We already had a test and trace system... who knew?
LOCKDOWN induces some odd behaviours. Like counting the first 70-odd Downing Street Covid-19 press conferences.
So, victims, my first question: Which minister, Johnson excepted, was first to front one?
No, not Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. He substituted while Johnson was hospitalised but was actually eighth minister to feature.
Surely, then, Health Secretary Matt Hancock? Nope, though he and his permanent pink tie have clocked up more appearances than Johnson himself.
Struggling? Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak? Surely not Home Secretary Priti Patel, sole woman minister apparently capable of reading from a lectern.
Give up? It was Environment, FOOD and Rural Affairs Secretary, George Eustice. His brief includes the so called food supply chain and this was late March – the panic-buying, pasta-hoarding weekend.
Now the seriously tricky question. How many winning elections to serve as a plain local government councillor – not London Mayor – have all 12 featured Ministers fought between them? Maybe not a huge number? One!
One four-year term of elected local government experience between them all – served by then 24-year old Gavin Williamson. Now Education Secretary and one of the Cabinet’s small state-educated minority, he is naturally its authority on when English schools should reopen.
It’s easy to mock – really easy – but there are archive pictures of Williamson doing his thing as North Yorkshire County Council’s ‘Champion of Youth Issues’. Making him, I believe, alone among that TV-trusted Cabinet dozen to have even minimal first-hand insight into how local government operates in the policy field for which he is responsible.
The others can tell you lots, variously, about banking (Hancock), hedge fund management (Sunak), litigation (Raab), corporate finance (Alok Sharma), corporate law (Robert Jenrick), public relations (Eustice, Patel), journalism (Johnson, Michael Gove), marketing (Grant Shapps), Conservative Central Office (Patel).
But actually experiencing what they presumably aspired to do – campaigning, meeting voters, getting elected, representing people, learning about the provision and funding of public services, the whole government and public administration thing – evidently never struck them as career-relevant.
Which today means they know virtually nothing at first-hand about some of the vital, but less visible, stuff local governments do: emergency contingency planning, air quality monitoring, water testing, pest control – oh yes, and communicable disease investigation and outbreak control, or ‘nuisance-chasing’.
‘Nuisance’ was one of my mother’s favourite words, applied frequently to my sister and myself, but to almost any usually minor upset to her daily life routine.
Mask-wearing and disinfecting supermarket trolley handles would be a ‘nuisance’, but not the wretched pandemic itself.
Yet the etymology of ‘nuisance’ is the Latin ‘nocere’ – to harm – and its original 15th century meaning could quite conceivably be applied to Covid-19 and its capacity to inflict serious and even fatal harm.
The mid-19th century predecessor of today’s Director of Public Health in Birmingham, Dr Justin Varney, would therefore have boasted the title of Nuisance Inspector – his nuisance agenda including factory air pollution, small-pox and cholera outbreaks, and sanitation, with the first generation of public urinals. Nuisance Inspectors could not themselves transform towns and cities, but they played a huge part. As do their modern-day successors – Public or Environmental Health Inspectors. Those successors, however – the ones that have survived the past decade of local government funding and employment cuts – could and should have been doing even more.
The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health reckons there are some 5,000 Environmental Health Officers (EHOs) working in UK local councils. All have job descriptions including responsibilities like “investigating outbreaks of infectious diseases and preventing them spreading further”.
That’s what they do – testing, tracking, tracing and treating people with anything from salmonella to sexually transmitted diseases – in areas, moreover, with which they are totally familiar and have networks of contacts.
‘Shoe-leather epidemiology’, is the technical term – seriously. So presumably, as in other countries – South Korea, Singapore, Germany – they will have been reassigned from other work and spent their time contact tracing?
Rhetorical question! For our Government, the chimera of “world-beating” apps was far sexier than local anthropology.
From early March, contrary to World Health Organisation guidelines, the ‘science-led’ masterplan was to ‘delay’ the spread of Covid-19, then develop vital (but still not fully operational) smartphone apps.
This enabled a “pathetically inadequate” scale of contact-tracing to be undertaken centrally by staff newly recruited by Public Health England – the executive agency of Matt Hancock’s Health and Social Care Department, described just this past weekend, following the release of papers from the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), as “not fit for purpose”.
Lamentably insufficient and inexperienced staff doing a job crying out for the skills, local knowledge and community contacts of council EHOs, who instead were monitoring social distancing rules in pubs, clubs and restaurants.
There are almost always costs in ‘keeping it central’, but, as we have seen, for so many ministers, it must be instinctive. It’s all they and most of their civil servants know at first hand. The alternative would be funding and at least sharing data with pesky local authorities, thereby losing some of their precious, protective control.
Finally, on May 22, all other options exhausted, the Government followed Ireland, Scotland and Wales in allocating £300 million to English councils to play a leading role, starting immediately, in tracking and tracing people suspected of being at risk of Covid-19.
This time, tragically, the cost of blinkered, prejudiced, self-protective government has been paid in lives. Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham
They know virtually nothing at first-hand about some of the vital stuff local governments do