PHE: a catalogue of errors
“Britain has an immensely proud history of public health,” said Matthew Lesh in The Daily Telegraph. “We have led the way in reducing air pollution, vaccinating children to prevent killer diseases, and biomedical discoveries such as penicillin.” But Public Health England (PHE) has come to represent a “dark chapter” in that history. Established in 2013, PHE – an executive agency with operational independence – was meant to “provide disease control and protection, unleash innovation and support local efforts”. But this year, “rather than improving our health, it has contributed to a public health catastrophe”. Since the Covid crisis began, it has failed time and again: it developed a diagnostic test for the virus in January, but then waited until mid-February to roll it out to its dozen labs. NHS labs weren’t approved for testing until March; meanwhile, PHE rebuffed all offers of help from labs in universities and other sectors. It neglected to ensure local officials had sufficient stocks of personal protective equipment (PPE). And it issued woeful advice to care homes, to the public (on face masks) and to healthcare professionals (on PPE). It hasn’t even provided reliable death statistics.
This week, the Government finally decided to act, said Denis Campbell in The Guardian. On Tuesday, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced that PHE is to be scrapped, and replaced by a new body modelled on Germany’s respected Robert Koch Institute. Whereas PHE was established to tackle a range of threats to public health, including smoking and obesity, the new National Institute for Health Protection – headed by former TalkTalk boss Baroness (Dido) Harding – will focus solely on infectious diseases and other external threats.
“No one will shed any tears” about PHE’s demise, said The Times. But it is an “open question” how much responsibility it should bear for the UK’s “poor crisis response”. The agency’s CEO Duncan Selbie has said that “both pandemic planning and preparedness and testing were the responsibility of the Department of Health”, and that it moved in “lockstep” with government strategy. A public inquiry might also bring up the Cameron government’s decision to cut PHE’s budget by 40% – which ensured “it went into the crisis chronically underresourced”. If you ask me, PHE belongs in the knacker’s yard, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. But what about the minister responsible? Hancock accepted its decision to delay testing; and he didn’t counter its advice, in place until 13 March, that there was no risk to care homes. “Getting rid of bungling officials isn’t going to save us if those who govern us also fail.”