5. Mr Michael Adamson

MR MICHAEL ADAMSON (affirmed).

Questions From Lead Counsel to the Inquiry

Mr Keith: Good afternoon. Could you give the Inquiry your full name, please.

Mr Michael Adamson: My name is Michael Adamson.

Lead Inquiry: Mr Adamson, whilst you give evidence, could you remember to keep your voice up, please, and also speak as slowly as you can so as to aid our stenographer.

You have kindly provided a witness statement dated 28 April 2023. There it is at INQ000182613, and I believe that you’ve signed it and declared its truth at page 20.

Mr Adamson, you are the chief executive of the British Red Cross. Are you also currently the co-chair of a partnership called the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership?

Mr Michael Adamson: Yes, I am.

Lead Inquiry: Dealing firstly with the British Red Cross, we understand that it was founded in 1870. It received its royal charter in 1908, and I think it received a further royal charter in 1988, which was subsequently revised in July 2003. It’s a very well known organisation with around about 12,000 volunteers and 4,000 staff.

What is the British Red Cross’s primary aim?

Mr Michael Adamson: Our primary role is to support people in emergencies or at their lowest ebb in crises, both here in the UK and around the world.

Lead Inquiry: Is it a government or a non-governmental organisation or something quite different, and indeed completely independent?

Mr Michael Adamson: We are a completely independent organisation, registered as a charity, committed to the principles of humanity, impartiality and neutrality.

We are also, though, a – we are also an auxiliary to government, which means that we work in partnership with government on issues like international humanitarian law and, indeed, in emergency response. But we’re entirely independent.

Lead Inquiry: When you say you are an auxiliary to government, is that obligation, which is what it is in effect, something mandated by your charter?

Mr Michael Adamson: Yes. Our role is to work alongside the authorities to provide support to people in emergencies, but we do that based on our own assessments of the needs in those emergencies, and we make choices about the support that we’ll provide based on the assessment of that need, but we’ll always do it in a way that is cognisant of our partnership with the authorities.

Lead Inquiry: So give us, if you would be so kind, some examples of crises or emergencies in recent years with which you’ve assisted, firstly in the United Kingdom and, secondly, abroad?

Mr Michael Adamson: For example, we were very active in the response to the Grenfell Tower fire, and supported the local authorities in the establishment of a rest centre, and then were present on the ground for six weeks supporting the response to the community.

We have also supported people who have been arriving, for example, most recently from Sudan, meeting people at – who were evacuated – the British citizens evacuated from Sudan, meeting around two and a half thousand people at airports and then working in partnership with others to ensure that they had a pathway to get the support they need to settle back here in the UK.

Lead Inquiry: In the particular context of the pandemic and mindful of the fact that the response for the pandemic is for future, did the British Red Cross help by way of, for example, the delivery of medicine and food packages, the loaning of medical devices, patient transport and the like?

Mr Michael Adamson: Yes. We were active from the earliest days of the pandemic, as you say, in providing food support, cash to people who had no access to funding, providing support to help people get in and out of hospital, to provide support around the delivery of medication.

We also mobilised support to vaccine – vaccination centres and, indeed, mobilised vaccination hesitancy campaigns through social media and mainstream media.

Lead Inquiry: Turning then to the VCSEP, when was that created?

Mr Michael Adamson: The VCS Emergencies Partnership was created in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, where we recognised that both resilience and recovery from an emergency are activities that require many agencies and organisations, both in the – in all three sectors, not for profit sector, private sector and public sector –

Lead Inquiry: Slow down, Mr Adamson.

Mr Michael Adamson: In the not for profit sector, private sector and public sector to work together to enable a community to get back on its feet again, and we formed the emergency partnership in the period between 2018 – after 2018, and then it grew and expanded to its current scale during Covid.

Lead Inquiry: How many partners or entities are there within, now, the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership?

Mr Michael Adamson: We now have 250 or so partners signed up, 70% of which are local organisations who would not normally think of themselves as first responders in an emergency, but who have realised that when both the day-to-day emergencies, the floods, the fires, and so on, take place, actually it’s local communities that respond, and then when bigger emergencies come along, like a pandemic, that actually they’re also very active.

The other thing that’s distinctive about the VCS Emergencies Partnership is that it also includes government departments, and indeed representatives of business through business in the community.

Lead Inquiry: So can you tell us which government departments are included within the emergency partnership?

Mr Michael Adamson: The Civil Contingencies Secretariat –

Lead Inquiry: Within the Cabinet Office?

