No formal response published by this government.

No formal response published by this government.

The government agrees that red teams are an effective means to scrutinise and challenge preparedness for and resilience to whole-system civil emergencies.

The Secretary of State’s Net Assessment and Challenge team within the Ministry of Defence brings together a cross-government red teaming community, which works to expand the use of red teams as a tool to challenge conventional thinking. The Cabinet Office also organises red teaming activities targeted at emerging threats and risks.

To go further, the Cabinet Office, working with the Government Office for Science, will strengthen central HMG red teaming capability, and clarify the expectations on departments to use red teams in their risk preparations. Specifically, this will form part of the next government-wide Capabilities Assessment.

Red teaming is an intrinsic part of the Crisis Management Excellence Programme, the government’s new crisis training curriculum for Civil Servants, including those working in the devolved governments. The purpose of this training is to ensure that participants are aware of the critical importance of red teaming, challenging assumptions, and avoiding cognitive biases and fallacies such as groupthink. Over the last six months, the Crisis Management Excellence Programme (CMEP) has delivered this free training to over 680 civil servants. The wider CMEP training offer - including training in crisis leadership for Director Generals and Permanent Secretaries, and training in crisis management basics for all civil servants - has already reached over 2,100 delegates and aims to expand capacity significantly over the next year.

External challenge is an established part of the government’s risk assessment process. With the move to a dynamic NSRA (described in the response to Recommendation 3), this expert challenge will be expanded and made permanent. The government will establish eight standing advisory groups of technical and scientific experts, each led by an independent chairperson. The programme is being designed to learn lessons from the Covid-19 Inquiry, for example allowing experts the freedom to advise by setting the agendas, and building in two-way feedback between experts and lead officials.

Red teams are one of many ways to bring expertise into decision-making on risk and resilience. The government also agrees with the Inquiry’s broader finding that the timely provision of expert advice is essential to prepare for and build resilience to whole-system civil emergencies.

UKHSA’s exercise and preparedness activities include expert challenge and red teams. The forthcoming Tier 1 pandemic exercise (described in the response to Recommendation 6) will use a variety of mechanisms, including a red team component, to provide this challenge to current arrangements for pandemic response.

Recognising the importance of scientific advice in planning for and responding to a crisis, the government will build on improvements already made to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), including the transparency of SAGE; its ways of working; and the recruitment, induction, diversity and support of SAGE experts. The Cabinet Office and the Government Office for Science will strengthen expectations and guidance for government departments to bring the best scientific evidence to bear on planning for emergencies before they happen. The Government Office for Science will also play an enhanced role in the development and co-ordination of pre-crisis science advice, including supporting departmental Chief Scientific Advisers and other relevant scientific leads to identify and deploy the relevant scientific evidence and expertise to support resilience planning.

Adjacent to these improvements to SAGE, a group of Chief Scientific Advisers from across government and the devolved governments was established in 2023 to ensure that strong and independent scientific evidence, capability and analysis underpins decision making on Biosecurity.

[IN PROGRESS] Red teaming integrated into 2025/26 Capabilities Assessment with autumn 2025 pilot. Broader red teaming capability expected autumn 2026. Crisis Management Excellence Programme training for ministers launched July 2025.