PRESS RELEASE – 19 JUNE 2023 – DAVID CAMERON DUE TO GIVE EVIDENCE AT 11AM AT THE UK COVID-19 PUBLIC INQUIRY

PRESS RELEASE – 19 JUNE 2023

DAVID CAMERON DUE TO GIVE EVIDENCE AT 11AM AT THE UK COVID-19 PUBLIC INQUIRY

Statement by lead solicitor Aamer Anwar on behalf of the Scottish Covid Bereaved.

This morning, David Cameron, former Prime Minister from 2010 to 2016, will be the first politician to give evidence at the UK COVID-19 at 11:00am this morning. We will issue a full statement once his examination has been completed.

One of Mr Cameron’s first acts in office as PM was to set up the National Security Council which he chaired given its importance. During the Ebola crisis of 2014, Mr Cameron spoke with Oliver Letwin to establish a specialist unit in the Cabinet Office as Ebola and Zika constituted major risks to national security. When Prime Minister, David Cameron claimed that as leader of the United Kingdom he was interested in the long-term planning to ensure that when a pandemic occurred, the UK could be fully prepared for it.

He himself had said the following – “One challenge of leadership is ensuring adequate time to look ahead to the long term and plan strategically, rather than constantly being embroiled in more immediate day-to-day issues. I was always mindful of this as Prime Minister, conscious of the importance of taking longer-term, strategic view. The structural reforms we made helped me do that.”

Indeed so proud was he his work on protecting the UK against a future pandemic he said the following –“This work was only possible because the Government made it a priority to stabilise Britain’s public finances. Indeed, economic resilience enabled us to deliver resilience towards future threats and hazards-we ‘fixed the roof while the sun was shining’…..I strongly believe the architecture across the Government was more ready to address serious domestic and international health crises when I left office than that which I inherited in 2010.”

But we know through expert evidence, a pandemic had been the government’s top non-malicious risk for years and it undertook a pandemic simulation exercise in 2016 known as Exercise Cygnus.

While it has made some use of this planning in responding to COVID-19, for example using the draft pandemic legislation and its contingency plans for dealing with the deceased at a local level, its preparations did not include the economic impact of a major disease outbreak. Exercise Cygnus may have been health-focused, but it is astounding that the government did not think about the potential impact on the economy, and that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (the Department) was not even aware of the exercise.

Despite the first reported case of coronavirus being confirmed by the Chief Medical Officer in England on 31 January 2020, the Treasury did not announce plans for significant funding to support businesses and individuals until the budget on 11 March, and it did not become clear to the Treasury until the following week that a furlough scheme would be needed.

We now know that over 227,000 people died from Covid-19 in the UK, we have heard evidence that the UK was not prepared for a pandemic, we have heard evidence that years of underfunding, cuts, and inequalities on impacted on the devastating scale of death, giving the UK the greatest amounts of Covid deaths in western Europe.

As lawyers acting on behalf of the ‘Scottish Covid Bereaved’ we hope to ask David Cameron if he agrees that as Prime Minister it would have been wise for him to plan for the economic impacts of the pandemic, rather than leaving it to the Government to scrabble around, making ad hoc decisions on furlough, business planning, for people as well as businesses who faced economic devastation.

It would have been wise for his government to plan for specific funding for the inevitable pandemic to ensure that essential medical items such as ventilators, PPE, hygiene control were readily available – not only for the people at risk of losing their lives, but also frontline workers risking their own lives to save lives.

For many of the Covid Bereaved we represent, this former Prime Minister is considered the architect of the Government’s failure to plan for the economic impact of a pandemic which led to catastrophic loss of lives when Covid-19 hit the United Kingdom, some four years after he stepped down.