6. Submissions on Behalf of the Local Government Association by Mr Allen KC

Mr Allen: Good morning, my Lady. As in Module 1 of this

Inquiry, I represent the Local Government Association.

Scrutinising when the pandemic was at its height, the LGA applied to become a core participant for two reasons: it represents the collected voice of local government, with over 99% of the English principal local authorities; and councils played an absolutely major role in bringing the country through the pandemic.

During Module 1 it was widely acknowledged the nation’s preparedness and resilience plans were ill focused and inadequate, and in this module the Inquiry will look at how those preparations were deployed and how government at all levels made policy under pressure and then operationalised it.

Some things are already quite clear. Policy decisions had to be made very quickly and then revisited as events unfolded. Central government did not always utilise all the sources of advice and information, and sometimes, as Mr Keith discussed yesterday, because of internal disorganisation.

Now, the LGA emphasises that these tasks were not for central government alone. Whatever policies were announced centrally, they had to be delivered locally. And if central government policy making ignored partnership with local government, its delivery was likely to flounder. These short points contextualise the most important issues for local government in this module. In summary, these are: subsidiarity and decision-making, local tiering and local lockdowns, key decision-making regarding both adult social care and care at home, test and trace and isolate, and data sharing between central and local government.

Why are these so important? To answer that, I need only sketch some of the roles that local authority officers and elected members had in this period.

Firstly, social workers continued to support those already drawing on their support. Social care commissioners continued to work closely with care provider partners to ensure people had access to the services they needed. Public health teams continued to control outbreaks. Emergency planners organised the local response. Revenue and benefit teams administered business support grants. Customer service teams contacted millions of clinically extremely vulnerable people. Bereavement services supported relatives in the most stressful of circumstances. And employees across the councils delivered emergency food parcels.

More could be said about roles like environmental health, health visitors, refuse workers. They kept the usual services running as normal, while hundreds of thousands of employees were re-deployed to frontline Covid response roles.

So the LGA very much hopes that the Inquiry will recognise that, from the very start, the goodwill, experience and expertise of local government was there to be harnessed to the task of overcoming the Covid virus.

Mobilisation within local government occurred well, with everyone determined to make a positive contribution. Thousands of workers volunteered overnight to change roles temporarily to contribute to the emergency effort. Very quickly, both unilaterally and where necessary in response to the national emergency legislation, local authorities redesigned and re-prioritised essential local services, and in some cases suspended services and introduced new operating models.

My Lady, the LGA’s chief executive has submitted two witness statements setting out this work and that of the LGA. It is happy that those witness statements should be published as soon as the Inquiry thinks appropriate.

This evidence shows how councils were able to devise solutions that were effective on the ground precisely because they knew best how things could be made to work in their communities. They restructured around essential services to deliver novel support services such as shielding, supporting vaccination roll-out, and the rapid distribution of business support, whilst also ensuring the continued delivery of critical core council services. And this flexible and engaged response of local authorities we say demonstrates the great importance of subsidiarity and localism, and also the contribution that elected members and officers rooted in their local communities bring to civil society on occasions such as this.

I will now emphasise some key points that are important both for the public to know and to provide, we say, focus for this module.

First, the LGA invites the Inquiry to recognise explicitly that there could not have been any success in addressing this emergency if local government had not been fully engaged from the outset. It asks you to note how local government was able to act flexibly and take early decisive action, officers reacting positively to requests to change roles and patterns with little notice, consultation or discussion.

But also, so much more could have been done. For instance, as has been mentioned already this morning, the NHS Test and Trace system in England was commissioned centrally and designed and created independently from local government. The LGA considers that this significantly impeded effective collaboration and slowed down the ability to actually effectively speedily test, trace and isolate people with the virus.

Secondly, in the early stages, there was a regrettable delay in central government’s engagement with local government, and thus a failure to benefit from councils’ understanding of their communities. We emphasise four aspects of this.

This delay affected the design of schemes of very great importance to the community at large. For example, in relation to shielding the clinically extremely vulnerable and contact tracing, as well as to aspects of the legislation that was introduced and supporting guidance.

Secondly, consistent concerns were raised with the LGA by its member councils from an operational perspective. These concerned the timeliness of government decision-making and communication to councils, and decisions about funding and workforce issues. We acknowledge, over time, engagement did improve.

Thirdly, many aspects of the response demonstrated the problems in trying to design, control and manage from the centre activities which must be delivered locally to tackle local challenges. Local government was simply not often enough a partner in co-designing the response to the pandemic, despite its critical operational role in managing this.

Fourthly on this aspect, particularly at the beginning, the disconnect between national policy formation and its local implementation meant that councils spent much effort trying to stitch together different elements of the pandemic response on issues such as PPE and volunteering and test and trace.

The LGA acknowledges the pressure on civil servants and government politicians, but really this does not excuse it, those failures to make the best use of local government.

Now, the third main aspect that we want to raise with you is the government’s introduction of checkerboard tier systems and the localised lockdowns approach, because this was very confusing.

Again, there are four subpoints to this.

The top-down approach inadequately considered local challenges such as overcrowded housing or intergenerational living.

Secondly, there were also communication issues. In some areas local leaders learnt about new restrictions literally merely hours before the public.

Thirdly, councils sometimes even had to support residents in multiple different tiers within their local area.

And fourthly, this kind of confusion about rules and engagement led to an increasing sense of inequality.

My Lady, you’ve already heard much, important submissions, about inequality this morning.

Now, the fourth main point we want to make is that there is no doubt that the crisis required the best use of all available data. This issue is of great importance, since it was relevant at so many levels, from the implications of the infection rates for particular groups to the identification of the clinically vulnerable during lockdown. It is highly likely that initial delays in providing local authorities with quality granular data meant that the pandemic response was not as effective as it might have been. These delays had particular impact on efforts to support the clinically extremely vulnerable, on test and trace and on vaccination rates.

The Local Government Association is clear that the rules for data sharing in an equivalent crisis require review. Efficiency requires greater harmonisation, with: one, timely access across all national public health agencies and other relevant data generating institutions; two, a code of conduct for data producers and data users relevant to such circumstances; and three, an acceptance that local authorities routinely use personally identifiable data in a professional and safe way and can be trusted to do so.

The LGA is particularly pleased to see the expert evidence from Gavin Freeguard and it hopes his contribution can help the Inquiry to see what needed to be done and how this could be achieved.

My Lady, the fifth and last aspect I want to mention concerns social care both at home and in care homes. There were many issues about this. In normal times, careful consideration, prioritisation and planning for care homes and domiciliary care is critical, and this was equally true, if not more so, during the pandemic.

Yet while such a mutual relationship seems to have operated between the government and the NHS, the relationship between central and local government in respect of the responsibilities for social care, both at home and in care homes, was in no sense comparable. In short, it seems that central government did not really know how to address the 18,000 providers and 150 local authorities concerned with social care. Thus, adult social care settings suffered severe problems from lack of PPE, from cross-infection, and from high morbidity.

Thus the arrangements for the funding, organisation and deployment of PPE for social care were far slower for social care than for the NHS. And thus consideration and treatment of the social care sector was at times late and piecemeal, with an overall governmental failure to offer those involved in this sector, whether staff or care recipients, equality of esteem with the NHS. The LGA urges this Inquiry to highlight the importance in any future similar crisis of addressing the needs of and the risks in the social care sector on a basis of equality with its approach to the NHS. Protecting those in social care must never be an afterthought. It is a matter of absolutely equal priority.

My Lady, thank you, we look forward to assisting during this module.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Mr Allen.

Mr Phillips, there you are.