Boris axed Cabinet pandemic team six months before Covid
BORIS Johnson scrapped a team of Cabinet ministers tasked with protecting the UK from a pandemic six months before coronavirus arrived, a Mail investigation has found.
The Government’s ‘anti-pandemic committee’, which included senior ministers Michael Gove, Matt Hancock and Gavin Williamson, was disbanded without discussing virus control plans.
The group, officially known as the Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingency Committee (THRCC), was supposed to ensure the UK was ready to cope with a pandemic.
But it was mothballed by former prime minister Theresa May on the advice of Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill so ministers and officials could focus on Brexit.
It was abolished by Mr Johnson days after he entered No10 last July as part of a vow to streamline Whitehall. Six months later Covid-19 arrived. Experts claim the Prime Minister’s delay in ordering a lockdown is partly why the UK’s death toll is so high. Last night, a former Cabinet minister who was a member of THRCC until it was axed said it could have ensured the Government reacted more quickly to coronavirus, adding: ‘Once the pandemic took hold in Italy... alarm bells would have been ringing.
‘We would have stress-tested the Government’s contingency plans for dealing with a pandemic.’
The disclosure that the committee was scrapped is embarrassing for Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who would be a member were it still running.
In July 2018 he was the security minister behind a Home Office report that insisted THRCC had a vital role in guarding against a pandemic.
Mr Wallace’s ‘biological security strategy’ said an influenza pandemic was ‘one of the most significant civil emergency risks facing the UK’, adding: ‘Such an outbreak could have the potential to cause hundreds of thousands of fatalities and cost the UK tens of billions of pounds.
‘Significant outbreaks of disease are among the highest impact risks faced by any society, threatening lives and
‘Alarm bells would have been ringing’