Transcript of Module 2 Public Hearing on 10 October 2023

(10.00 am)

Lady Hallett: Mr Keith.

Mr Keith: Good morning. May I please call Lord O’Donnell.

1. Lord Gus O’Donnell

LORD GUS O’DONNELL (sworn).

Questions From Lead Counsel to the Inquiry

Mr Keith: Could I commence, please, by asking you to give your full name.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Gus O’Donnell.

Lead Inquiry: Lord O’Donnell, whilst you give evidence, could you remember, please, to keep your voice up and also try to speak as slowly and as concisely as you’re capable of doing in order that your evidence may be more easily recorded by our stenographer.

Lord O’Donnell, you have been good enough to provide to the Inquiry a witness statement dated 26 June 2023, INQ000215548. There we have it. Is that a statement that you signed and declared to be true to the best of your knowledge and belief, I think, on the last page, page 16?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: Probably on 26 June. There we are.

Lord O’Donnell, significantly, you were once upon a time the Cabinet Secretary, and, in order to be able to get our bearings, were you Cabinet Secretary between 2005 and 2011? Were your successors, then Sir Jeremy, later Lord Heywood, who tragically became very ill whilst still in office and died? He was succeeded by then Sir Mark, later Lord Sedwill, between 2018 and 2020. He resigned in September of 2020, and he was replaced by the present incumbent, Simon Case. Have we got the chronology right?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: That is correct, yes.

Lead Inquiry: Did you leave the civil service in 2011 when you ceased being Cabinet Secretary?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: You’re now a crossbench member of the House of Lords. Do you carry out a number of different functions and have a number of roles, including being chair of Frontier Economics, you’re the president of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, chair of the public interest board of PwC, and are you also a chair of a number of worthy establishments and groups and entities, including the All-Party Parliamentary Group on wellbeing?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes, for a full list you should look at my House of Lords register. For example, I finished being chair of the public interest board at PwC some time ago. But there’s a full list, including, as you rightly say, the fact that I chair Pro Bono Economics, which may be relevant later.

Lead Inquiry: Yes, indeed. Have you, since the commencement of the pandemic, in fact published a number of articles concerning the government’s response to the pandemic, including an article based upon an annual lecture that you gave to the Institute of Fiscal Studies in September of 2023. I’m not sure actually, perhaps, that that’s the right date, but in any event you gave a lecture to the IFS and that lecture was subsequently produced and reproduced in an article entitled “The Covid tragedy: following the science or the sciences?”. You also published an article entitled “Far from Well: The UK since Covid-19, and Learning to Follow the Science(s)”, an article you published with a professor or an academic at, I think, King’s College London, Harry Begg. Also, thirdly, an article, “When to Release the Lockdown? A Wellbeing Framework for Analysing Costs and Benefits”.

So you have looked, in broad terms, quite carefully at some aspects of the government’s response to the pandemic and you’ve published your thoughts in relation thereto?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes, I should explain that as president of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, we were due to have a Nobel Laureate come and give the lecture. It was Covid so they didn’t come across from the States, so I stepped in at relatively short notice and produced that lecture, which was then turned into an article with Harry Begg, who I fear is not King’s College but is Blavatnik School at Oxford, Oxford University.

I should say that one of the reasons for this and the point that I wanted to get across very early is that this was a really serious event, a massive thing for government, and I just wanted to make my personal view that I feel very strongly for all those affected by it, by the victims of this. As an individual, I was affected by it as well of course. So I just want to say that I feel for you, and I understand where you’re coming from, and I think it’s really important that this Inquiry works, as you are, incredibly hard to learn lessons from the events.

Lead Inquiry: In your articles, one very important theme emerges, and it may be put in this way, Lord O’Donnell, you posed the question: were the appropriate structures in place to ensure that the best possible decisions were made?

I’d like to commence, please, with an examination of that question. Why does it matter, when government is making momentous decisions of this type, that the structures and the processes which underpin that decision-making are appropriate, adequate, suitable, worthy unto the day?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: So what’s important when you hit a crisis is the ability to bring together all of the information in a sensible way, to get that to the ultimate decision-makers, who are of course ministers, in a form in which they can understand and apply their judgement to that information and evidence that you’ve given to them.

So you do need to do this. And it’s also important that quite a lot of people fight the last war. So some of the structures were set up, in a sense, with regard to the previous crisis. So in my case I lived through SARS and things like that. So there is – there was an element of us thinking about pandemic flu. A lot of the time that was top of our – the National Risk Register, which was started in my day.

But each crisis is very different. If you think about, for me, the biggest crisis during my time was the global financial crisis. That was very much about the economy, the Treasury, global issues. So that was – that required a certain set of structures.

Covid was different, in that quite often, for example, SARS was mostly a health crisis dealt with through health means. So, for example, you were thinking about how much of the medicine should we buy, and we were criticised later for buying too much. Actually I think, you know, my goodness, I think we may be … I personally would stand by all the decisions we made then.

But Covid was different, in the sense that there were going to be medical ways of solving this, vaccines eventually, there were drugs, there’s various things, but also there were – I think the term that everybody uses is NPIs, which were very different, and actually required understanding of how people’s behaviour would change, and also of their impact in a broader sense.

So, for example, closing schools would have an effect on transmission, which experts in epidemiology could tell you something about, but in order to understand the overall impact and put this to ministers, you needed to have someone saying, “What’s the impact of that on the children, on their education? What’s the impact on teachers? What’s the impact on the mental health of the parents and, in due course, on the economy as a whole?”

So there were lots of – I always – I refer to it in the papers as a mixed crisis, in the sense of it starts with a health issue but it’s solved by a combination of health and non-health interventions. And that’s complicated, and therefore you need a multidisciplinary approach right from the start. Hence you need to set up the structures to deal with the crisis you’re dealing with, so what would have been right for a global financial crisis would absolutely not have been right for Covid.

Lead Inquiry: The type of evidence and information to which you refer was of course, during the pandemic, the sort of information relayed to decision-makers through, as we know, SAGE – and we’ll come back to that in a moment – and COBR, to which we’ll also revert in a moment.

But presumably at some point in this structure, in this system, the information, the evidence, the wherewithal to be able to enable decision-makers to make the best possible decisions had to be routed through existing government structures, so the Cabinet Secretary, the Cabinet Office, Number 10 and, perhaps to a lesser degree – the extent to which it was a lesser degree we’ll examine in due course – the Cabinet.

How important in this decision-making process or this evidence gathering process is the role of the Cabinet Secretary?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Very important. But I would say one thing about – you don’t necessarily need to put it through existing structures, you can create new structures.

Lead Inquiry: Of course.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: And we did, for things like the global financial crisis.

Lead Inquiry: But I’m asking you about the existing structures, because the Cabinet Secretary played a vital role, of course, in the response to the Covid pandemic.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Absolutely. And if you think about what the role of the Cabinet Secretary is in this, it’s to make sure that both the Prime Minister and Cabinet – and I think this is important, it’s actually in the name: if you’re Cabinet Secretary you have dual roles, right, you are there as a policy adviser to the Prime Minister but you are also there to support Cabinet and Cabinet decision-making. So you have to try to set up structures that make sure that both of those, as it were, clients are treated properly, and you need to make sure that the structures you’ve got work well for this.

So, for example, COBR was used at various times. COBR is a structure that works at its best – sorry, you –

Lead Inquiry: We’re going to come on to COBR in a moment.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Fine, okay.

Lead Inquiry: Can we remain focused on the Cabinet Secretary for a moment.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Sure.

Lead Inquiry: The Cabinet Secretary is, in effect, is he or she not, the head of the government machine? They liaise with the Prime Minister, to whom of course they are the Cabinet Secretary. He or she will be the head of the civil service, probably, not necessarily. They liaise with the Cabinet, they are the secretary to the Cabinet, and they are at the head of the structure, the civil service structure which will give advice to the Prime Minister.

