James Shepherd-Barron
Latest posts by James Shepherd-Barron (see all)
- HOT FROGS and the monetization of money - 3rd March 2021
- CoVid Lessons Un-Learned - 29th January 2021
- HOLE IN THE WALL (Book Extract) - 18th January 2021
Tortoise Media held an ‘Inquiry’ into the UK government’s Covid response over three days between 19 November and 4 December. It made for fascinating listening. This was my submission:
I have managed to fold my observations – made with the benefit of over twenty-five years as a practicing disaster management consultant – into one overarching conclusion: The architecture, systems and capacities used by the UK government to manage large-scale emergencies and mitigate the risks of known hazards across the UK need to be urgently reconfigured.
To justify this conclusion, I offer four pieces of (anecdotal) evidence:
Exhibit A
On Day-1of your Inquiry, Professor David Alexander, a respected authority in the field of disaster risk reduction, opined that large-scale epidemics are a form of ‘natural disaster’ like any other and need to planned for and responded to as such. In my view, he was quite entitled to say this.
When in Sierra Leone as a humanitarian health adviser for The Department for International Development (DFID) at the beginning of the 2014 Ebola epidemic, I sent the following message:
“The Government of Sierra Leone is not alone in treating Ebola like any other cholera outbreak which it assumes can be contained by traditional measures of isolation, treatment, and community
outreach. As a result, they, the UN, and especially The World Health Organisation, are failing to see it for what it is: a full-scale natural disaster, every bit as deadly as the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan or Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. The epidemic is a slow-motion tsunami, the only difference being that the havoc being wrought is invisible and is taking place over months rather than minutes. All predictions point to it killing just as many people.”
The fact that diseases epidemics are registered as a separate category on the world’s EMDAT disaster database at the Centre for Research into the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in Belgium is a deliberate omission by the international health community as it tends to reinforce the notion that disease is another of those aspects of life over which we have no control; is something apart; and something beyond our lay comprehension that only health professionals can deal with. After what happened in West Africa through 204-2015 and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2018-2020, there can no longer be any excuse for this smug, medico-centric mindset not to take a more holistic approach by acknowledging what the professional disaster risk management community knew all along: That it’s not just the disease but fear of the disease which demands the full range of complementary professional disciplines from the fields of anthropology and psychology, politics and economics, risk communications and social mobilisation be taken as seriously as infection control, therapeutics and vaccination. By focusing on the epidemiology, HMG signally failed to do this coherently during the 2020 phase of the Covid pandemic.
Exhibit B
In the early phases of the West African Ebola crisis of 2014-2015, the Minister of Health in Sierra Leone just didn’t know what was required to mobilise resources at the sort of speed and scale used just months before for Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines or for the Haiti Earthquake in 2010. Those who could have woken her up to the enormity of what was going on in the World Health Organisation (WHO) failed to do so. As a result, the management architecture was incorrectly configured and inappropriately resourced. This meant that those in charge were reacting to events, when they could and should have been getting ahead of the disease. The national ‘Emergency Operations Centre’ (EOC) established to manage the extensive control measures needed consisted of “little more than two flip-charts, one without paper, and a pile of ink-less pens strewn across a dusty table. There was nothing to show that this small room, crowded with empty chairs, was an ‘operations centre’ for anything, let alone an unfolding national calamity.”
I advised the government to galvanise an international response and immediately move the EOC out of WHO’s offices and into the Office of National Security, a building set up with generators, satellite relays, TV monitors and computer sockets during the Cholera response two years earlier and now lying unused. This they eventually did, but not before the international response arrived some three months later, by which time many people had died unnecessarily .
On Day-3, Lord O’Donnell, a Cabinet Secretary to three Prime Ministers over six years and therefore a civil servant well placed to comment, suggested that “Cabinet (COBRA) is not the appropriate decision-making body in times of crisis” and that the National Security Council (NSC) would have been – or would be – a more appropriate place from which to coordinate the response. This followed another observation from Professor Alexander on Day-1 that there was “not one emergency planner among the 56 members of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)”, a state of affairs later described by Mr. Nazir Afzal, a former prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service and lead ‘counsel’ during the Tortoise Inquiry, as “tantamount to a criminal act.” And, as was pointed out at the time, he should know.
