Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that the findings and recommendations of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry are incorporated into future pandemic planning and preparedness exercises.

Ensuring the United Kingdom is prepared for a future pandemic is a top priority for the Government, and we are embedding lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic within our pandemic preparedness. We aim to have flexible, adaptable, and scalable capabilities that can respond to any infectious disease or other threat, along all routes of transmission, rather than relying on plans for specific threats.

The Government is committed to learning the lessons from the United Kingdom COVID-19 Inquiry to protect and prepare us for the future. On 16 January 2025, the Government published its response to the inquiry’s module one report on resilience and preparedness. The Department has committed, as part of this response, to publishing a new pandemic preparedness strategy that will show how we are embedding our new approach to pandemic preparedness. The response is published online and is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-government-response-to-the-covid-19-inquiry-module-1-report/uk-government-response-to-the-covid-19-inquiry-module-1-report-html

In Autumn 2025, the Department and the UK Health Security Agency conducted Exercise PEGASUS, a national exercise on the UK’s preparedness for a pandemic, which concluded live participation on 5 November. It aimed to test our ability to respond to a pandemic, involving all regions and nations of the UK, as well as thousands of participants. The exercise has provided valuable experience which is being used to inform our strategy and planning.

Exercises like this are an essential and valuable tool to test our preparedness, capabilities, and response arrangements in the context of a pandemic. Future domestic and international exercises to test our preparedness and defences to biological threats, including pandemics, should factor in findings and lessons from a variety of sources to inform their design. This was an important part of the design of Exercise PEGASUS, the tier one pandemic preparedness exercise, where a variety of lessons, including from previous pandemic exercises such as Exercise CYGNUS, as well as recommendations from the COVID-19 Inquiry, were factored into the exercise’s design and planning.