Is that a fair summary?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes. I would stress, though, it’s Prime Minister and Cabinet, and sometimes you’re going to talk to the Prime Minister about ways of involving Cabinet more. So, you know, it’s not just one way. You have two masters in that sense.

And you are, as you absolutely rightly say, head of the civil service, so all of the permanent secretaries to the different departments report to you as Cabinet Secretary. So you are trying to make sure that all of the departments work well together, particularly when you’ve got an issue which goes across departmental boundaries, and Covid would be one where that absolutely was true.

Lead Inquiry: So in a time of crisis, the demands on the Cabinet Secretary are greater than in normal times, because they have to try to broker, or broke the position within government as well as respond to and be at, I suppose, the top of the pile in relation to the government’s ability to deal with the ensuing crisis?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes, I would say so, but I would also say that, as Cabinet Secretary, I was told there was a crisis every single day, and that turned out to be there was a bad headline in a newspaper. My response always was: how many people have died? And you need to get that calibration in there to understand that some crises are really, really important and need urgent attention. I think Covid was a classic example of that.

So there is this kind of role of the Cabinet Secretary to get things in perspective, to say, “You might think this is a crisis, but this is going to be something that would be resolved in a few days and it might be a few bad headlines”, “This is something that is an absolutely existential threat and therefore requires everybody to change their behaviour it might require new structures, and it might require all of us to think about things quite urgently as to what we need”, for example collecting more data.

Lead Inquiry: Is the Cabinet Secretary the head of the Cabinet Office, which is itself a government department, although perhaps to call it a government department may be to mislead indirectly?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Good question. So when I was Cabinet Secretary I actually did have three roles at the time: I was Cabinet Secretary, head of the civil service and I was Permanent Secretary for the Cabinet Office. Which I thought was too many, and I wanted to get there to be a separate Permanent Secretary for the Cabinet Office. But ultimately you are always going to be overseeing the Cabinet Office, whether you’ve got the titular head of Permanent Secretary for the Cabinet Office or not, because that is the mechanism by which you’re bringing together all of the departments.

You are – as Cabinet Secretary, it’s worth pointing out, every Wednesday for an hour you bring together all the heads of the government departments, all the agency heads, and you talk about the big issues of government, and you do this knowing that Cabinet will be meeting to talk about some of the same issues.

So there is a very big role in bringing together the whole of the civil service and government machine.

Lead Inquiry: How important is the interface between the Cabinet Office, which performs this wider governmental a role of broking between departments, of trying to apply a level of control, to try to focus the information and the evidence in a way that assists the centre of government, and Number 10, where executive power in the form of the Prime Minister is essentially vested?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: So you have to manage both, and you have to remind the Prime Minister at times that he may be, a phrase to use primus inter pares, first amongst equals, but he is head of a Cabinet, and it’s important that Cabinet gets to discuss some of the important issues.

So the Cabinet Secretary will spend quite a lot of time with the Prime Minister, saying, “Actually, Prime Minister, you should take this to Cabinet”, or, “You should take this to a certain committee”, or whatever, rather than just saying, “Prime Minister, you’ve got to decide this or that”.

Lead Inquiry: It’s self-evident, isn’t it, that these working relationships, the relationship between the Cabinet Secretary and the Cabinet Office and the Cabinet, and the relationship between the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister, and between the Cabinet Office and Number 10, are all absolutely essential to the way in which a government can respond to a crisis? If those relationships break down or become degraded, the government is likely to respond less efficiently and less well. Would you agree with that general proposition?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: These are all personal relationships, and it’s – you know, having worked closely with John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, I would say in every single respect you have to take into account the personality and strengths and weaknesses of the Prime Minister you’re dealing with, and therefore as Cabinet Secretary you have to adjust to that, because they are the Prime Minister, you know, and you need to make the relationship work. So different styles are needed at different times, depending on who you’re working with.

But yes, at its best that relationship is a very strong and close one and allows the Cabinet Secretary to do what we always say, speak truth unto power and be able to challenge the Prime Minister and say, “No, Prime Minister, actually I think you’re wrong, I think, you know, you shouldn’t do this, you should do that”.

Lead Inquiry: And you say at best, but if at worst the relationship breaks down or there is a loss of confidence, that is likely, is it not, to have a deleterious, a damaging effect on the nature of the decisions which the government will then make?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes. I mean, there’s no doubt that if that – in my time, I can only speak about my time – in my time if I had not felt that there was mutual trust and respect between me as Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister, that would have made life very difficult, and I was very fortunate in that all of the Prime Ministers I worked with I felt that that relationship existed.

Lead Inquiry: It is now well known that Sir Patrick Vallance, then the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, kept a set of diaries or evening notes in which he recorded his contemporaneous views on the workings of government during the crisis. In those dairies, in fact on 11 November 2020, he says this of your successor, Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case:

“Simon Case says No 10 at war with itself - a Carrie faction (with Gove) & another with SPADs …”

What are SPADs?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Special advisers. Political appointees, not civil servants.

Lead Inquiry: “PM caught in the middle. He has spoken to all his predecessors as [Cabinet Secretary] & no one has seen anything like it.”

Lord O’Donnell, were you one of the predecessors to whom he spoke?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Most certainly I was, yes. And like I say, you know, I look back on this and think I was blessed, I actually had a relatively easy time. All of the prime ministers I worked with, I could say I think there was that sense of mutual trust and respect, and ability to get prime ministers to focus on the decisions they needed to make and the information and evidence they needed.

That was clearly, from the evidence you’re seeing – obviously I wasn’t anywhere near this at the time, but from the evidence you’ve got from other people, that was clearly an issue. And once that’s an issue, you need – the reason that the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, would have been talking to Patrick Vallance about this is they need to understand how to operate in a way in which – the top is not functioning as well as you would like it to, and when that’s happening, you obviously need to think about: how do we ensure that the best decisions are made for the country when it’s not working as well as one would like?

And that means that sometimes you have to, you know, be clear with the key officials, like Patrick Vallance, Chris Whitty, that there are problems with these relationships, and therefore things may not happen as quickly as you would like.

So that’s the world you’re living in, they are there, you can’t change them, a lot of these issues are for, you know, our political appointees, and the Cabinet Secretary can’t do anything about that.

Lead Inquiry: But the outcome, the ultimate outcome of a failure to take a grip on factional infighting or loss of confidence in important individuals or breakdown in the relationships of trust between these various departments and the various individuals will be, won’t it, a degradation in the decision-making? No government sensibly constituted can respond properly to a crisis and make these momentous decisions if it’s at war with itself and if its various moving parts are, bluntly, dysfunctional?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: There are always differences of view amongst members of Cabinet, and differences of view even within Number 10. So – and that, to be honest, is healthy. You would not want groupthink to take over. There are always competing factions, there are always competing views of looking at the same evidence, coming up with different answers. The job is to try to make sure that there is a consistent framework, that there are rational decisions being made, rational in the logical sense, that can be explained consistently both to – within government but also to the public, to understand why certain decisions are made.

So that’s – I think that’s the key. You have to accept the fact that there won’t be unanimity amongst all of these different players, but you need, as best you can, to use the processes at your disposal to make sure that all of these different voices are heard, but there is a good decision-making process that comes up with the right answers.

Lead Inquiry: This material, though, Lord O’Donnell, goes beyond, doesn’t it, debate or even ferocious debate? It indicates a level of dysfunctionality, “no one has seen anything like it”, there are references to “chaos”, internecine warfare going on within Number 10. That’s not the normal part of government, is it? That’s not debate, that’s a systemic failing, is it not?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Like I say, I wasn’t there. All I can say is during the time when I was there, there was healthy debate. You know, there was – a lot of people have written about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown not always sharing the same views. That actually, to my mind, was a strength of government, a Chancellor and a Prime Minister testing out ideas with each other. But, yes, I wasn’t – and I don’t think anyone has ever said that there were problems like those that Patrick Vallance is referring to and others have mentioned. So that, to my mind, means that Simon Case was dealing with a far, far more difficult situation than I ever had to face.