I believe both witnesses were half right and half wrong. Neither SAGE nor NSC have in place the systems or structures to manage what is, after all, a public health emergency of international concern. SAGE is what it says it is, a technical (scientific) advisory body; the NSC also does what it says on the box and is designed for the most part to meet security risks emanating from terror and cyber threats. What is needed is a separate managing entity led by a team of professional disaster risk managers supported by planners, information managers, risk communicators and the whole range of technical competencies demanded when responding at scale, only one of which is epidemiology.
Exhibit C
After the ‘Kashmir’ earthquake of 2005, national response efforts in Pakistan were led by the military because there was no alternative disaster management authority to coordinate response and recovery efforts. As a result, they leaned heavily on the UN ‘cluster coordination’ system. By the time of the devastating floods of 2012 seven years later, not only had such an authority been established at national level based on what they had learned from the ‘cluster’ approach but they had built their risk management capacities to such an extent that significant technical (non-financial) support from the UN and other external actors was neither requested nor required. So often and so unfairly reviled, the UK’s Department for International Development (Now FCDO) did much to make this happen (as they have done in Nepal and elsewhere).
Exhibit D
During the Typhoon Haiyan response in the Philippines in 2013-2014, five ‘hub’ emergency operations centres (EOCs) were established across the affected region, with the main one operating out of the sports stadium in Tacloban, the worst-hit city, and strategic oversight maintained in the capital, Manila, over one-and-a-half flying hours away. The reason hubs and sub-hubs are established is because international disaster risk management professionals have learned two things the hard way: Coordination costs, but poor coordination costs lives; and, to be effective, you must be fast, you must be adaptable and you must be as close to the affected people as possible.
To put these Exhibits into context, the following observations might be helpful:
- The UK is a signatory to the Sendai Framework for Global Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030) which calls for increased investment in disaster preparedness and response by national governments, with Action Point 2 specifically calling for “strengthened disaster risk governance.” With the risk of hydro-meteorological hazards seeming to be increasing in frequency and intensity across the UK, there appears to be little political appetite to elevate serial ‘emergency’ responses – mostly led by ‘blue-light’ police and/or fire & rescue services into one coherent ‘disaster risk management’ response. This is less surprising once it is understood that politicians the world over prefer to respond to disasters rather then prevent them. Not only does it make them look good in the eyes of their voters but they know that preventive measures are not seen as cost-effective by a weary and wary public despite much evidence of up to seven-fold returns on investment.
- In your justification for holding this Covid Inquiry, you argued that the case for a public inquiry into the UK’s response to the Covid pandemic was clear and urgent: “The longer it is delayed,” you said, “the more scope those responsible will have to varnish the record, and the more inclined a weary public may be to let them. A full inquiry and a fearless reckoning are essential – to learn lessons, save lives and for the sake of justice – and yet it isn’t happening.” In all Level-3 (large-scale) international disaster responses, the UN system is obliged to hold a formal ‘Peer Review’ three months into a crisis (and every six months thereafter) supplemented by a series of more frequent sector-specific ‘Real Time Evaluations’ the purpose of which is not to apportion blame or even to hold people or organisations to account, but to act as a ‘mirror for management’ which leads to course corrections as needed to make the response and recovery effort more efficient and effective. HMG (DFID, now FCDO) is the first to complain if these aren’t done, yet, during the Covid crisis, they have been unwilling to hold themselves to the same level of transparency and accountability.
- Finally, the conclusion drawn here has not been made with the benefit of hindsight; I discussed these and many other risk factors in my blog through March and April 2020 (see https://www.aidessentials.org/category/disaster-management/). They also reflect my personal, direct experience.
What HMG should be considering, and considering fast, is the establishment of a Denmark-style National Disaster Management Agency based on existing Civil Contingencies legislation with full-time resources – including Civil Defence resources – dedicated to managing disaster risk as well as emergencies. The skills and capacities exist in the UK in the military, the blue-light services, the private sector and academia … though, notably, not in the civil service .
End
James Shepherd-Barron is an independent disaster risk management consultant and adjunct professor at Fordham University’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs with over twenty-five years of hands-on experience managing international disasters around the world on behalf of governments, the UN and international humanitarian organisations.
He can be contacted on ‘[email protected]’