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The UK lacked the resources to scale up its response to Covid-19 and politicians need to make “explicit” decisions about how much money they devote to preparing for future pandemics, England’s chief medical officer told the government’s Covid inquiry on Thursday.

Sir Chris Whitty told the hearing that diagnostic ability was essential in any epidemic and the UK had responded well to the initial small number of cases. But he added that it had lacked the ability to accelerate its response in diagnostics and other areas such as personal protective equipment.

“It’s the scaling up which, in my view, was a weakness that was demonstrated during the early phase of Covid,” Whitty said.

He added that maintaining capacity between pandemics required investment and politicians would need to choose “between having an insurance against future events and, for example, investing in pressures in the NHS during winter. That is a choice and I think it has to be made explicit,” he said.

The chief medical officer also suggested that although expert committees such as the scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) had worked well during the epidemic, with “a reasonable balance between coherence and challenge”, there was a need for more “radical” thinking by scientific advisers between public health emergencies. 

He admitted that it would not have been feasible for scientific experts to have prepared for the possibility of a national lockdown without being instructed to do so by ministers. The mandatory quarantine that Britons were subject to at the height of the pandemic was “the very big new idea” that had emerged through the crisis and “a very radical thing to do”, he said.

“I would have thought it would be very surprising, without this being requested by a senior politician or similar, that a scientific committee would venture, between emergencies, into that kind of extraordinarily major social intervention with huge economic and social ramifications,” he said.

Whitty added that most overseas observers would judge the UK scientific response to have been “very strong by international standards” even though there were “other areas people might be more critical on”, he noted.

Sir Patrick Vallance said practical expertise in vaccine manufacturing would be important for future resilience © James Manning/PA Wire Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser until April 2023, followed Whitty into the witness box and backed up several of his colleague’s points. He said the government had to be clearer about the risks of spending money on things that might not be needed. 

He pointed out that while the Vaccines Task Force had been one of the success stories of the pandemic, when it was set up in the spring of 2020 he thought it “possible, even likely” that its mission would fail.

“If it had failed, the National Audit Office would have probably written a report saying what an outrageous waste of money it was,” he said.

Covid-19 also showed how important the country’s industrial base was for pandemic preparedness, Vallance said. “By 2020 UK vaccine manufacturing had almost gone . . . while we didn’t have a diagnostics industry on any scale, which made it very hard to scale up testing.” Germany, with a larger diagnostics sector, had been able to scale up much faster.

Vallance said practical expertise in vaccine manufacturing would be important for future resilience. “Don’t dream that you can have a vaccine factory sitting there waiting for a pandemic,” he said. “It’s going to be staffed by people who don’t know how to make vaccines.”

I can happily see the mander@mander.xyz community but cannot see communities such as biology@mander.xyz or natural_process_art@mander.xyz when using my feddut.uk account. Might be happening for communities on other instances but I haven't noticed if that's the case.

I have since made a lemmy.world account where I have no trouble doing so. Would love to stay on this instance long term - the local timeline is really great here (great going instance admins and mods)!

Just posting this to bring attention as I'm hoping this teething problem can be figured out at some point when the admins have some time to do so.

A Labour government would not only lift the de facto ban on onshore wind farms in England but also force councils to “proactively identify” areas suitable for renewable generation, leader Sir Keir Starmer has announced.

Asked what would happen if a community did not want new onshore wind or solar power plants, Starmer told the BBC on Monday: “We have to have a mechanism where we can move forward.

“Otherwise you get to a situation where everybody says ‘there ought to be more renewables . . . but I just don’t want it near me’. We have to have a situation where we can resolve that.”

The Labour leader is in Edinburgh on Monday to announce a package of green policies that his party would adopt if it wins the general election, which is expected next year.

Labour had previously intended to borrow £28bn a year to spend on the transition to a net zero emissions economy but earlier this month said the figure would not be reached until halfway through the next five-year parliament.

Starmer has also announced that a proposed state-owned energy company called Great British Energy will be based in Scotland under a Labour government.

The party leader will on Monday emphasise how renewable energy projects could produce revenue that local authorities could use to cut council tax or invest in improving public services.

He has promised to use the net zero strategy to deliver investment “in the UK’s industrial heartlands”, in line with similar debt-fuelled green plans from US president Joe Biden.

“The whole world knows that the future of power is bound up with renewables,” he told the Radio 4 Today programme. “Look at what’s happening in America with the Inflation Reduction Act — it’s like a magnet for business and for investment. We can’t sit this out.”

Labour has committed to a target of Britain producing all of its electricity from low-carbon sources — such as nuclear, solar and wind — by 2030, an ambition seen as over-optimistic by many senior industry figures.

“That [target] will put us ahead of the world in developed economies, that is a massive plan,” he said. “Nobody in the sector is saying it’s not ambitious enough, if anything they are saying ‘it’s just about doable Keir but we’d have to work hard . . . and you’re going to have to take some tough decisions in relation to planning and the grid.”

The Labour leadership has faced a backlash from the oil industry and some trade unions for its pledge, first announced in November 2022, to stop granting new licences for the development of North Sea oil and gasfields.

However, under the policy Labour would not cancel existing licences in place at the time of the election. “Oil and gas will be part of the mix for decades to come under existing licences or licences that are granted in the near future,” Starmer said.

Equinor, the Norwegian state-owned energy company, is expecting approval for its Rosebank oilfield within weeks.

David Whitehouse, chief executive of Offshore Energies, a body representing the UK offshore energies industry, told the BBC that the Labour plan would “create a cliff edge” for businesses, given that 180 of the North Sea’s active 283 fields are due to close by 2030.

But Philip Evans, a campaigner for Greenpeace, said the idea that ending new licences would “lead to an overnight shutdown of the industry” was merely a “scare story”.