Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health.
What will Rishi Sunak’s legacy be when he, in all likelihood, departs from office sometime in the next nine months? On his ‘five pledges’ progress hasn’t been great.
Though progress has been made on NHS waiting lists, they still stand at 7.6million. And though progress has been made on reducing illegal cross-channel immigration, legal migration totals have never been higher.
As for the economy, whilst inflation has halved, falling debt to GDP is entirely dependent on a fictional £20 billion worth of spending cuts in the future that will never materialise. The economy also entered a “mild” recession in 2023 that when adjusted for population growth was far more severe than headline figures suggest.
None of this will be turned around between now and a general election. But there is one thing Sunak could do that, though it would not redeem him in the eyes of voters, could do so in the eyes of history: pandemic preparedness.
Why? Four years on from Covid, there’s an inconvenient truth we all must face. Another pandemic is coming.
Though specific numbers can be argued, the assessed probability of a new “Disease X” – a pandemic on the same sort of scale as the Spanish Flu or Covid – emerging is thought to be up to 2 per cent annually. That estimate is only getting higher as the world becomes even more interconnected and environmental changes continue.
We all saw what the last pandemic did – the equivalent of 400-480 million jobs were lost globally in just three months, British debt to GDP climbed from 84 per cent to over 100 per cent (peaking at 108 per cent), inflation with the help of Russia went from 2 per cent in 2019 to 10 per cent in 2022, and again globally just the mortality cost is thought to amount to 30 trillion dollars (24 trillion pounds) the equivalent of 9 years of the UK’s GDP.
This is to say nothing of the 18.2 million who died of Covid, 169,000 of them in the UK.
The Prime Minister could and should make his legacy in preventing that from ever happening again. It will not win him the election, but it would be an act of foresight that would embody the greatest aspect of conservative tradition, the idea that society is ‘a contract between the living, the dead, and those that have yet to be born’.
To be clear, no matter what he did he would never be able to prevent all pandemics, or stop disease outbreaks. But Sunak could put in place the tools for future governments to be able to handle them.
In January 2020, when European states were evacuating their citizens from Wuhan, and the BBC and Sky had live-feeds of buses carrying evacuees decamping from RAF Brize Norton, where were those people aken? An NHS staff accommodation block. Why? The lack of permanent quarantine facilities in the UK.
Zero permanent facilities to quarantine humans. But at the time of Covid’s emergence the UK had four permanent facilities to quarantine birds. Today it has six facilities to quarantine birds and still, zero facilities to quarantine humans.
Temporary quarantine facilities were established under the Managed Quarantine Service yet this started a year too late (February 2021) and it has since emerged cost far more than it was planned to with £786 million being self-financed by tourists and travellers to half paid for by the Government.
Taking just the Government’s ultimate cost share of that contract, it would have been enough to cover the cost of building the specific quarantine facilities needed to accomodate the 214,000 that were ultimately quarantined.
Whilst this clearly would not have been possible mid-pandemic, having the foresight here would have saved lives by allowing for a mass scale foreign quarantine regime to be implemented immediately, and money both directly through not awarding the contract and more importantly through reduced economic harm.
Australia here can serve as a clear example – it largely replaced its own hotel system with purpose-built facilities that, whilst mothballed, remain in place, ready for future use. Great Britain is an island and it’s time it has the quarantine facilities it needs to act like one: at least as far as disease is concerned.
Outside of quarantine, the Government rightly invested heavily in stockpiling PPE (though much maligned now) and building surplus vaccine manufacturing capacity.
Yet post-pandemic ‘Treasury brain’ lead to the Government selling off its 200 million-pound 74,000 square-foot vaccine manufacturing facility. That the factory never opened its doors is more than fine. The only mistake here was eliminating what could have been a critical asset for a future pandemic.
PPE stockpiling is arguably the most egregious example here. Whilst Angela Rayner may describe it as an “eye watering waste of money”, it is anything but. It is the kind of comment that will age as those of the critics of Roselyne Bachelot, France’s former Health Minister, did.
Bachelot responded to Swine Flu by ordering 94 million vaccines and stockpiled 1.7 billion masks (which were eventually destroyed after she was replaced in another win for false economies) has since been redeemed by history with Le Monde describing her as the “Minister who was right too early”.
These last few months of Conservative government should be used to permanently embed the pandemic infrastructure that will be needed in the future.
A new body needs to be created, working with the reorganised UK Health Security Agency. It must be fully independent and financed through a means that false economies cannot touch – a ring-fenced endowment. The money for this endowment? It should be raised directly, and without central government involvement, by transferring to it the ownership of NHS car parks.
From just the revenue of NHS car-parking, some £300million a year, we can begin to create real pandemic security in the UK through financing mothballed vaccine and quarantine facilities, through financing permanent genomic sequencing infrastructure at airports, and through financing storage of personal preparedness equipment.
A just-In-case body without constant political intervention empowered to prepare would be a real legacy for Sunak’s government.
Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health.
What will Rishi Sunak’s legacy be when he, in all likelihood, departs from office sometime in the next nine months? On his ‘five pledges’ progress hasn’t been great.
Though progress has been made on NHS waiting lists, they still stand at 7.6million. And though progress has been made on reducing illegal cross-channel immigration, legal migration totals have never been higher.
As for the economy, whilst inflation has halved, falling debt to GDP is entirely dependent on a fictional £20 billion worth of spending cuts in the future that will never materialise. The economy also entered a “mild” recession in 2023 that when adjusted for population growth was far more severe than headline figures suggest.
None of this will be turned around between now and a general election. But there is one thing Sunak could do that, though it would not redeem him in the eyes of voters, could do so in the eyes of history: pandemic preparedness.
Why? Four years on from Covid, there’s an inconvenient truth we all must face. Another pandemic is coming.
Though specific numbers can be argued, the assessed probability of a new “Disease X” – a pandemic on the same sort of scale as the Spanish Flu or Covid – emerging is thought to be up to 2 per cent annually. That estimate is only getting higher as the world becomes even more interconnected and environmental changes continue.
We all saw what the last pandemic did – the equivalent of 400-480 million jobs were lost globally in just three months, British debt to GDP climbed from 84 per cent to over 100 per cent (peaking at 108 per cent), inflation with the help of Russia went from 2 per cent in 2019 to 10 per cent in 2022, and again globally just the mortality cost is thought to amount to 30 trillion dollars (24 trillion pounds) the equivalent of 9 years of the UK’s GDP.
This is to say nothing of the 18.2 million who died of Covid, 169,000 of them in the UK.
The Prime Minister could and should make his legacy in preventing that from ever happening again. It will not win him the election, but it would be an act of foresight that would embody the greatest aspect of conservative tradition, the idea that society is ‘a contract between the living, the dead, and those that have yet to be born’.
To be clear, no matter what he did he would never be able to prevent all pandemics, or stop disease outbreaks. But Sunak could put in place the tools for future governments to be able to handle them.
In January 2020, when European states were evacuating their citizens from Wuhan, and the BBC and Sky had live-feeds of buses carrying evacuees decamping from RAF Brize Norton, where were those people aken? An NHS staff accommodation block. Why? The lack of permanent quarantine facilities in the UK.
Zero permanent facilities to quarantine humans. But at the time of Covid’s emergence the UK had four permanent facilities to quarantine birds. Today it has six facilities to quarantine birds and still, zero facilities to quarantine humans.
Temporary quarantine facilities were established under the Managed Quarantine Service yet this started a year too late (February 2021) and it has since emerged cost far more than it was planned to with £786 million being self-financed by tourists and travellers to half paid for by the Government.
Taking just the Government’s ultimate cost share of that contract, it would have been enough to cover the cost of building the specific quarantine facilities needed to accomodate the 214,000 that were ultimately quarantined.
Whilst this clearly would not have been possible mid-pandemic, having the foresight here would have saved lives by allowing for a mass scale foreign quarantine regime to be implemented immediately, and money both directly through not awarding the contract and more importantly through reduced economic harm.
Australia here can serve as a clear example – it largely replaced its own hotel system with purpose-built facilities that, whilst mothballed, remain in place, ready for future use. Great Britain is an island and it’s time it has the quarantine facilities it needs to act like one: at least as far as disease is concerned.
Outside of quarantine, the Government rightly invested heavily in stockpiling PPE (though much maligned now) and building surplus vaccine manufacturing capacity.
Yet post-pandemic ‘Treasury brain’ lead to the Government selling off its 200 million-pound 74,000 square-foot vaccine manufacturing facility. That the factory never opened its doors is more than fine. The only mistake here was eliminating what could have been a critical asset for a future pandemic.
PPE stockpiling is arguably the most egregious example here. Whilst Angela Rayner may describe it as an “eye watering waste of money”, it is anything but. It is the kind of comment that will age as those of the critics of Roselyne Bachelot, France’s former Health Minister, did.
Bachelot responded to Swine Flu by ordering 94 million vaccines and stockpiled 1.7 billion masks (which were eventually destroyed after she was replaced in another win for false economies) has since been redeemed by history with Le Monde describing her as the “Minister who was right too early”.
These last few months of Conservative government should be used to permanently embed the pandemic infrastructure that will be needed in the future.
A new body needs to be created, working with the reorganised UK Health Security Agency. It must be fully independent and financed through a means that false economies cannot touch – a ring-fenced endowment. The money for this endowment? It should be raised directly, and without central government involvement, by transferring to it the ownership of NHS car parks.
From just the revenue of NHS car-parking, some £300million a year, we can begin to create real pandemic security in the UK through financing mothballed vaccine and quarantine facilities, through financing permanent genomic sequencing infrastructure at airports, and through financing storage of personal preparedness equipment.
A just-In-case body without constant political intervention empowered to prepare would be a real legacy for Sunak’s government.