Lead Inquiry: It’s a matter of public record that Lord Sedwill gave up the position of being Cabinet Secretary publicly in September of 2020, although the debate in Downing Street as to how long he should continue for raged throughout the summer. What, in your experience, would have been the likely impact on the decision-making processes of the change in Cabinet Secretary in those terrible months?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Well, on the one hand you want a Cabinet Secretary that can manage the relationships with the Prime Minister, and if that relationship’s broken down, it’s a bit like – as Cabinet Secretary, it was always my job to go and talk to a minister if they weren’t getting on with their permanent secretary and to think about, was it something about the way the permanent secretary was acting or behaving, was there some personality clash or whatever, and you’d try and find a way to make that relationship work better, and to then think about, ultimately, if it wasn’t going to work, how you manage the smooth transition. So, in a sense, that would be my playbook as to how – unfortunately that playbook works when you’re talking about ministers and permanent secretaries; obviously when it comes to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary, there’s no one else to go to. So that’s the kind of – that’s a very difficult situation.

And if a Cabinet Secretary and a Prime Minister ultimately can’t work together, and, you know, from what we’ve heard about the Prime Minister’s style, what other witnesses have said, I can understand why that might be very, very difficult, then you can understand why there’s a decision for that Cabinet Secretary to go and for a new one to come in.

I mean, of course, the other side of it is when prime ministers should go, and that’s obviously an issue that’s either decided by the electorate or their own party. That was done.

Lead Inquiry: You’ve used the phrase, perhaps the euphemism, “it would be a difficult situation”. In terms of government administration and the proper workings of this very highest level of government, that breakdown of relationship with the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary was, frankly, a car crash, wasn’t it?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Well, you have to do your best to make sure that it’s not. So you have to –

Lead Inquiry: But it was, was it not? It does appear that the relationship broke down completely at the highest level of government, and that is a most regrettable feature of the way in which the government responded.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: It’s – most certainly, yes. I mean, I would say it would be far better if they were getting on well. Precisely – you know, the job then of the Cabinet Secretary, Mark Sedwill, would have been to try to make sure that the damage of that relationship not working was as small as possible.

Lead Inquiry: Indeed.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: You know, so Mark needs to think about: okay, what’s the future, can we get a new Cabinet Secretary in? Can we make sure that this doesn’t damage things in the way that …

You’re right, because the Cabinet Secretary is a very important position for bringing all of this together, at a particularly difficult time, so the potential is there. The job that Mark tried to do was to make sure that the damage was as small as possible, given the behaviour of other participants in it.

Lead Inquiry: Generically, there is, of course, the well known division of function between the civil service, which acts primarily in an advisory role, and ministers, who carry executive power, who are the decision-makers. Without delving too far into this extremely complex conceptual and administrative divide, does that division of function work particularly well in a crisis, where you have civil servants giving, with the best intentions in the world, advice, but leaving it to ministers, some of whom may have more experience than others, to make the executive decisions?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: In a sense that’s democracy for you. You know, we’ve decided that we want to go down a route where the ultimate decision-makers are elected politicians, mostly. I mean, there can be some from the House of Lords, obviously. And they can move around. You know, during my time I had nine ministers of pensions in five years. I mean, it’s quite a long-term issue.

So you would want your decision-makers to be really good at one thing. You can’t expect them to be good at the subject matter in the sense of – you know, because they could move from health to defence or whatever. What you really want is for them to be good at decision-making under uncertainty, because you’re always going to have uncertainty and you always want them to – and I would – you know, if I had one wish it would be that ministers had training in decision-making under uncertainty. Because that’s the nature of what they do.

And this is, particularly in Covid, it’s complicated, the stats you’re giving them, you know, the whole, you know, epidemiological modelling. There are some of us who – you know, I grew up teaching how to do modelling, you know, but that’s not their background for most of them. So this is hard for them, and it’s hard for us to explain complicated things to people haven’t done basic stats, and understanding probabilities, and the uncertainties around these things. Because, to be honest, dealing with Covid, you were mostly dealing with situations where the honest answer most of the time is “We don’t know”. “But” – but, and this is a really important but – “we know ways to try and find out”, which mostly involved collecting more data early.

Lead Inquiry: Just picking apart some aspects of that answer, Lord O’Donnell. Firstly, in terms of crisis management, is there any training for ministers at all in advance of taking up their role, their position, in order to better prepare them for crisis management?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Well, obviously there are – there are training programmes, people like the Institute for Government, Blavatnik School, do training programmes for would-be ministers, and they will cover things like crisis management. You get good training for them if they do tabletop exercises. So they have to live it. And I found that was one of the most important things.

Also you’ve find that ministers get better on their second crisis. So when they go through it the first time and they understand how COBR works and issues like that, they get better. You know, I think all of us would say, you know, the second time we do something is so much better than the first time.

Lead Inquiry: That may provide little solace for the poor unfortunates who suffer from the first crisis.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Absolutely. Which is why, when it comes to a new kind of crisis, like I say I call this a mixed crisis, where you’re very aware that you’re putting to people really complicated issues that they will find very difficult, hence the importance of having people like the Chief Scientific Adviser, the Chief Medical Officer, to try to distill the wisdom of others and put that evidence to ministers in a way that they can understand it and allow themselves to apply – which ultimately they have to, as the elected ministers – their decision-making process to it.

Lead Inquiry: The second aspect of your earlier answer referred to or related to churn. In your article “Far from Well”, you note that Mr Johnson’s Cabinet went into this crisis with comparatively limited experience in positions of power. You said there had also been significant churn among the top positions in the civil service, and plainly, therefore, those ministers had not had any opportunity to take part in live planning exercises.

To what extent do you believe that that comparative lack of experience in ministers had an impact on the decision-making in the early days of 2020?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Well, I should say that you can’t control this, to start off with. You know, you imagine 1997, Tony Blair comes into office, Tony Blair had never ever had a ministerial role, he becomes Prime Minister. Right? Very, very few ministers, when there’s a change of administration, have had any experience whatsoever. So this is something you have to live with in a democracy.

Lead Inquiry: Can I pause you there, Lord O’Donnell?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yeah.

Lead Inquiry: Your article was entitled “Far from Well” and was a piece of learning on the relative performance of the United Kingdom Government and its decision-making. You wouldn’t have referred, on page 785, to the significant churn amongst ministers and civil servants unless you had taken the view that it mattered and it had an effect on the standard of decision-making?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Sure, don’t get me wrong, what I’m saying is it does matter but it’s not within your control. If there’s just been an election, imagine the next election, imagine if there’s a change of administration. By my count there will be seven people in government, if the Shadow Cabinet became the government, who have actually had any ministerial experience. Right? That’s the world we live in. You can’t assume that ministers have got prior experience.

So here we are in a government where there hasn’t been a change of administration for a long time –

Lead Inquiry: Sorry, can I just ask you to slow down just a little bit, Lord O’Donnell. Thank you.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: What I’m saying is that – so you have to have systems that will work with ministers that are new in place.

Lead Inquiry: Well, ameliorate, in effect, the lack of ministerial experience?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Precisely. In an ideal world, and I remember saying this to David Cameron when I had the access talks with him, when he was Leader of the Opposition, he asked me, “What’s the one thing I could give you, Gus?” And I said, “Minimise the churn in ministers.”

The longer ministers are in place, the more chance they’ll have the training, the more chance they’ll have been through one of these issues. So I think it is absolutely vital.

And our ability to respond, and I would say any democracy’s ability to respond, will depend to some extent on the experience of ministers. And if ministers, even though they haven’t been through a crisis like this, have had training about how to manage crises, that would be even better.

So I would love them all to have pre-ministerial training.

Lead Inquiry: I think you might describe yourself fairly as being in the Sir Oliver Letwin camp in that case?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: He would be a perfect minister in many respects, because he did take these things seriously.

