Britain must prepare for harder lockdowns, says Matt Hancock
Health secretary at time Covid hit admits the Government's pandemic strategy was 'woefully inadequate'ByNeil Johnston and Tony Diver, WHITEHALL CORRESPONDENT
27 June 2023 • 10:19pm
www.telegraph.co.uk
Britain must prepare for wider, earlier and more stringent lockdowns in the face of future pandemics, Matt Hancock has claimed.
The former health secretary told the Covid Inquiry that failing to plan for restrictions on civil liberties was a flaw in the Government’s “woefully inadequate” pandemic strategy.
Mr Hancock, who was in office from 2018 to 2021, said that even before Covid hit in 2020 he thought it was “an oversight not to consider lockdowns” during a pandemic.
He made the claim despite mounting evidence that lockdown has caused more harm than the pandemic, from soaring child mental health referrals to a “cancer bomb” of patients whose treatment was delayed alongside a struggling economy.
David Davis criticised his former Cabinet colleague, saying that lockdowns were “ill-conceived and based on scientific guesswork, not science”.
He added: “Mr Hancock has not shown a smidgen of evidence to support his proposal that we should have locked down earlier, just as there was very little evidence when they chose to lock down in the first place.”
The long-awaited inquiry is now in the third week of its first phase, examining pandemic preparedness rather than decisions made during the national emergency.
Mr Hancock advocated for lockdown, saying that the UK was “completely wrong” by assuming a pandemic could not be stopped.
“It is central to what we must learn as a country that we’ve got to be ready to hit a pandemic hard,” he said. “We’ve got to be able to take action – lockdown action if necessary – that is wider, earlier, more stringent than feels comfortable at the time.”
Boris Johnson, as the then prime minister, announced the country’s first lockdown on March 23 2020, 54 days after the first case of the virus was detected in the UK.
