Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what practical steps they are taking to embed lessons from the pandemic response to ensure future pandemic preparedness.

The United Kingdom has flexible and well-tested pandemic response capabilities. Learning the lessons from COVID-19, we are working with the Centre for Pandemic Preparedness in the UK Health Security Agency to ensure a flexible and capabilities-based approach to pandemic preparedness which will see emergency planners develop and maintain a generic suite of response capabilities across Government. This will enable an approach that can be flexibly deployed to meet the demands of any future pandemic and provide a whole-system response.

We cannot perfectly predict the characteristics of a new pandemic pathogen and therefore our strategic approach to pandemic preparedness constantly evolves in response to new scientific information, lessons learned from prior pandemics, responses to other infectious disease outbreaks and rigorous exercises to test our response mechanisms.

Public hearings for Module 1 of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry commenced on 13 June 2023 and will run for six weeks. The Department acknowledges there are valuable lessons to be learnt from COVID-19 to inform our preparedness for future pandemics.