Lead Inquiry: Thirdly, arising out of your earlier answer, a lack of ministerial experience places an even greater premium, does it not, upon the receipt of straightforward, clear and speedy advice from the civil servants?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: One of Sir Patrick Vallance’s diary entries from December 2020 says this, that the permanent secretary had become annoyed that the Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Scientific Adviser had told the Prime Minister about a new variant, and he says:

“Sounds familiar. Really we had no choice and he needs to know. The civil service reflex to slowly manage politicians is really awful.”

Does it follow that if there is a lack of ministerial experience, then any level of dysfunctionality in the civil service, in Number 10 or the Cabinet Office, in terms of informing ministers, informing the Prime Minister, providing them with the right information, the right evidence, will have an extreme, perhaps a disproportionate impact on the ability of those ministers to make proper decisions? Without the experience and without the proper flow of information and advice from the civil service, those ministers will be, frankly, at sea?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: So, yes, they need the proper advice, but this comes back to my point about working as well as possible with the ministers you’ve got. So if you know you’ve got a minister that is liable to, on being told there’s a new variant, to immediately jump to a policy conclusion which you think may be wildly mistaken, then it actually makes sense to pause for a second and say: okay, so if we say there’s this new variant and it’s much more powerful, we really need to be able to answer the Prime Minister’s question afterwards, which is, “So what should I do about that?”

So you might want to hold back and say: let’s do some analysis first, let’s make sure that we’ve considered various policy options and put before the Prime Minister these various things. Because otherwise there’s a chance the Prime Minister will come to a snap decision when told about it and will then talk to somebody else who will say, “Yes, but there’s a case for doing the opposite”. So you really need to work with what you’ve got, in terms of ministers, and you need to understand how the machine can help those ministers make the right decisions. Which may well often mean that you pause for a second before you actually give them some new piece of data.

Lead Inquiry: And this machine was stuttering, was it not?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: I’m not sure I could vouch for that. I would say the machine was doing what it could in terms of understanding the virus and all the rest of it and bringing together the evidence in the best way it could.

The question of whether it was stuttering at that point or at the point where it hits the minister is not something I could say, because I wasn’t there.

Lead Inquiry: I understand. Just focusing now on the Cabinet Office generally for a bit, a considerable amount of evidence appears to show that systemically the Cabinet Office failed to exercise the sort of institutional levers of power that are required to be operated in order to bring other departments into line, to be able to broker different positions between different departments, and to synthesise the information, the evidence and the decision-making for ministers.

During your tenure was any concern ever expressed that the Cabinet Office was too amorphous, that it had too many moving parts yet had insufficient control over the rest of central government?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: There is, I would say, throughout my career, a long career in the civil service, there have always been different views about this, that – on the one hand, if you talk to departments, they will tell you that the Cabinet Office gets in the way too much, that they are slowing us down, and, on the other hand, the Cabinet Office will say that they need to join up more and more.

I mean, to give you one little example, one incredibly effective way of getting government departments to work together was when you present them with a problem which they have to answer quickly. A classic would be: there’s an EU directive on X, it affects five different departments, there’s going to be an EU council meeting in a week’s time, we need a single government position.

Alas, that doesn’t happen any more, and quite often you’ll find, therefore, that departments are basically not resolving that, not coming up with the single thing.

So this cross-departmental aspect is very difficult to do in our system.

And that’s where the – you need the structures to work effectively, and I would say one of the most effective ones in my time was the setting up of the National Security Council.

Lead Inquiry: Just pause there, though. It’s axiomatic, is it not, that if the system is not working, if the Cabinet Office is unable to exercise sufficient levels of control over other departments, and if there is an institutional war going on as to who ultimately has the whip hand, whether it’s Number 10 or whether it’s the Cabinet Office and the Civil Contingencies Secretariat or the lead government department, in a time of crisis, that level of lack of co-operation or lack of proper exercise of power will be all the more exemplified?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Well, ultimately we know and departments know that it’s for Cabinet and the Prime Minister to make decisions. So when it’s something which crosses departmental boundaries, you want as far as possible to set up machinery of government, you know, various committees that cross these boundaries, which actually allow you to bring everybody together.

But it’s, you know, you shouldn’t – the realpolitik of this is that there’s always a battle going on between central control and individual Secretary of State’s freedom to do what they want. It’s never that easy.

Lead Inquiry: Now, you refer then to the bodies and the organisations which can exercise power in times of crisis. It’s very plain, and of course it’s a matter of public record, that the institution known as COBR, the Cabinet Office Briefing Room structure, was set up, of course, and convened to deal with the crisis.

In your experience, is COBR the sort of body which is properly designed for a long-term whole government crisis or can it only really operate in the first few days and perhaps weeks of an acute crisis?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yeah, COBR is at its best – and some of you will be very familiar with this – dealing with, for example, a terrorist crisis. When it’s something short, immediate, you need action, you need the people round the table, you need the Met Police, you need all the rest of them there, and you get as much information as you can, and it’s something that’s dealt with in a few days. It can deal with slightly longer-term ones, foot and mouth and all the rest of it, but if it’s an ongoing thing that you think is going to be there for a year or more, I would say you don’t want to use COBR, you want to set up structures which are different.

COBR is – partly it’s a signalling mechanism, to say to the world you’re taking this very seriously, but as a kind of structure to sort out longer-term decision-making in something as complicated as the Covid crisis, yeah, I would try to move away from COBR quite quickly.

Lead Inquiry: Is that, in essence, because, as an ad hoc committee which convenes to deal with an emergency, it’s simply not designed to be able to develop a coherent and long-term strategy, and a strategy and a coherent plan is essential for any government to be able to properly respond to a crisis?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes, I mean – and that’s what you need to start off with. You know, the government had an action plan eventually, but it’s basically yes, you need, for something like COBR – there might – for something like Covid, there might be something you need COBR to meet early on to kind of – when it thinks: is this a short-term crisis or not? Once it gets to the stage where you’ve got the information which tells you actually this is something that’s big and is going to be around for a long time, you then need to say: okay, what are the right institutional structures to handle this kind of crisis? And then you start setting up the machinery of government which will work effectively for this.

Lead Inquiry: And, as you know, there were a number of ministerial implementation groups convened. They were then replaced in May of 2020 by the Covid-S, the Covid strategy ministerial committee, and the Covid-O, operational ministerial committee.

Did COBR, in your opinion, continue to be convened for too long? It was convened until May, in fact. And if so, what is likely to have been the impact of that in terms of the government’s ability to respond?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: That is incredibly hard for me to say from outside, because I wasn’t sure why they were using COBR, to be honest. If the structures were working you would like to think that they would have meant that COBR didn’t need to meet. It could be that they’d given some specific role to COBR that I don’t know about, so …

Lead Inquiry: Well, at page 777 of your own article “Far from Well” you did attempt to address that thorny issue, and you were able, in fact, to answer that question, because you said:

“… COBR continued to be convened well into May, by which time various implicit political tensions had become apparent …”

So you obviously did take the view at that stage that it had been convened for too long. What did you mean by –

Lord Gus O’Donnell: No, I think what – I can’t see how you infer that from that sentence.

Lead Inquiry: “… COBR continued to be convened well into May, by which time various implicit political tensions had become apparent …”

So –

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: – it plainly went on to such a point, until such a time, that these political tensions built up and became apparent?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: But you’re implying causation there. It’s because COBR was meeting the implicit political tensions arose. I was saying –

Lead Inquiry: What did you mean by “political tensions”?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: – that Covid – that implicit political tensions were rising, which meant that certain different structures might be required.

So COBR was carrying on, not quite sure why, but it was quite apparent from other events that were going on that there were some internal issues, politically, which were creating problems.

They may – and those were problems probably related to the sorts of things that Chris – Patrick Vallance was saying about the different factions, which made decision-making harder. It’s not necessarily related to the – what I call the comitology, the committee structure.

