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Oliver Letwin, the Cabinet Office minister, told the Covid inquiry that it was a matter of “lasting regret” to him that he had not focused on the threat from a flu pandemic when he was in charge of resilience.

Yesterday David Cameron told the inquiry that his government has spent too much time preparing for a flu pandemic, and that as a result it had not prepared enough for another type of pandemic, like a coronavirus one.

My great regret about not having focused on pandemic flu, because I was told it was being well looked after, is not actually about pandemic flu.

But that it might have occurred to me if I had focused on that, that despite all the scientists had concluded, and no doubt they were right, that there was a very tiny probability by comparison with the probability of pandemic flu, of some other catastrophic pathogen …

Actually it is absolutely not an excuse for a minister, alas, because you can always ask the following question, you don’t have to accept the advice.

That is actually what I should’ve done and it’s a matter of lasting regret that I didn’t.

Letwin, the former Cabinet Office minister, said there should be a senior minister in government with sole responsibility for resilience, including preparing for pandemics. Letwin was responsible for resilience, but he had many other responsibilities too. He told the inquiry:

Actually there really ought to be a minister solely devoted to resilience at a senior level.

There hasn’t, as far as I’m aware and I think that is an error.

I came to that view very gradually but by the end of my time I was pretty convinced that we ought to have, and had I remained in situ I would’ve tried therefore to move to a model, where somebody took that position.

Letwin said the high turnover of ministers and civil servants responsible for resilience was a “disaster for the country”. He said the ministers and officials should receive training for dealing with civil emergencies, and he said there was a need for “a system that keeps both ministers and officials in post long enough so they can use the training”. He said:

I’m pretty certain that the entire structure of the civil service means that you can’t really make progress in a career without going through endless different jobs one after another, which I regard as a disaster for the country, particularly disastrous in the case of things that have very long lead times and where learning from experience is critical.

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