Mr Michael Adamson: Within the Cabinet Office, and the resilience and emergency directorate within what is now the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, local government, and also the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Lead Inquiry: When you say they are part of the emergency partnership, that means presumably that the partnership communicates with them, they attend meetings, and no doubt a whole host of issues are explored week in, week out with them?

Mr Michael Adamson: That is correct. We would have, for example, a monthly network call with all of the partnership and they would be part of that, and attending it.

We also have a strategy steering group that meets once a quarter, which is a smaller group of around 23 or 24 organisations, and that would include those government departments.

Lead Inquiry: Now, just a series of questions, if I may, about what the perceived need for the emergency partnership was.

Presumably the majority of the organisations within the partnership pre-existed the foundation of the partnership. Why, if they were already providing planning services and resilience and also response capability in local emergencies, was it necessary to have a partnership for them to continue to discharge those functions? If they were already playing their part in the EPRR system, why is this partnership an improvement on what went before?

Mr Michael Adamson: Many of those local organisations would not have seen themselves as having a role in emergencies before we created the emergency partnership.

Lead Inquiry: Just pause there. What do you mean by “they wouldn’t have seen themselves as having a role”? They do things, they exist, and they exist locally. So why would they have not seen that?

Mr Michael Adamson: Because their primary purpose was to support people in, you know, disability or in the environmental work or in other sports work or other charitable work at local level, and they would have seen their primary purpose – or to address poverty in their local community. They would have seen their primary purpose as that. But what we have learnt around the world from our work is that it is always the community that responds first, and we’ve also learnt that in an emergency it’s much better to have the relationships in place in advance of the emergency rather than have to make friends, as it were, during the emergency.

Lead Inquiry: So, in essence, the various entities already existed to provide services and help and support to various parts of the population, those for example who may be disabled or those who suffer from health inequalities or so on and so forth, but no one had brought them together for the specific purpose of planning for local emergency and to respond to local emergencies, whatever they may be?

Mr Michael Adamson: That’s correct.

Lead Inquiry: Right.

Why is it necessary for the emergency partnership and the entities which make up the partnership to do the jobs that they now do in terms of local planning, local resilience, local response? Why are local authorities and central government not fulfilling those tasks or doing those jobs themselves so as to require your partnership to step into the breach?

Mr Michael Adamson: I think it’s fair to say that the dominant thinking in the world of emergencies would be based around command and control structures, around gold, silver and bronze, and for – for example, to put out both the actual or the metaphorical fire. But the preparedness for – to prevent the fire or the flood or to be better ready for it in advance, or to respond and help people to recover is a – involves a lot of different activities that are very people-focused and not about infrastructure, not about command and control, they’re very relational. And actually bringing organisations together in advance of when these things happen allows us to secure better outcomes for people.

It’s not a criticism of the National Health Service or a local authority that actually there is a need for the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership. What we need to, though, ensure is recognised is the importance of that partnership to the outcomes for people in emergencies before they happen, and that those are – that is recognised at national and local government level.

Lead Inquiry: In essence, local and central government and the emergency services have to provide the overarching structure in which a pandemic or any emergency may be both planned for and responded to, but when it comes to the delivery of food to a household, or the supply of a vaccine, or shielding facilities, or replacing household goods and providing somewhere to sleep in the event of a flood, recourse has to be had to the sorts of organisations, entities, whom you represent, because they’re the ones who deliver on the ground; is that a fair summary?

Mr Michael Adamson: That is partly a fair summary, in the sense that some of those things were actually done very well during the pandemic, in terms of a mass vaccination programme, for example, that we were able to, for example, mobilise volunteers to provide support at vaccine centres and, indeed, to then work around trying to identify who are the people who are not likely to come forward for a vaccine, why might they be vaccine-shy, as it were, and what are the barriers to them coming forwards, be that around disability or, for example, a lack of confidence in their legal status that meant they were reluctant to really – you know, to reveal themselves, as they saw it, to the authorities. So we might work in that kind of way.

But if you also look at the recovery from flooding or fire, or indeed the arrival of people from Sudan trying to settle and get back on their feet again, they need to be accompanied. Because you think of the trauma that they have been through, if you lose your home, whether it’s fire, flood or indeed because you were coming from Sudan, you think of the emotional impact of that: you don’t know your way around the system, you don’t know where to get help, you don’t know where to get legal advice, you don’t know whether you’re insured, your insurance company will pay out. You need people who will accompany you and think of you as a whole person, and indeed sometimes think of a whole community and the community cohesion that can be – and actually whether that has been undermined by the events.

Organisations like ours, and indeed local community organisations, can work alongside people for the medium term to help them re-establish the connections that actually help them to be more resilient for the next emergency.

Lead Inquiry: In plain English you provide, at a local level, individual help to specific people?

