20 here, Mr Lloyd?
Mr Lloyd: We see councils that are recognising that they’re under stress and capability in their workforce, that during the period that’s preceded councils have seen – councils don’t have people on standby waiting to respond to a crisis. We need to deploy staff – re-deploy staff in those circumstances, and we see here those stresses being reported.
Ms Blackwell: In your witness statement, you tell the Inquiry that councils in England have had their core funding from central government reduced by £15 billion over the ten-year period from 2010 to 2020, in cash terms, and that that in your estimation is a real terms reduction of 57%.
When Ms Frances gave evidence to the Inquiry, she told my Lady that that is not a measure of the resources available to local government, particularly because it doesn’t include resources from council tax. Do you agree with her assessment of your setting out of the figures?
Mr Lloyd: Okay, it all depends on how one wants to present the argument, to be frank. If we were looking at central government grant to local councils, I could say to you, under oath, that 60p in every pound of government grants was reduced.
Catherine Frances will talk about core spending power of councils, which includes our ability to raise council tax, and she’s right, but the degree to which councils can raise council tax is constrained by central government and is set, normally, at a level flow inflation, so we have a diminishing resource base.
So I think the easiest way to agree this between ourselves and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is probably to refer to the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee, who do acknowledge that there were very significant cuts in local government funding, and they put the overall reduction in spending by local government at 26%. That’s probably a good place to land between the two presentations.
Ms Blackwell: All right. Thank you very much, that sounds very fair, if I might say so.
Mr Llewelyn, what comments do you have for the Inquiry in terms of funding in Wales?
Mr Llewelyn: The period of austerity had a massive impact on local government finances, inevitably with a period of cuts around ten years. What happens is that authorities are forced to focus on their statutory services.
Wales has 22 unitary authorities. They deliver social services, adult and children’s education and other statutory services. Inevitably, when their budgets are cut so significantly, they can compensate to a very small extent through increases in council tax, but with all the restrictions that have been mentioned, what in reality happens is that non-statutory services are cut, culture, leisure, other discretionary services. It has had an impact on emergency planning services as well. They would have been reduced.
There are other further consequences as well, in terms of the – as spending on council services is reduced we also know that demand for council services increases during a period of austerity as well. In weaker communities and parts of the economy that impact is disproportionate and is exaggerated. In many parts of Wales, local government is one of the best – one of the few employers and, again, in cutting local government services, it has a detrimental effect on the wider economy as well and on the supply chain within that local economy. So we see services diminish, demand for services increase, and the impact is inevitably felt more widely.
Then, in terms of going forward, the lack of financial resilience, both within local government in Wales but also the Welsh Government as well, the Welsh Government in terms of its reserves is very restricted as well.
During – in response to the Covid crisis, because of the lockdown, because local government services had been closed down, some of the leisure centres, leisure services and others that I mentioned, authorities could redeploy those staff, but it’s not inconceivable that in a future crisis that capacity to redeploy wouldn’t be there in the same way, which is why we say that more thought and more planning needs to be put into that, the process of redeploying.
Ms Blackwell: All right, so not just a matter of budgeting restraints but also workforce capacity?
Mr Llewelyn: And knock-on consequences.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Ms Allen, you tell us in your witness statement that individual councils in Northern Ireland do not receive specific funding to undertake emergency planning, and that it’s for each council to determine the resource that they will internally provide based on their local assessment?
Ms Allen: That’s correct.
Ms Blackwell: Are there any comments that you would like to make about the level of budgetary provision in the run-up to Covid for the local authority organisations that you represent?
Ms Allen: Yes, and it speaks to the point a couple of colleagues have made in relation to the wider pressures on council finances, particularly in the context where in Northern Ireland it is a discretionary enabling power for councils under Article 29 of Local Government Order, so the –
Lady Hallett: Could you go more slowly, please.
Ms Allen: I’m sorry.
It is a discretionary enabling power in relation to council roles and emergency planning, and in that context discretionary services often suffer under financially constrained times in terms of prioritisation. So we definitely believe that more resource is needed to support preparedness.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Finally I would like to look at table 21 of the survey which is, I think, at pages 48 to 50 – thank you – and talk about factors negatively impacting readiness.
Could we move forwards, please, to the next page, and the next page, please. Thank you.
