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Results of pandemic planning exercises kept secret from local councils

Local government chief says sharing results of national exercises would have ‘changed what we were doing’ during Covid

By Laura Oliver
Results of pandemic planning exercises kept secret from local councils
The vaccination centre in the home of Aston Villa football club in Birmingham threw open its doors in February 2021. Councils across the UK were invaluable in the pandemic response, running contact tracing, Covid testing and vaccination programmes | Jacob King – Pool/Getty Images
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The findings of crucial exercises to test planning and responses to pandemics four years before Covid were never shared with local councils, the UK’s Covid inquiry has heard.

In 2016, the UK government ran Exercise Alice, a “table-top” exercise to explore the consequences of the UK experiencing a MERS or SARS-type pandemic, and Exercise Cygnus, to test responses to a serious influenza pandemic.

But councils across the UK were not told about Exercise Alice happening, said Mark Lloyd, chief executive of the UK’s Local Government Association (LGA).

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