Lead Inquiry: You do, though, express the view plainly that Covid-S and Covid-O, to which I’ve referred, may not have been brought into existence soon enough.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Well, my personal view has always been that this kind of crisis should have been dealt with by something like what I would call a National Security Council structure, which would have been the key political decision-makers plus the key officials round a table, and that would have set the strategy and would have made the big decisions, having got all of the other structures that you would set up to feed those in.

One of the great strengths of that NSC structure, National Security Council structure, was that it allowed all the officials to give their best view of the evidence and explain the pros and cons of various different policy options and then to observe the ministers talk about those different options and come to a political decision about what they were going to do.

That had the great advantage – that system has the great advantage of ensuring that all the ministers get the evidence directly, and, you know, with the various experts in the room they can cross-question each other and they can cross-question those experts as they wish, but also that those experts go away and can report back to their various groups on why those decisions were made, what the political reasoning behind saying, “Look, we advised X but they decided to do Y, and the reason they did that”, because they were in the room when it was made, “is the following”. And people can understand that and therefore interpret that, that it wasn’t that they disagreed with your example, for example, they just put a different judgement on the benefits of A versus the benefits of B.

Lead Inquiry: And SAGE, to which we’ll turn now, was not a body that enabled that process which you’ve described to take place. The politicians were not on SAGE and SAGE provided scientific advice which was relayed through the Chief Medical Officer and the Government Chief Scientific Adviser?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Precisely. I mean, that’s – SAGE would have been one of my sub-bodies, although I would have liked a more multidisciplinary sub-body.

Lead Inquiry: We’ll come back to that in a moment.

So, SAGE. You’ve referred, Lord O’Donnell, already to the vital importance of the supply of proper advice. It’s self-evident that in a crisis the executive decision-makers, the ministers, must have up-to-date reliable data and advice. They need that assistance.

What about the issue of public trust? In terms of managing a crisis and responding to a crisis, how important is it for the public to know that the government is the recipient of high-quality, speedy, proper, effective advice and data?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: That is massively important. We know that this crisis would involve asking people to radically change their behaviour, and that meant that they had to trust that you were doing this for good reason. So public trust is absolutely essential in this.

We have lots of research evidence that in places where trust is higher, lots of things work better. It’s kind of fundamental getting trust up there, and everyone should do their best to think about trust building exercises, how you ensure that you get across to people that what you’re doing is trusted. And often that’s through thinking about: who are the best messengers for this?

Again, it’s part of the whole behavioural playbook that people will believe certain people and trust them much more than they, dare I say it, would trust politicians in general. Trust in our politicians is rather low, unfortunately.

Lead Inquiry: Was that in part why, of course, the government proclaimed that it was following the science?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Well, it’s a very –

Lead Inquiry: We will come back to the detail of that, but there is a link there, isn’t there?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: There is a link there. What you’re trying to do is get people out there as spokesmen, which they did with the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Adviser, that people will trust that are – that they believe are on top of the science. Though I would always argue that we need to interpret science very broadly in that term, to include social science.

Lead Inquiry: Let’s look at SAGE briefly, and I just want to put to you a number of propositions, drawn in fact from your articles about the operation of SAGE.

Firstly, in terms of its composition, it’s well known that it comprised largely epidemiologists –

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yeah.

Lead Inquiry: – modellers, behavioural scientists. Is it your view that it was, certainly at first, dominated by medical professionals and that there were insufficient numbers of experts on infection control, I don’t know, community mobilisation, the social sciences, and nursing and intensive care?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes, I would say, and I would refer to the evidence given by members of SAGE who have said that there were all sorts of areas that they didn’t cover and they didn’t understand what research was going on in those areas. So, yes, but obviously there could have been other bodies in which – which did that.

Lead Inquiry: Well, we’ll come to that in a moment.

Secondly, do you report in one of your articles that there was an element to SAGE which perhaps indicated that, because it was designed to address questions put to it, on a commission basis, if you like, it simply didn’t feel able to be able to raise issues of its own volition, of its own motion; it was, in effect, too much of a responsive committee rather than a body or a forum which could proactively make suggestions for ministers to decide to accept or not?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes, I would agree with that. I think the fundamental problem there, though, was that if you ask SAGE kind of very specific detailed questions and it doesn’t know what the ultimate outcomes the government’s trying to achieve are, I think that’s the problem.

If you give them something about the ultimate outcomes, then they can talk about various ways of achieving those outcomes. If you ask them a very specific question about: what should we do about social distancing? Then you’ll get an answer about social distancing. You won’t get an answer that says: yes, but maybe social distancing isn’t the right way to think about this, because of the objectives you’ve given us.

And I think that failure to kind of specify what the overall objectives were was one of the things I would kind of look back on and say that’s what made it very hard for all the advisers, not knowing what – the ultimate source of this. Because there were various statements made, like stopping the NHS falling over or whatever, but nobody really, to my mind, ever laid out a good strategy and what the overall objectives – for example, minimising the impact of Covid on the country as a whole, and then you go from that to say: well, what does that mean? And you could layer it into economics, social, et cetera, and health obviously.

Lead Inquiry: A number of the scientists on SAGE in their witness statements have referred to the fact that a lack of a clear strategic direction from the government or a lack of information about the government’s priorities made it very much harder for SAGE to understand what it was they were truly being asked.

There is, in one particular set of minutes, these words:

“Modelling suggests earlier and/or combined interventions will have more significant impact.”

That sort of phrase may be reflective of this scientific commissioned position, as opposed to SAGE being asked “What do you recommend we should do?” in plain terms. And is that one of the areas that you think is problematic?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Well, I think it’s – I mean, SAGE was, as I say, filled with a certain set of experts. You know, it depends on the question you’re giving them. If the question is: should we close schools? Then clearly the kind of experts you need are people that understand the impact of closing schools on the educational effect on children, the effect on their parents, general effect on the economy of doing these sorts of things, as well as the things that SAGE might have been very good at saying, which is the impact that might have on transmission.

So you need to balance all those things together. That’s a hard thing to do, and that’s where you really need to be thinking about: how can we put this to ministers in a way that it makes it possible for them to bring their judgement to bear, to weigh up these different things, to come up with an answer?

Lead Inquiry: You make the point in one of your articles, quite rightly if I may say so, that SAGE was onlial scientific advisory group, it simply wasn’t constituted to be able to weigh up the economic and societal consequences of any whole-society order or measure that might be put in place.

You refer in that context to the vital question of whether or not there should, in future, be a committee structure above SAGE that can synthesise not just the scientific advice from SAGE but all the other economic and societal, pandemic management, complex public health issues that might arise outside the narrow confines of a scientific advisory body.

Did you have in mind and do you have the mind the sort of structure, that operates a little like the National Security Council that you’ve described, where all that material can be put together and officials and advisers, scientists and ministers can cross-examine each other about the importance of the information being provided?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Most certainly. I mean, you know, SAGE, the answer’s in the name, that’s what they were doing, Scientific Advisory Group. It will be crisis-specific, let’s be absolutely clear. The people you want round the table, the kind of committee structure you need will depend upon the nature of the crisis. So I wouldn’t have a single answer now. I would say let’s have some principles. The principles should be: let’s work out what our objective is. If our objective, for example, with Covid, would be minimising the impact on the UK population, so there would be some health impacts, there would be some economic impacts, there would be some social impacts, there would be some impacts on the wellbeing of the NHS staff, you know, you could go on, and there will obviously be impacts on – and deaths and the like, like that. So that tells you the kind of structures, the number of experts you need, and the kind of structure you should have.

Sorry, too fast.

But that, I think, is the way I would set it up. So for each crisis, I would want to sort out the structure, but based on there being very clear strategic objectives of what we are trying to achieve. And then that feeds down to what committee structure you need, what experts you need around that table.