Now, I’m going to seek to summarise what we have here, because of course the survey itself will be published following the evidence of the three of you today, but the authorities were asked, were they not, to identify any factors between 2009 and 2020 that negatively affected their state of preparedness for Covid-19.
Is it right, Mr Lloyd, I’ll come to you, that two factors were identified by markedly more respondents in England than the others, and those were: national guidance related to pandemic preparation and plans not reflecting the challenges due to a full lockdown never being anticipated, and in fact the same number of authorities, 87%, identified those two factors, lack of national guidance and no reference whatsoever to lockdown, as being two of the greatest challenges?
Mr Lloyd: That’s exactly the case. I think that’s run through the evidence of Mr Llewelyn, Ms Allen and myself, that councils were – have robust local plans to deal with significant incidents, we had really good plans in place for pandemic flu, we did not have plans in place for a Covid-like incident in this country, and because of that, having not modelled the MERS and SARS consequences, we did not model the non-pharmaceutical interventions and we had to adapt and change to reflect those circumstances.
Ms Blackwell: Mr Llewelyn, is there anything which you would like to add?
Mr Llewelyn: No, I think that’s a very good summary, I’ve nothing to add.
Ms Blackwell: Ms Allen?
Ms Allen: I agree.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you very much.
My Lady, that concludes my questions. You have provisionally provided permission, I think, to both Covid Bereaved Families for Justice UK and also the Northern Ireland group to ask a small collection of questions to the panel.
Lady Hallett: Thank you.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you.
Lady Hallett: Mr Weatherby.
Questions From Mr Weatherby KC
Mr Weatherby: I thought the microphone genie had struck, but it hasn’t.
I’m going to ask a very small number of questions on behalf of Covid Bereaved Families for Justice UK. They’re going to be directed primarily at you, Mr Lloyd, but we represent families from across the UK, bereaved families from across the UK, so no doubt the Inquiry will be assisted if there’s anything that any of the three of you want to say.
It’s a discrete topic, and it’s excess death management, and in particular the aspect of that which is the treatment of the deceased and the bereaved, issues of dignity.
Mr Lloyd, in your witness statement at paragraph 232 you deal with this to some extent, and this is a section of your statement where you deal with the issues about Exercise Cygnus that you’ve already given evidence about.
In your statement you make the point that the Cygnus report found uneven levels of resilience and limited capacity in some areas to surge resources into excess death management.
Now, does that provide us with an example of the problems with a lack of candour in terms of the report not being published?
Mr Lloyd: Mr Weatherby, thanks first for notice of the question. Yes is the short answer. Local governments with our partners have been concerned about the issues of managing increases in death rates in our communities for some time. The example that starts my evidence relates to the swine flu outbreak and the work that we did in that regard around speeding up death certification a decade ago, so that we could maintain dignity for bereaved people at those moments in time.
That work carried over into our pandemic flu planning, and recognising at that point across councils that local government, despite having the obligation that you’ve highlighted, in the main almost entirely does not own mortuaries and is dependent mostly on NHS and undertakers.
That carried forward into the work that you’ve identified in Cygnus that was kept secret, and there is a recommendation – sorry, a lesson, lesson 21 in the Cygnus report, that requires the Cabinet Office, Home Office, the former DCLG, MoD, Department for Work and Pensions, Ministry of Justice, Department of Health, to do work on excess death planning. To the best of our knowledge that’s not been taken forward.
Mr Weatherby: I’m going to come on to that if I may in a moment, but that’s really helpful, and the fact that you didn’t know about the Cygnus recommendation until 2020 meant that you and local partners couldn’t use that work to make progress yourselves.
Now, at paragraph 232 you highlight also that in preparation for assisting this Inquiry this was a topic which was then raised by local government with you, but you also referred, and I think you’ve already spoken to this, that independently you had feedback about these topics, so these were very real, persistent and ongoing issues for local government.
Is it right that the planning that had been done by local government focused primarily on mass fatality events rather than a broader focus on excess death management during a pandemic, or a more prolonged period?
Mr Lloyd: So I think both are true –
Mr Weatherby: Yes.
Mr Lloyd: – and, as we’ve illustrated through our evidence today, different local resilience fora in their local plans have different issues they need to grapple with. Some would be catering for both the things you describe, some just the latter.
