David Cameron blames ‘wrong risks’ for pandemic planning mistakes

Austerity was not responsible for the dire impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the UK, according to former prime minister David Cameron who said planning for an outbreak was dominated by the threat of flu.

Questioned as part of an inquiry into the government's handling of Covid on Monday, Mr Cameron dismissed the idea that cost-cutting was responsible for one of the world’s highest death tolls.

More than 175,000 deaths had been reported in the UK from the virus by July last year.

Mr Cameron claimed funding for the National Health Service had been protected during the cuts, which he said aimed to “safeguard and strengthen” the economy to enable it to “cope with whatever crisis hit us next”.

He also rejected the idea that the health budget was “inadequate” during his premiership, saying: “I don’t accept that, neither on a sort of big picture level or a small picture.

“I don’t think you can separate the decision and the necessity of getting the budget deficit down and having a reasonable debt to GDP down so you can cope with future crises.

“If you lose control of your debt and you lose control of your deficit and you lose control of your economy, you end up cutting the health service.”

He said other countries which did lose control of their economies were forced to make cuts to their public health, but that life expectancy in those countries had even risen.

“Greece and Spain had far more austerity, brutal cuts, and yet their life expectancy went up. So I don’t think it follows.”

But, he admitted, some mistakes were made in pandemic planning, which tended to focus on flu and other viruses with low transmissibility and high mortality.

“We set up a much more superior architecture for looking at risks, for judging risks and planning for risks.”

He added: “The problem was that when pandemics were looked at, there was too much emphasis on pandemic flu, and when other pandemics were looked at, including Ebola, including Mers, they tended to be high fatality but low infection."

He said not considering the potential impact of asymptomatic spread was another failure.

“The failing was not to ask more questions about asymptomatic transmission and what turned out to be the pandemic we had,” Mr Cameron, who served as premier from 2010 to 2016, said.

“So much time was spent on a pandemic influenza and that was seen as the greatest danger. But why wasn’t more time and more questions asked about what turned out to be the pandemic that we faced?”

Mr Cameron’s comments came after the British Medical Association called for him, along with former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, to be questioned about the "parlous state" of the NHS due to a decade of spending cuts.

BMA council chairman Professor Philip Banfield said ahead of Monday's hearing there was "no doubt that both staff and patients were put in harm's way" because of underfunding in the decade running up to Covid's arrival.

"I have seen first-hand the damage wrought by years of austerity and a failure to prioritise the nation's health. The UK was severely on the back foot when Covid took hold, and this proved disastrous - for the doctors I represent and the millions who suffered at the hands of the virus.

"It is therefore critical that Cameron, Osborne and Hunt are taken to task over the decisions they made that left us so unprepared, and to ensure the same mistakes are not repeated when we face our next health emergency," Prof Banfield said.

The BMA and the Trades Union Congress are among core participants in the inquiry, aimed at analysing the UK's level of preparedness for Covid.

Last week the inquiry heard that the UK had gone into the pandemic with "depleted" public services and widening health inequalities.

A report by public health experts Prof Sir Michael Marmot and Prof Clare Bambra said austerity policies had affected the health of the nation ahead of the crisis.