Mr Michael Adamson: We provide individual help to – we and others. We, as the Red Cross, provide individual help to specific people. We work with other organisations in a community to identify who might be being missed in the – as the – as we think about the response and the recovery, and how do we help connect them into the support they need for the medium term.

Lead Inquiry: All right.

Mr Michael Adamson: But it’s very – it’s rooted in that individual support, that person-centredness.

Lead Inquiry: I think, if I may say so, I then did summarise it moderately accurately.

The Inquiry’s heard evidence about the way in which the current EPRR systems operate and in particular the existence of local resilience forums. Are the British Red Cross and the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership part of the local resilience forum structure already?

Mr Michael Adamson: Yes, in many places, but not necessarily everywhere.

Lead Inquiry: Why are they not plugged in to the local resilience forum structure everywhere?

Mr Michael Adamson: Local resilience forums are not consistent in the way in which they work with and engage with the voluntary and community sector and community organisations. There are a range of models across the country, and some of that variation is completely understandable because a densely populated urban environment is very different to a more sparsely populated rural area, for example, and may indeed have differences in the emergencies with which it’s potentially threatened and indeed about the organisations that are around in those places.

Lead Inquiry: So they differ, they may have to deal with different emergencies, and of course they will exist in different parts of the country, urban, rural and all in between, and therefore have different demands made of them; is that fair?

Mr Michael Adamson: That is correct, but it’s only part of the story, because there is also – I think all of those local resilience forums would benefit from having deep relationships with the voluntary and community sector in order to achieve some of those both individual and community outcomes that I talked about earlier, and they’re not equally committed to that way of working.

That said – can I just complete the point?

Lead Inquiry: Yes, please.

Mr Michael Adamson: I think there’s been a significant development in the orientation of willingness to engage with the voluntary and community sector coming out of Covid, because we all lived through it, you know, for the best part of two years, and relationships were forged. The question is: what do we learn from that for the future, and what needs to be put in place to ensure there is that consistency of intentions around the outcomes that can only be secured in partnership between statutory and voluntary and community sector organisations for the long run? How do we make sure that that is secured for the future?

Lead Inquiry: That was to be my next question, Mr Adamson.

What can be done to make local resilience forums better aware of what the voluntary and community sector has to offer? Must it be done by way of the imposition of a legal obligation, changes to the Civil Contingencies Act and the nature of Category 1 and Category 2 responders, or changes to the working relationship between local resilience forums and DLUHC, or what? How can local resilience forums be made to engage your sector better in the future?

Mr Michael Adamson: Well, local resilience forums are not standard legal entities anyway. They –

Lead Inquiry: We – the Inquiry is aware of that.

Mr Michael Adamson: Yeah. But that means that it’s hard – I’m not sure the answer is legislation, but I think that the UK resilience framework creates the opportunity to set out a much clearer set of expectations about the characteristics of an effective local resilience forum, including the way in which it engages with the voluntary and community sector, and the kind of models and structures that work in different places, and to spread best practice, and also to use peer review and audit as tools to establish what is working well and what is working less well, and then be prepared to talk about those that are working well and those that are working less well.

Lady Hallett: Forgive me. Who decides on the member ship of the LRF?

Mr Michael Adamson: That is decided amongst the – I think primarily among the Category 1 responders in a – in whatever the designated area is, sometimes which is a local authority boundary and sometimes it may be across a number of local authority boundaries. But other boundaries will also be taken into account, for example police boundaries or health service boundaries. So there is quite a lot of variability about the way in which they work.

Mr Keith: Is the position, Mr Adamson, that because the local police force will generally be the de facto chair of the local resilience forum and because the main attendees are the police and the blue light services, they generally get to decide who will attend those meetings? Is that how it works in practice, in your experience?

Mr Michael Adamson: I don’t think I would have expressed it like that. I think the police do sometimes take the lead, there’s no question about that, but I think it’s more variable, and perhaps post-Covid even more so, because it’s recognised that actually the issues in responding to and recovering from something like a pandemic are so much more about community than they are about policing and security.

Lead Inquiry: The Civil Contingencies Act part 1 provides that Category 1 responders are, amongst the many duties imposed on them, obliged to liaise with the voluntary and community sector. So there’s no shortage of legal obligation to connect with your sector, the issue lies in relation to how it’s carried out in practice; would you agree?

Mr Michael Adamson: Yes, I would.

Lead Inquiry: You refer also to the national resilience guidance. By that, did you mean the national resilience framework, in particular the document which was published by Mr Dowden, the Deputy Prime Minister, and the Cabinet Office in December of last year, the national resilience framework? Is that the sort of guidance you had in mind when referring to the existence of a structure or a guidance required to place expectations upon your sector as to what it can do?