Mr Weatherby: Yes.
Mr Lloyd: And councils during – we’ll come on to this in Module 2, I’m sure, Mr Weatherby, but councils were working with the Civil Contingencies Secretariat with RED to try and be clear in the pandemic around probable numbers that we would need to grapple with.
Mr Weatherby: Yes.
Mr Lloyd: And I think it’s fair to say that we had to act locally at risk in the absence of numbers being given to us to make sure that we, as local councils through our local resilience fora, were ensuring dignity in death should that occur –
Mr Weatherby: Yes.
Mr Lloyd: – by commissioning extra capacity.
Mr Weatherby: Yes. And of course dealing with the sheer number of excess deaths is one side of it and then the other side of the equation is the dignity side of it, which is very important, and there are many reports, including from those we represent, of very upsetting circumstances of where people have not been able to have post death rituals or personal items have been disposed of and very severely time limited funerals, so all of those issues are issues that arise in this excess death management area, aren’t they?
Mr Lloyd: Exactly, they are, and local government is absolutely concerned about the family, faith obligations, et cetera, at those moments in time.
Mr Weatherby: Would you agree that there is, therefore, a need for clarity and the assistance of clear national guidance to ensure standard, minimum standards, perhaps, are applied across this area to deal with dignity?
Mr Lloyd: So, Mr Weatherby, in playing back the conclusions from Cygnus, you will have noted the omission of local government from the parties that have an interest in this.
Mr Weatherby: Yes.
Mr Lloyd: Which illustrates the lack of the join-up between central and local that I think we’ve all illustrated through our evidence session, so the answer to your question is: yes, we do need a plan, but that plan cannot be produced just by a list of government departments.
Mr Weatherby: No. It should in fact – if it is to be national guidance, it should be developed in association with yourselves –
Mr Lloyd: It should be co-produced, yes.
Mr Weatherby: Yes. That brings me on to my next point, which is – I was going to ask you whether you were aware of, in fact, a consultation document, but we provided that to you today so that you’re not ambushed by my question, and so I know the answer to this, but it’s right, I think, that there is a draft consultation document provided by the Department of Levelling Up, dated 22 May 2018.
I’ll give the reference but for time I’m not going to put it up because you’ve seen it, Mr Lloyd, but it’s INQ000108395.
That is clearly headed “Draft for consultation. A Framework for Planners preparing to manage deaths”. You’ve seen it today, but I’m right, I think, that you’ve never seen it before?
Mr Lloyd: So I’ve checked with the colleagues within the LGA that would deal with this, and there’s a small number of them, and I can report that none of them have seen this document.
Mr Weatherby: Yes, and that kind of illustrates the point we were just discussing, doesn’t it, that if there is work to be done on this, then it just be done in collaboration with local partners and local government associations across the UK.
Mr Lloyd: Exactly.
Mr Weatherby: So it’s right that there has been some work done on this, and in fact that document does make passing reference to dignity in a couple of areas. But in fact in terms of contingency planning options, it has a whole annex which goes on – annex D, which I think you’ve seen – which refers to the other side, the practical excess death management, but doesn’t in fact refer to any issues affecting – positively affecting dignity at all, does it?
Mr Lloyd: My fast reading agrees with your conclusion, but I would want to look in more detail at the document.
Mr Weatherby: Sure. That’s, if I may say, a perfectly reasonable answer.
So there is a need, isn’t there, for a people-centred approach to excess death management and clear and consistent standards to help everybody, including local government, to understand the issues? Is that a fair way of putting it?
Mr Lloyd: That’s right, and it needs to be produced not just with local government but our colleagues that run the hospitals –
Mr Weatherby: Yes.
Mr Lloyd: – with our colleagues in the funeral director companies, et cetera, so it’s a wide range of interests.
Mr Weatherby: Yes, and that guidance should include specific post death rites for particular communities, for example the Jewish community or the Muslim communities, many other communities as well, and it should deal with communication with the bereaved where the extent of funerals, for example, need to be curtailed, so manage the way in which that is done. So it needs to be a holistic approach doesn’t it?
Mr Lloyd: 100% agree.
Mr Weatherby: Yes.