Lead Inquiry: Does it follow, Lord O’Donnell, that if you have or if you were to have and if my Lady were to recommend an overarching structure above SAGE to synthesise the information and present it in the presence of ministers –

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: – there would be no need for the relatively narrow conduit that existed during the Covid crisis of SAGE’s information and advice being routed through the Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Scientific Adviser to government?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes. Because when you think about it, SAGE wasn’t looking at, say, for example, the economic stuff. So they’re always doing a partial thing, and ministers are then going to have to feed that together with other things. So they need to have this information from the range of specialists and advisers that are relevant to the decision they’re going to have to make. And that’s – you know, again I stress, these are very difficult decisions because they’re having to weigh up, make trade-offs. You know, yes, we could close down, we could lock down forever, but that might have all sorts of negative implications beyond the health ones. So they have to weigh up and make trade-offs, which ultimately are things that ministers are paid for.

Lead Inquiry: Lastly on this subject and the position of SAGE, do you consider that it was fair on SAGE for the government to declare publicly that its momentous decisions were the result directly of SAGE advice, by virtue of the proclamation that it was, repeatedly, “following the science”?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: I think – I mean, if the implication of that is, “Don’t blame us, blame SAGE because they advised us”, then obviously that is completely wrong. I mean, ministers make decisions. Ministers ultimately can ask for different sets of advice from different sets of people, so when they say they are following the science I think that’s a way of trying to build trust in things. The question is – you know, science is much bigger than just SAGE. There are lots of other social sciences that were really highly relevant to this.

Lead Inquiry: And the government decisions were far greater than science?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Oh, absolutely, because – and science, if we define science very narrowly as the kinds of things that SAGE looked at, which are mostly the epidemiological material. Mostly. They did some other things.

Mr Keith: My Lady, is that a convenient moment?

Lady Hallett: Yes, certainly. 11.15.

(11.02 am)

(A short break)

(11.15 am)

Mr Keith: Lord O’Donnell, just some concluding questions, if I may, in relation to the structures and the process issues that we’ve been looking at.

Firstly, the National Security Council system and the National Security Council itself exists in order to be able to respond to threats, and in particular threats which eventuate, which take place, as opposed to risks. So a pandemic is a risk. A terrorist outrage is a threat, and in fact a threat coming to pass.

When you were Cabinet Secretary, did you give consideration to the possibility of setting up the sort of structure that you’ve described today in relation to risks as opposed to threats?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: So something like that did happen when Gordon Brown set up something he called the “National Economic Council”, which is a bit like an NSC but also included one thing which I think is really useful in these sorts of committees, which is bringing in outside experts to talk – to focus on some things.

So I – so the idea was that things like NSC would think about threats, as it were, and then when something became very apparent you would move to some other different structure, which was determined by what the nature of the crisis was.

Lead Inquiry: But in general terms, the position remained that there was a scientific advisory group, there was a COBR to deal with the acute crisis and then the lead government department model kicked in?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: That’s right –

Lead Inquiry: Remained as such.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: – yes.

Lead Inquiry: All right.

Secondly, you are aware of course that the government changed from a model in which there were ministerial implementation groups to a system of a Covid-S, strategy, and a Covid-O, operational, ministerial group, or two groups, and then ultimately in late May or the summer of 2020 the inauguration of the Covid-19 Taskforce.

To what extent was that Covid-19 Taskforce not replicative of the process that you’ve described? Is it because, or if you agree that it wasn’t the process you’ve described by way of your National Security Council-type committee, was it that the CTF was not a ministerial body, ministerial power remained vested in Covid-S and Covid-O, and therefore what you envisage is in fact an amalgamation of the structures that the government ultimately put in place, namely the Covid-19 Taskforce on the operational front and the Covid-S, Covid-O ministerial committees?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes, a lot of people think that you can have one group that does strategy, another one that then goes away and does the operational implications of it.

I always think it’s important to make sure that you’ve got round the table someone that actually understands about operations when you’re having that strategic discussion, because it’s quite possible that that strategic discussion will come up with something that operationally is impossible.

So I was always keen on having the two groups round the table together so that they could actually – the operational people could put their hand up and say, “Can’t do that”, you know. And I think there were some operational things here where – you look at test and trace, you know, the local authorities were good at it, we dismantled it for some reason. You think about the labs, you know, why did we not use private labs more? There are lots of things where someone with an operational understanding would have said, “Actually, if that’s your objective, you need different answers, and here’s what you should be doing”.

Lead Inquiry: I’ve mentioned the lead government department model. Are you aware of the government’s December 2022 Resilience Framework document?

My Lady, that was the subject of great debate, you’ll recall, in Module 1. Does that Resilience Framework document note and acknowledge that where risks are more complex, meaning that there is in essence a whole government response required, there are distinct limitations on the efficiency or efficacy of the lead government department model?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I would say you don’t really want a lead government department when it’s something that crosses so many departments and has such a big impact on all of them. Covid being a classic. You know, the Treasury, a massive impact, you know, something like the furlough schemes, billions and billions of pounds.

So you actually want Cabinet Office then to hold the ring and create structures and bring all the departments together. I think if there’s something which is 90% one department, the lead government department thing will work well. When it’s much more diffuse and spread, I would go for a much more Cabinet Office-led model.

Lead Inquiry: Presuming that the Cabinet Office is able to step up to the mark in that scenario?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Absolutely.

Lead Inquiry: Yes.

Finally, under the National Security Council process, is that a body at which the devolved administrations are represented, do you recall?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: They’re not. Because of the nature of national security it’s at UK level. That’s not to say you couldn’t have a body which did involve devolveds. In fact, I would always say with this structure you need to modify it for the nature of the crisis. So it could well be the devolveds, it could be the local mayors, it could be all sorts of things that you would want to add in.

Lead Inquiry: And if, of course, it’s a pan-UK crisis, then the devolved administrations would be required to have a seat at the table, because, of course, it’s a pan-UK crisis?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: It’s a bit more complicated than that, I’m afraid, because there are various things –

Lead Inquiry: Somehow, Lord O’Donnell, I knew you would say that.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: There are various things that are protected at the UK level that aren’t devolved.

Lead Inquiry: Ah, yes, you’re talking in terms of, potentially, national security issues, but, for example, in the case of a pandemic, a viral pandemic striking the whole country, under a new model, of the type perhaps that you’ve described, it would be essential to have the devolved administrations represented at that new model?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yes. I would think it would make an enormous amount of sense to do that.

Lead Inquiry: Strategy.

Lady Hallett: Sorry, before you move on.

How do you make sure that that council, that body, doesn’t then become – have so many people on it that it becomes unwieldy and really doesn’t do anything?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Absolutely right, which is why we talked about the devolveds, very small number of devolveds. Once you start thinking to devolved – below the nation state, and so you’re talking about regions and local mayors and all the rest of it, you’re absolutely right.

So I think there is a case for there being that overarching body and then thinking about one of the subgroups having much more representatives of local authorities, devolved areas, mayors, depending on the different structures we have around the country. Which are very different.

But to lose that information I think is – would be a real mistake. But you’re absolutely right, you know, these bodies work because they’re relatively small.

Lady Hallett: Yes.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: And you shouldn’t – you know, Cabinet is a very big body, and therefore that creates limitations to what you can put to Cabinet.

The NSC was deliberately kept quite small.

Lady Hallett: Sorry to interrupt.

Mr Keith: My Lady, not at all.

Strategy. I really don’t want to ask you to get into the weeds of the debate about the relative merits of suppression, that’s to say control of a virus, as opposed to mitigation, that is to say flattening the curve or squashing the sombrero.

In one of your articles, however, you make the point that it is an essential part of strong political leadership in the face of a crisis to have and to communicate a strategic plan.

Why, Lord O’Donnell, is that so? Why is it necessary for a government to have a strategic plan in a crisis and to communicate it?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: It’s –

Lead Inquiry: Shortly, if I may.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Sure. It is absolutely vital, because the decisions you’re making will involve trade-offs.