Mr Michael Adamson: Yes. We see the UK resilience framework that was published in December 2022 as a step forward in setting out a whole-society approach to the way in which we think about resilience, that recognises – that brings people much more into our thinking about resilience as opposed to just about infrastructure, important though that is.

The challenge for the UK resilience framework is actually that the strategic implementation plan or, you know, the roadmap is incredibly high level, and we would like to see a much more detailed roadmap or strategic implementation for all of the different components of the UK resilience framework that we could develop in partnership with the Cabinet Office, and indeed the resilience and emergencies directorate, to really live that whole-society approach from now about what needs to be in place to enable people better to – to be better prepared for emergencies in the future and to better recover from them.

Lead Inquiry: So you would say that the national resilience framework does not go far enough in setting out what can be done, what the expectations are, reasonably, upon your sector and in identifying a route map going forward to bring about practical change?

Mr Michael Adamson: I would frame it more positively, in the sense that the UK resilience framework came out in December 2022, we’re now in July 2023, now is the time for a detailed roadmap of what is required.

We think that the quality of conversation has improved since, you know, its development.

We also welcome the development of a kind of split of the role of the director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat from the director of resilience, because we think that resilience has been the poor relation of emergency preparedness and response for too long, so it is welcome that there’s a director in charge of that.

We would like to see that go further, we would like to see a minister for resilience, because at the moment resilience is the responsibility of –

Lead Inquiry: Slow down, please, Mr Adamson.

Mr Michael Adamson: We would like to see a minister for resilience, because at the moment those responsibilities fall to the Paymaster General, and we don’t – whatever the qualities of the Paymaster General, we don’t think that signals a serious commitment to national resilience, particularly when the Paymaster General has a range of other responsibilities.

Lead Inquiry: I’m going to pause you there, because my Lady has heard a great deal of evidence from Cabinet Office witnesses about that, and from politicians, about the need for a minister to be in charge of resilience unencumbered by other obligations.

Lady Hallett: I’m not sure they all agreed on “unencumbered by other obligations”, Mr Keith.

Mr Keith: I stand corrected. That is correct, there was a variety of views expressed across that topic.

Lady Hallett: What would be you recommending?

Mr Michael Adamson: We think 2017 was a watershed year with the Grenfell Tower fire and the terror attacks, we’ve then had Covid, we’ve then seen the way in which international emergencies in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Sudan have had deep ripple effects back into the UK in a way that international emergencies did not previously have. And therefore we think that the – we as a nation need to be much more prepared for a world of multiple simultaneous emergencies that will affect us in the future, and that therefore there is a requirement for a minister who is fully committed to thinking through: what is a resilience strategy for the nation? And that required – the risk, if you like, the risk profile has changed.

Lady Hallett: Thank you. So fully and solely committed?

Mr Michael Adamson: Yes.

Lady Hallett: Yes.

Mr Keith: Mr Adamson, a few moments ago I asked you some questions about the legal obligations in part 1 of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, and I noted in my question to you that Category 1 responders are required to have regard to the activities of certain voluntary organisations. I think that’s regulation 23, and I’m very grateful to those behind me for reminding me of that.

Do you have a view as to whether or not the current terminology in that legal obligation – that is to say the requirement upon Category 1 responders to have regard to activities of certain voluntary organisations – should be strengthened?

I ask because I think you were asked this very same question in the context of the Inquiry into the Grenfell fire, the Grenfell Tower fire, and you answered yes, if I can remind you, to that question when it was put to you in that Inquiry.

Mr Michael Adamson: We would – we still believe that that would be desirable. The reason – we do, though, think that the new UK resilience framework is very helpful in setting out strategic intentions around a whole-society approach to how we build resilience and the ability to respond to and recover from emergencies, that means that there is an implicit strengthening of the “have regard to” phrase. But of course we would welcome phraseology in law that was stronger than that phrase of “have regard to”.

Lead Inquiry: The framework itself, as you know well, makes reference repeatedly to activities which the government is already undertaking to carry out, as well as to specific activities and acts which are due to be complete by, respectively, 2025 and 2030.

So it would seem, Mr Adamson, that there isn’t room in the current framework for the additional sort of plans of action or route maps of which you’ve spoken, because the framework is already committed to a particular timetable which doesn’t include the matters that you’ve spoken of.

So would you also welcome a tightening up of that national resilience framework and a further, more detailed commitment to the sorts of changes of which you’ve spoken?

Mr Michael Adamson: Yes, we would. We have chosen to interpret the word “framework” in a positive way, which is – and that there is a framework set out, of action, but we think that a much more detailed roadmap and implementation plan is required to deliver what is set out there.