Finally, this: you’ve dealt with assurance in other respects but in terms of this area, would you agree that there is a role for ensuring that different geographical areas, local resilience fora, other areas of local government, are assured with respect to this very important issue?
Mr Lloyd: So I think there’s a precursor to your point. I believe that if we do as Mr Llewelyn and Ms Allen have said, and we properly involve locally democratic – local democratically elected leaders in our planning processes –
Mr Weatherby: Yes.
Mr Lloyd: – they will be defending the rights of people in the plans for managing death.
Then, secondly, we need to do that peer review of each other’s plans across LRF –
Mr Weatherby: Okay. The specifics of it might be for another time but you would agree there needs to be some kind of assurance in order to ensure that each geographical area does have a sufficient concentration and planning with respect to this important area?
Mr Lloyd: I think it would be very odd to disagree with that proposition.
Mr Weatherby: Yes.
Thank you very much indeed.
Lady Hallett: Thank you, Mr Weatherby.
Ms Campbell.
Ms Campbell: My Lady, I’ll just rearrange the furniture, if I may. I won’t be very long.
Lady Hallett: As long as you don’t jinx the microphone, Ms Campbell.
Ms Campbell: No, or the water. Thank you.
Questions From Ms Campbell KC
Ms Campbell: Now, if I might just introduce myself, my name is Brenda Campbell and I represent, together with others, the Northern Irish bereaved families, which means it follows, Ms Allen, that many of my questions, if not all of them, are for you, but if I may just thank all of you for the clarity and the depth of your answers.
Ms Allen, the first topic is on really how the Northern Ireland Local Government Association functions to bridge that gap between, I suppose, local and regional levels, and you deal with this in your statement when you set out that the NILGA, the Northern Irish Local Government Association, promotes and develops and champions government, local government by developing policy, and am I right that that is, in the main, not mandatory, in terms of any policies that you communicate on to councils, but it’s in the main not on a statutory footing; is that correct?
Ms Allen: That’s correct. So we build policy positions from our member councils up, and we work to develop consensus and build our positions from that.
Ms Campbell: So just building on, really, the visual image that Ms Blackwell gave us of you cascading information down to local councils and then elevating or escalating information up to the regional level: I mean, is it your experience that individual councils are actively engaged in that process both, one, to learn and to share their experiences?
Ms Allen: I think given our small size as a region I think that is much easier in terms of sharing information. We are 11 councils. NILGA provides the – obviously, as a political body, the opportunity to share political perspectives and input and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives is the officer network. Both organisations meet monthly and they also meet together in the sharing of information, and I participate in their meetings and they participate in our meetings. So I think it is – there’s always room for improvement in the sharing of information, but at the moment no issues have been particularly highlighted to me.
Ms Campbell: Yes. I suppose that across the board all three of you would really champion a very vibrant and active local community, but one of the unique things that certainly we think about Northern Ireland is that we do have a very engaged population at community level and a very engaged civil society, and you would agree with that.
In terms then of escalating information up to government departments, you describe in your statement, and for the record it’s paragraph 1.7, that in the past government departments have regularly consulted with the predecessor organisation, the ALANI on matters such as proposed legislation, and then you go at a later stage to see that NILGA had previously had involvement in local government emergency planning, and civil contingencies policy.
Is it your experience, or does the organisation consider – perhaps I should put it that way – that the Executive in Northern Ireland currently makes sufficient use of NILGA and its position and its expertise in relation to the development of local government and emergency planning and guidance?
Ms Allen: I’ll respond to that, I suppose, by first of all highlighting that we are also a small association, and local government in Northern Ireland is a much smaller sector than would be the case in the rest of the UK. However, we feel we have a massive contribution to make because of the points already raised. I think particularly because NILGA is a political organisation, so whenever NILGA speaks, NILGA speaks with a mandate, a political mandate coming from the 11 councils, and I think it is always useful to have that political oversight and scrutiny. So we would be happy to be used more, particularly practically, in the way that the other local government associations are clearly embedded in the development of policy.
Ms Campbell: Well, that really brings me on to another question really: are there forums that you have identified within local government, perhaps emergency management groups or civil contingency groups in Northern Ireland, that NILGA’s voice could and should be heard where perhaps it currently hasn’t been or isn’t adequately heard?
