Responding to reports of the axing of Public Health England, the chief executive of NHS Providers, Chris Hopson, said:

“Whilst there have been significant successes, there have also been multiple problems with the UK’s response to COVID-19, including testing, the supply of PPE and the failure to properly protect care homes.

“Over the last few years, the NHS has rightly been developing a learning culture based on learning from individual or systemic mistakes and continuously driving improvement, rather than seeking to apportion blame. As a nation and a health service, we need to adopt a similar approach to learning the lessons of COVID-19.

Trust leaders would highlight five obvious issues in relation to public health in this country in recent years.

“That learning needs to be done calmly, carefully and collectively. A public inquiry is the obvious forum. But, if there are lessons to learn and changes that would improve our ability to deal with this pandemic, we should make them now.

“Trust leaders would highlight five obvious issues in relation to public health in this country in recent years.

“First, years of underfunding for Public Health England, and public health work more widely, has resulted in the UK not being properly prepared to tackle a pandemic such as COVID-19. For example, the local authority public health grant has been cut by 25% in real terms over the last five years.

“Second, Public Health England has always had a wide range of different roles including protecting the nation from public health hazards, preparing for and responding to public health emergencies, reducing health inequalities, screening and immunisation programmes and actions to address the wider determinants of health such as increasing exercise and reducing smoking and sugar in foods. There were many who argued that this scope could be too wide – COVID-19 looks to have proved them right. Ensuring public health functions are sufficiently resourced to tackle this broad spectrum of activity in the future is essential.

“Third, unlike other health bodies such as NHS England, NHS Improvement and the Care Quality Commission, Public Health England has always been an executive agency of the Department. This gives Ministers direct control of its activities. So whilst it might be convenient to seek to blame PHE’s leadership team, it is important that the Government reflect on its responsibilities as well.

“Fourth, the government’s strategy in the early stages of the pandemic in key areas of PHE’s responsibility such as testing, was flawed and confusing. Ministers, not PHE officials, were driving that strategy, directing the response and allocating resource accordingly.

“Fifth, the pandemic has shown that we have the balance between national and local level activity wrong here. Creating a new organisation provides a much needed opportunity to devolve more leadership, more control and more resource to local level.

“We will therefore want to see how well the Secretary of State’s detailed plans address these issues.”