This radical reform of PHE is welcome
For weeks this newspaper has called for Public Health England to be abolished, and today we are pleased to report a victory: PHE will be scrapped and merged with NHS Test and Trace into a new body called the National Institute for Health Protection – intended to protect against pandemics. The quango has been a complete disaster. It was PHE, in 2016, that organised a simulation of an outbreak to war game its responses; yet when Covid-19 hit, it admitted its testing system was only capable of handling five cases a week. Other countries increased testing immediately; the UK dropped it, and PHE was accused of turning away private offers of help.
More recently, we have discovered that PHE’s statistics for Covid deaths have been exaggerated, while local authorities have complained about the supply of information.
Public health used to be organised more locally; it has been centralised and spread too thin, one minute fighting coronavirus and the next mounting a campaign against obesity. Trapped between the roles of nanny, scientist and prophet, PHE underperformed in each task – yet got away with it because the public couldn’t work out who was accountable for which. In Britain, civil servants generally take decisions while ministers take responsibility, with the result that the electorate can sack the politicians yet end up with the same results regardless of who is in government.
Excuses are pitiful. It was said that Britain could not test on a grand scale because it did not have a diagnostics industry in place. Arguably, the whole point of PHE was to help ensure that it did.
It is welcome news, therefore, that Britain will finally get its own version of the German Robert Koch Institute. The moral of the PHE saga is that institutional atrophy is literally dangerous and it is never enough just to tinker; radical reform is needed. The Tories were elected to change things for good, and the pandemic has shown us where the greatest work needs to be done.