So let’s imagine the objectives are to minimise the number of deaths, to minimise the impact on the economy, to minimise the effect on children and their education, et cetera, minimise the impact on the wellbeing of the UK population as a whole. How do you do that? How do you do those trade-offs?

So if you have a strategy which has the overarching goals, then you start to say: okay, so tell us more about how you see the trade-offs.

One of the issues that you would like to have is a consistent way of making trade-offs. People might disagree with the weight you give the different parts of the trade-off, but actually for them to be consistent is absolutely vital.

That’s – leads us into the whole of my push for there being a wellbeing approach to all of this, and using WELLBYs and various technical things which haven’t been used yet, but I’m glad to say the Treasury’s own Green Book now has supplementary guidance on how you might do this kind of analysis.

Lead Inquiry: We’ll return to the question of your wellbeing structure or framework in a moment, but is this the nub of it: in order to be able to take the country with it, the government ought to and must in fact demonstrate what its plan is in order to increase confidence, to greater ensure compliance. But also, if it has a plan, is it more likely to be able to discharge the primary function upon it of making the right decisions?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Absolutely. If you’ve got a plan and you’ve got clear objectives, then you can work to that. It makes the communication – and I say this as a former press secretary to a Prime Minister – you know, it makes the communication easier. If the communication is easier, you build up trust. And in – as we said earlier, when you’re asking people to change their behaviour radically, far more than I ever thought we – any government ever would, you need that trust, that this is based on some really good evidence and it’s going to result in better outcomes.

Lead Inquiry: As far as you are able to say, did the government ever publicly debate, put to the country what its strategy was in relation to what level of loss of life it would deem is acceptable? So in this debate about suppression, that’s to say complete control or mitigation, there is this terrible issue of herd immunity: if you are merely mitigating or managing a virus, by implication it requires the virus to spread through or to continue to spread through parts of the population that you’re unable to hermetically seal.

Did the government, in your view, make plain the limits of and the nature of this strategic debate, this strategic issue?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: I think they were very nervous to do this, and I think they were very nervous because if you take the implication of your statement to its logical conclusion, it gets you into a discussion of: what’s the value of life? And we know that governments routinely make decisions based on a particular evaluation. You know, the cost-benefit analysis for roads dating back 30 years has done this.

Lead Inquiry: And medicine, medicinal products –

Lord Gus O’Donnell: NICE, for example, where NICE works out whether – sorry, National Institute for Clinical Excellence works out whether a new drug can be made available, you’re doing these things. Politicians very rarely like to have that debate, because it’s a very cold-hearted debate to say actually it’s not worth saving this life because it costs too much money.

So it is difficult for them, I accept that, but actually implicitly they are making those decisions, so it will be good if, even implicitly, there were understanding that behind this there is a consistent application of their judgement as to what the trade-offs are.

Lead Inquiry: Another aspect of government decision-making and the ability of the public to understand what was going on and what was being decided and on what criteria these momentous decisions were being made, the material demonstrates very clearly that at the very highest level, at the Prime Ministerial level, there was a certain degree of what has been described as flip-flopping or trolleying behaviour, that is to say, an apparent inability to make a decision and stick to it.

It may be self-evident, Lord O’Donnell, but why does a consistency of approach matter so very much in the teeth of a crisis?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: And I think that’s important, because when people talk about flip-flopping, there could be good reasons to flip-flop and bad reasons, and if you have a framework which basically says, “Look, you know, here are – here’s the way in which we’re making decisions about whether to lock down or not, you know, the costs and benefits of lockdown and how we’re trading them off”, and then – “and they’re based on this data and information” – if that data and information changes, then it makes perfect sense to change the policy and to change your decision. And you can do that and maintain trust if you’ve established the framework and people understand the framework and they understand why you’ve changed your mind.

And I think this is the key point, that it’s not necessarily wrong to change the policy prescription at a certain point in time if new information becomes available which you didn’t have at the time which says, actually, policy B turns out to be better than policy A which you chose in the first place.

Lady Hallett: How are you ever going to get that – realistically, how are you ever going to get a political party to talk to the public about possibly allowing a disease to run riot through care homes, killing people in large numbers?

I mean, yes, you could have a rational debate of the kind you’ve talked about, but is that really going to be something a political party is going to want to engage in with the public, and possibly hostile sections of the media?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: That’s a very good question. I mean, there’s nothing to stop the public inferring what the implied value of life is. And indeed, you know, some people did that. So it’s not like this is hiding away.

I think part of political leadership is getting the public to face up to the fact that there are going to be difficult decisions, that we can’t save everybody, therefore we want to put our resources in the places that will save the most people that we can.

Now, the public would get that, and they would understand that, you know, there were limitations on what could be done. But the fact, if there is trust, that you are really trying to do the best, and having laid out in your strategic plan what the best means, then I think you start to build public trust and you can start to have that debate.

Mr Keith: These are fairly obvious issues, albeit of the greatest importance, the most momentous decisions for any society, but they’re at the level, aren’t they, of asking the country: do we do whatever is necessary to avoid death at all costs? To what degree do we batten down the hatches in order to prevent the spread of the virus at any cost? To what extent do we seek to try to hermetically seal segments of the population and thereby allow the virus to continue to spread amongst those who are more capable and more able of being able to deal with it?

Is that the sort of level at which this debate is required?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: What’s essential is to get across to people that there are always trade-offs. You know, the fact that there’s – a new drug becomes available and it’s £10 million and it will extend someone’s life by three months, whereas you could use that £10 million in another way that would extend babies’ lives forever, for the rest of their life. You know, alas, these are the tough decisions we have to make, and leadership is about confronting people with those tough decisions, and …

Lead Inquiry: And if there is a framework –

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Exactly.

Lead Inquiry: – by which the cost and the benefit of these decisions can be objectively evaluated, then that will promote consistency of approach and better enable decision-makers to be able to make a rationalised and perhaps more straightforward decision?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: That’s what all of my articles were about, it’s like the need for a framework. And one can argue about what goes into that, one can argue about the parameters as to, you know, what value would you put on life or whatever, but if you’ve got a consistent framework at least you then start to have a grown-up public debate.

Lead Inquiry: Could we have on the screen, please, INQ000189725.

This is, Lord O’Donnell, your article “When to Release the Lockdown? A Wellbeing Framework for Analysing Costs and Benefits”, from, I think, April 2020.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Yeah.

Lead Inquiry: In any event, on page 4, paragraph 2 of this article, you set out the metric, that is to say a chart setting out the sort of considerations or issues by way of the cost and the benefit of any particular decision so that you can see how it might operate in practice.

So you refer there, at paragraph 2, to the analogy with the QALY metric, which is the – well, the metric which is used in the NHS for being able to evaluate the cost and the benefit of particular treatment, also triage, and a number of matters relating to clinical affairs.

What you’ve proposed is that in the different field of whole society, whole country measures, by way of social restrictions, for example, it should be possible to identify the costs and the benefits of such measures by reference to matters such as the impact on income, the impact on unemployment, on mental health, confidence in government, educational prospects, and the benefits in terms of fewer deaths, of course, because it’s largely a mandatory system for compliance with social restrictions, fewer deaths in terms of road deaths, commuting, the impact on CO2 emissions and so on. That is the chart which you produce there on that page we can see there on the screen.

You’ve made the point that of course the parameters are open for debate, but is it your view that this sort of momentous decision, and a whole society decision, which is not a decision to produce a medicinal product or to give treatment to an individual, is capable in principle of this sort of cost-benefit analysis?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: I think it is. I think with all of those numbers, those parameters, there will be disputes about what the right number is. You know, we put these numbers in, mainly – not to say precisely when lockdowns should change, but to show that there was a framework that could be used. Government would then say: actually, you know, we don’t really care much about the income effects but we care massively about the mental health effects. Or whatever. And gave their own weight to this.

And then the great virtue would be they’d apply some weights and then, when it came to a future decision, you could say: okay, so we assume the weights are the same.