Lead Inquiry: All right.

A further discrete topic, if I may. To what extent does the voluntary and community sector, and in particular the emergency partnership, take part in national exercises or simulations for civil contingencies emergencies? Do you attend exercises? Are you invited to attend them? Do you attend as participants or as observers, or –

Mr Michael Adamson: As both – with both my Red Cross hat on and VCS Emergencies Partnership hat on, yes, we are part of exercises and have been for many years, and indeed most recently took part in the Mighty Oak exercise, which was looking at the impact of a complete power outage on the ability of the nation to cope.

What I would observe is that – and this is very relevant to the UK resilience framework – is to ask the question of whether anyone is taking account of, when we look at the risk register, which is – and we welcome some of the updating of the National Risk Register – are – and you look at the mix of local and national exercising that’s taking place, is that a proportionate response to the National Risk Register against which we’re planning? And is that covering the whole country against the kind of risks that different parts of the country might face? And indeed, in relation to your question, are the voluntary and community sector being properly integrated into those exercises?

So my answer is: yes, we are included, but I think that the reflection of the change in the risk profile that we face, that I described earlier, means that we should also be making sure that the exercising we’re doing, locally and nationally, is being done in the right way and relating to the risk profile we now face.

Lead Inquiry: You mean the role that you play currently in national exercises and simulations needs to be better thought about and better targeted, the risks for which the exercise exist need to be thought about to a greater degree, and your role in the meeting of those risks needs to be thought about also to a greater degree?

Mr Michael Adamson: Yes, I do.

Lead Inquiry: Finally, in your statement at paragraph 57 you identify a number of key areas where lessons should be learnt from the pandemic for the future. Are they advanced not by way, in fact, of specific steps that can be taken but more by way of general principles that ought, in your opinion, to be applied?

Mr Michael Adamson: That’s correct.

Lead Inquiry: Devolving power from central government to local government and better co-ordination of preparedness and response at a local level, the first one; strengthening the relationships with the voluntary and community sector, at both national and local levels, in advance of civil emergencies so that resources can be better deployed in times of need; thirdly, it’s important to look beyond initial emergency response and plan for longer term recovery and build that into your planning procedures so that, bluntly, we’re taken less by surprise in the event of an emergency; and, fourthly, do you also, as with many others, say there needs to be greater focus on understanding, thinking about and planning for the impact of emergencies on those persons who suffer from pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities, and would you wish the Inquiry to consider all those worthy principles?

Mr Michael Adamson: Yes, we would, and they are a connected set of principles, because if we work through the scenarios for the different kinds of emergencies we face, coming – arising from the risk register, and the human impacts of those different types of emergencies, and the vulnerabilities that may arise.

So, for example, and I’m sure you’ve heard considerable evidence about: while this was treated as – Covid was treated as a health emergency, actually its impact on vulnerability was multifaceted and could only really be interpreted at local level.

So these considerations that we’re suggesting for the future are connected.

National scenario planning, a more human approach to the risk register that’s pulling out the different vulnerabilities in different scenarios, different emergencies, and then allowing local – you know, emergency response is essentially a local activity, because that’s where people are.

So local authorities and their partners, including the voluntary and community sector, need to be empowered with the information necessary to respond, but having been stretched and challenged around those scenarios and thinking through who is most likely to be forgotten in the response to these emergencies.

Lead Inquiry: A whole-society but individual approach?

Mr Michael Adamson: Exactly.

Mr Keith: My Lady, those are all the questions I have for Mr Adamson.

Lady Hallett: I don’t think there are any other questions?

Mr Keith: I believe not.

Lady Hallett: Mr Adamson, thank you very much indeed. Extremely thoughtful and extremely interesting; you’ve bee very helpful, thank you.

The Witness: Thank you so much, and can I also just express my condolences to all those who lost loved ones in the emergency during this period.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Mr Adamson.

(The witness withdrew)

Mr Keith: My Lady, that concludes today’s evidence and indeed all the evidence, expert and factual, in Module 1. There remains only to hear, importantly, from four witnesses tomorrow on the part – on behalf of the Covid bereaved family groups.

Lady Hallett: Yes, so anybody who is planning to watch tomorrow, they should know – or listen or attend tomorrow – they should know that the morning will be spent listening to people who have suffered bereavement during the pandemic.

Mr Keith: Indeed.

Lady Hallett: Very well. Thank you very much. 10 o’clock tomorrow.

Mr Keith: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

(3.08 pm)

(The hearing adjourned until 10 am on Tuesday, 18 July 2023)