The government’s preparedness for the COVID-19 pandemic: lessons for government on risk management

The Cabinet Office should establish who leads and manages whole-system risks. Working with other departments, it should clarify and publicise the government’s risk appetite for whole-system emergencies as a basis for proportionate planning across government for these types of risk event.

The Cabinet Office should support government departments to take stock of how funding for risk management and national resilience is prioritised and managed. There should be deliberate consideration of the investment required to ensure that risk management and national resilience have an appropriate level of funding and resourcing compared with other national and departmental priorities, at both departmental and central government levels.

The Cabinet Office should work with government departments to ensure that their risk management, business continuity and emergency planning are more comprehensive, holistic and integrated. This involves ensuring that the government can rely on timely and good-quality data in the event of a major emergency; improving coordination and information sharing between the CCS and risk managers in departments; applying best practice in risk management, horizon scanning, stress-testing and business continuity and emergency planning; collaborating both internationally and with the private sector to identify and manage cross-economy risks and global interdependencies; and considering what broader aspects of national resilience need to be strengthened to ensure that the residual risk is in line with the government’s risk tolerance.

The Cabinet Office should strengthen oversight and assurance arrangements over preparations for system-wide emergencies. These should include publishing standards against which lead government departments, supporting departments and other public sector organisations can assess their level of preparedness for major emergencies, developing external assurance processes to assess, on a regular basis, whether there are adequate preparations in place that meet those standards and can be activated rapidly in the event of an emergency, and ensuring that all departments that are involved in the response to whole-system or catastrophic risks have coordinated plans that cover the whole range of societal and wider impacts.

The Cabinet Office and other government departments should ensure that lessons from simulation exercises are communicated and embedded across government. Simulation exercises are an effective way to spend resources to improve the management of low-probability high-impact risks, but lessons learned must be promptly disseminated and implemented to achieve value from undertaking these exercises.