Just take a look at Exercise Cygnus and its recommendations.

The plan isn't a party issue initially but how the plan is implemented certainly is. And, moreover, making sure each area of the response teams is properly ready is the responsibility of the Minister, no question.

Pandemics historically have killed as many people as the wars that have beset this world, yet the resources committed to pandemic prevention and response are a fraction of the resources we commit to security. This paper examines the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 by analysing the preparedness and responses of the UK, the USA, Germany, and South Korea. We will evidence that the UK and USA lacked the levels of preparedness that global health reports indicated, and that their responses were diametrically opposite of those of Germany and South Korea. We argue that decades of deregulation and privatization due to neoliberal, free-market economics by the UK and USA led to the Great Recession of 2008. This, in turn, led to economic collapse and austerity (increased neoliberalism), which negatively impacted investment in healthcare in the UK and USA. This resulted in very different levels of preparedness and responses by the four countries under the microscope.

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On Oct. 24, 2019—45 days before the world’s first suspected case of COVID-19 was announced—a new “scorecard” was published called the Global Health Security Index. The scorecard ranked countries on how prepared they were to tackle a serious outbreak, based on a range of measures, including how quickly a country was likely to respond and how well its health care system would “treat the sick and protect health workers.” The U.S. was ranked first out of 195 nations, and the U.K. was ranked second.

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Hold on. Surely a plan to deal with a Pandemic is not a party issue, neither would it have been written recently. We have known about pandemics for a long time.

You can't blame this government for having no blueprint to fall back on, as much as you would like to.

No government or opposition anywhere in the world had prepared properly for a pandemic.

Sure but some countries had been investing significantly more each year for decades into their health systems. It's also not about the actual amounts but also how that money is spent. From what I've seen much of the money going into the NHS has been siphoned off by consultants and senior management rather that improving the infrastructure of the NHS that touches those that needs its services.

I’m with you on this bit. It’s neglect going back years. I guess it’s the decision of spending money on something that *might* happen rather than something that *is* happening for any government.

Any large organisation will have a disaster plan in place for any large scale unforeseen events so the fact that there was not one for a global pandemic makes you wonder what else they would be completely ill prepared for.