Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, with reference to paragraph 18 of the UK Government Resilience Action Plan, published 8 July 2025, how expert advisory panels challenge institutional groupthink within government risk assessments.

The Government has established eight standing advisory groups of technical and scientific experts, each led by an independent chairperson. The programme has been designed to learn lessons from the Covid-19 Inquiry, building in two-way feedback between experts and lead officials. Each panel is focused around different impact dimensions. The experts include professionals from industry, local level, charities and academia. The role of experts is to provide challenge by: supplementing, clarifying or refining the submitted information; identifying areas of uncertainty; helping to resolve inconsistencies in the scoring of impact; helping to improve communication of impact information; and identifying long term trends that provide context to the submitted risk.