Ms Allen: So obviously not being in post at the time but certainly nothing has been highlighted to me particularly and I think that is down to the separation of function between NILGA as a strategic –
Ms Blackwell: Sorry to interrupt, I think the stenographer is really finding it very difficult. If you could continue to keep your speech at a slower level.
Ms Allen: Certainly.
The separation of what is a political role and what is an operational function. So the – as you’ll have seen from my previous evidence, the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives are very heavily embedded in the operational management of emergency preparedness and response, right from council level right up to their involvement in the Civil Contingencies Group.
If those chief executives highlighted to us that there was a need for political input via the mechanisms that I have already highlighted, then we would of course step in at that point.
Ms Campbell: Are you aware of that having happened in the past?
Ms Allen: Not specifically in relation to preparedness but in relation to other matters, yes.
Ms Campbell: Well, I wonder, then, if I could pick up on some of your evidence in relation to the fact that emergency preparedness is really a discretionary power at local government level, and you’ll be aware that one of the aspects of the evidence that this Inquiry has heard is whether or not there should be more firmer or a statutory footing for civil contingency planning in the north.
Does NILGA have a position on that? Do you consider that to ensure consistency in responses from councils throughout the north, particularly given restrictions on funding and diversions of resources, that there should be statutory guidance in relation to emergency preparedness?
Ms Allen: So the short answer is yes. I’ll explain why. First of all, a statutory duty means partners are compelled. As things stand at present, the council cannot compel any partner to participate in emergency preparedness. It is therefore a coalition of the willing.
We also think that a statutory duty would go some way to protecting the resources, given those push/pull factors around financial pressures, and we think a statutory duty would also go some way to codifying roles, responsibilities and appropriate governance.
Ms Campbell: Well, we know from your statement that in the past NILGA and your predecessor had been involved in those discussions, particularly in fact around the civil contingencies Bill back in 2004. Where did those discussions – or can you tell us why those discussions stopped approaching 20 years ago? Or did they?
Ms Allen: So I can’t speak as far back as that. I can only advise what I’m advised most recently, that NILGA has been highlighting the need for legislation for a significant period of time. The reasons for that are best outlined in the chief executive review of local council roles and responsibilities in a post 2015 context, following local government reform, so I can’t speak as far back as that, but the NILGA – the role of NILGA now is very much supported by the multi-agency regional resilience team, so they have stepped very much into the operational co-ordination role which NILGA may have occupied before, under the 26-council arrangement, and we work very closely with them to make sure that we support in relation to matters that need highlighting with central government, particularly politically –
Ms Campbell: Just slow down a little bit again, sorry. It may be that the accents are familiar it’s a bit easier for some of us to follow than others.
Sorry, had you finished?
Ms Allen: Yes.
Ms Campbell: Okay.
Just picking up on your answer, back to the guidance of 2015 and the developments back then, can we bring it up to modern or to the current timeframe. Are you being asked for your opinion as to what that statutory footing might look like or what ought to properly go into a statutory framework to enable local councils in Northern Ireland to respond to any future pandemic?
Ms Allen: Not to the best of my knowledge in relation to legislation.
Ms Campbell: Do you think that you should be?
Ms Allen: Yes, I have every confidence that if those discussions start that NILGA would be involved, as well as the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives. I am not aware of those discussions commencing at the moment.
Ms Campbell: Thank you very much.
Lady Hallett: Thank you, Ms Campbell.
Ms Blackwell: My Lady, that completes the evidence of these three witnesses.
Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, you have all been extremely helpful and, just to assure those in Scotland, we’ll obviously make sure that your Scottish colleague – any contributions he or she – I think it’s a she –
Ms Blackwell: It is.
Lady Hallett: – wishes to make will be taken into consideration, so thank you again for all your help.
(The witnesses withdrew)
Lady Hallett: I think we have pushed our luck as far as our patient, I hope –
Ms Blackwell: And brave.
Lady Hallett: – and brave stenographer is concerned, so we will break now and return at 3.05.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you, my Lady.
(2.50 pm)
(A short break)
(3.05 pm)
Lady Hallett: Ms Blackwell.
Ms Blackwell: Thank you, my Lady. The final witness of the day is Aidan Dawson. May he be sworn, please.