Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department has taken to learn lessons from its response to the covid-19 pandemic for future pandemic preparedness.

The Department is committed to fully learning lessons from COVID-19, including through supporting the Inquiry process, to inform our preparedness for future pandemics. The Department continues to plan and prepare for a range of pandemic and emerging infectious disease scenarios, including those caused by respiratory (influenza and non-influenza), contact and vector-borne pathogens, building on lessons learned from exercises and incidents, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Department, working with other Government Departments, aims to have robust, flexible, and deployable capabilities that can be adapted to outbreaks of different scales and characteristics. Sector resilience should be systemic and enable infrastructure to respond well in the event of an emergency.

The UK Health Security Agency has established the Centre for Pandemic Preparedness (CPP) to ensure the United Kingdom’s future pandemic responses are more effective and efficient and to reduce the negative impacts of health threats. Part of the CPP’s role will be assessing successes and issues that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuring we learn lessons for future events