So that would rationally help you explain why you’ve moved from one position to another.

But I do think it’s a very important way of being able to present to ministers the trade-offs, the really difficult decisions they have to make. Without this kind of thing, you end up – and I’ve seen them – endless submissions which list: here are – you know, there’s going to be effects on these five things, and there are going to be good effects on these five and bad effects on these five.

Well, how do you weigh them up? You know?

And that’s what the whole – that’s what QALYs try to do, quality-adjusted life years, that’s what WELLBYs, wellbeing years – they are ways of bringing these things together.

Lead Inquiry: All right, thank you.

The final topic is that of trust in government. It is obvious and it is well understood and known that there were a number of breaches of rules and standards by ministers, officials and advisers, in particular in Downing Street.

The social and personal impact of those breaches is obvious. It was outrageous that whilst members of the population buried their loved ones that sort of behaviour was going on. But systemically, in terms of a government’s ability to ensure compliance and to ensure that it takes a country with it in terms of these whole-society measures, why does leadership and setting an example and the behaviour of government officials and ministers matter so much?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: It comes back to the point you have mentioned many times: it’s all about trust. And it’s all about building that trust. That actually you’re putting forward, you know, unprecedented restrictions on people’s behaviour because you think they are in those individuals’ best interests. And if you then operate in a way that says, actually, but you’re not going to – you don’t think they’re in your own interests, therefore you don’t follow them, that destroys that trust.

So it is absolutely essential that you demonstrate by your behaviours that you believe what you’re saying to the public is the right thing to do and your own behaviours follow that.

Lead Inquiry: So putting aside the personal opprobrium, any view personally on the behaviour of those who were involved, in terms of a government’s ability to be able to manage a pandemic, was this incredibly destructive?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Without a doubt it was destructive, because, you know, you need – you’re relying on a behavioural response, right, you’re relying on people complying with rules, and for most people that will be about whether they decide that that’s what they should do. It’s not about police enforcement, because there aren’t going to be police chasing round everywhere, so it’s do they think this is the right thing? Do they trust the people that are telling them this is the right thing?

When that trust breaks down, then people are going to say, “Well, you know, should I do this?” I mean, and that’s the whole point about these behavioural compliance changes, is that you need people to respond to them. And, you know, you can imagine, there having been lots of lapses this time, you know, if you were trying to do this again, would you get the same levels of compliance? And, really, once you’ve made the decision, let’s assume the decision is right, that various things are required, you really want people to comply with it. And therefore you need maximum trust.

So, yeah, I think it has been damaging, and damaging to future ability of governments to get across behavioural issues.

Lead Inquiry: The police issued, I believe, 126 fixed penalty notices to 83 individuals in and around Downing Street. It may be thought that there was a general ethos of misbehaviour. Had you known, would you have allowed parties to take place in Downing Street?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Absolutely not. I mean, this is – under no circumstances would one want a party which violated the rules that you were telling everybody else on terms of social distancing and all the rest of it.

There is no question about that.

Mr Keith: Thank you.

Questions From the Chair

Lady Hallett: A couple of questions, Lord O’Donnell.

Firstly, if you had the kind of structures that you would like to see in place ready to respond to this kind of emergency, with the kind of membership and sub-bodies that you’ve described, to what extent would the perfect structure, in your view, be undermined by personalities?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Well, that’s why you try to create structures that are, as it were, independent of personalities. That’s why, in a sense, when faced with the question about why is it that Chancellors decide to cut interest rates ahead of elections when it’s not in the best interests of the economy, you say: well, let’s set up a structure where they can’t do that. So you’ve given the power to the Bank of England.

There could be some institutional changes which take power away to bodies that we professionally trust, so that’s one possibility. But there is also this aspect that our system does depend upon people behaving well.

I mean, Peter Hennessey called it the “good chaps” theory, which is a bit sexist, I have to say, but I do think that there are some areas where this showed up that our system operates if people abide by the rules. When they start not abiding by the rules, you get serious problems. And we need to look again at our structures to say: do we need to tweak them in some way to make sure that these things operate?

I would say – you know, in my time we put together the Cabinet Manual, which was kind of pretty much trying to bring together the rules. I hope a new version of it could strengthen some of those rules which learn from the problems we’ve had this time around.

Lady Hallett: Last question from me: in my lifetime I’ve seen the growth of, use of, importance of SPADs.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Mm.

Lady Hallett: What is it like for a senior civil servant operating with SPADs? How does that relationship work?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: So I’d say, I’ve always said this, good SPADs are worth their weight in gold. I work with people like Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, who were special advisers to Gordon Brown. They were really helpful to the civil service, they trusted and respected the civil service, and they were good avenues and sounding boards for finding out what the Chancellor, whose time is very limited, would think about something and how you might manage, you know, trying to help them make the right decisions and the kind of information they’d need.

And I’ve also seen bad special advisers. They are disastrous. And they’re mostly disastrous for the minister that employed them. They end upbringing the minister down quite often.

So I would say that there is a lot to be said for restricting the number, and making sure that they have good training. You know, good SPADs are technically well trained. Ed Balls knew a lot about the economy, economic issues, that was really important. If you’ve got a bunch of SPADs who are trained in PR work and who only think about, particularly, pushing their individual minister and their status and how their minister got it right and everybody else got it wrong, they’re the pretty disastrous ones. They add very, very little. And quite often they’re working for a minister rather than the government. And therefore they’re damaging to prime ministers and Cabinet government in general.

Lady Hallett: Sorry, having said it’s my last question, just following on from that, when you have – so the SPADs are basically political advisers, and when you have a political party who obviously want to make sure that they get re-elected, how does the civil servant maintain their independence and objectivity and not get swept along with “This will play well with the electorate” or “That won’t play well”?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Well, you need to – so civil servants need to be political with a small P. You need to understand that when you emphasise one policy rather than another, it will have political implications, and the SPADs, it’s their job to come in and point out those political implications. It’s your job as a civil servant to say “Actually, we think policy A is best for the country as a whole”. Yeah, there might be some political problems and you might want to talk to your SPADs about how you mitigate those political problems, but our job as civil servants is to say what’s best for the country, and we will say, “In the long run, Prime Minister, (inaudible) this, that’s what’s best for you and best for your recollection chances”.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Lord Gus O’Donnell: Could I just say one other thing?

Lady Hallett: Yes.

Mr Keith: Lord O’Donnell, are you about to raise the issue of the global comparative study?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: I am.

Mr Keith: My Lady, there are no questions from the core participants, or at least none in relation to areas that we together haven’t covered, but this morning Lord O’Donnell mentioned a great interest that he has in the need for there to be, in light of this pandemic, a far more sophisticated global comparative study of the impact that the various government NPI decisions have had.

Is that the nub of it, Lord O’Donnell, that there is a need for us all to be a great deal better informed about how, comparatively, the various government decisions which governments around the world have made in the face of this pandemic in fact operated and to what level they had benefit?

Lord Gus O’Donnell: That’s exactly right. The point I make – the reason I make this point is that there will be lots of individual inquiries which will look at the impact for their country. If you want to try to find out, you know, for example, did lockdown work, did these other things, you need to start with: so what’s your ultimate objective? Let’s say it was excess deaths or whatever. But there’s going to be lots of countries around the world that did different things with the same virus and had different outcomes. By looking at that large sample of lots of different countries, we can infer, controlling for all the other factors like age distribution, ethnicity, you know, there’s lots of other things going on, but a really good study could look at all of those things and would, I think, be a massive advantage to the world.

And it’s really hard for any individual country to do that, so I just hope that somewhere along the way you can give a push to someone doing that.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Mr Keith: My Lady, that concludes the evidence of Lord O’Donnell.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Lord O’Donnell, extremely interesting. Thank you.

The Witness: Thank you, my Lady.

(The witness withdrew)

Mr Keith: My Lady, the next witness is Professor Sir Ian Diamond, the National Statistician and head of the Office for National Statistics.

Yes, please.