Let’s face it, the coronavirus has been and will be a gargantuan challenge for every government around the world. Few were sufficiently prepared for it, even though every expert in infectious diseases knew that a pandemic was a matter of when not if.
I applaud more than I condemn the Government’s management of the crisis, but it is undeniable that some of its responses could and should have been more rapid and robust. They weren’t for several reasons, but the biggest one by far is that it wasn’t sufficiently surge-prepared. That is, it wasn’t ready to take the all-out measures necessary in the shortest timescales possible.
This is obvious in regard to equipment and testing. The Government is playing catch-up furiously, but it shouldn’t be doing that. Escalation now is no substitute for having been ready in the first place.
So what would have made it surge-ready? And what could make it ready for the next big disaster? The answer, I believe, is a Surge Unit in 10 Downing St.
For years now, there has been a “nudge unit” . Its formal title is Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) and its work nowadays stretches well beyond its partnership with the UK government. This team has had a significant influence on policy. Pension auto-enrolment is probably its most notable achievement, but it is also active in the present crisis, nudging people into, for example, using a Covid-19 text service for the NHS.
Nudging people into doing something that’s good for them, or good for wider society, is to be applauded. But the BIT is basically in the business of tweaking. It uses behavioural insights to identify the small behaviour changes that can have major policy benefits. Its applications seem particularly appropriate when the country is operating in steady-state mode.
But in times of great turbulence and crisis, when the country is hit by overwhelming floods or a pandemic, we need really effective responses even more than nudging and tweaking. We need big action fast. We need the government and the civil service to be able to shift from “normal” gear into surge gear, so that it can achieve what it needs to through robust and concerted action.
Those in the know might point out that the apparatus for emergency planning is already in place. The NHS is already subject to Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response (EPRR), which means that it is charged with being ready to deal with all manner of incidents and emergencies. The Civil Contingencies Act (2004) also obliges the other emergency services and local government to prepare for various types of emergencies. And up and down the country Local Resilience Forums are required to have plans in place for civil emergencies.
And then, in the midst of crisis situations, SAGE (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) is convened and COBR meetings held.
So why do we need a Surge Unit as well?
All the above are absolutely necessary, but not in themselves sufficient. What we need behind emergency planning outfits, war cabinets and bespoke groups of specialist advisers is a permanent unit tasked with ensuring that the whole machinery of government has a surge gear that it can operate in whenever it has to.
To put it rather more poetically, at the heart of government we need a pumping heart that continuously beats out the message that rapid and robust responses should be the go-to responses to almost any situation of consequence. If the response selected is other than this, then compelling justification for it needs to be forthcoming.
So the primary purpose of the Surge Unit would be to inculcate ‘surge consciousness’. That means getting individuals, teams and departments to normalise the belief that things can best be achieved through acting rapidly and robustly rather than through slow, gradual or piecemeal action.
This is the mindset necessary for being surge-prepared in practice. The ultimate goal is for every government department, every part of the civil service and every other relevant organisation to develop the wherewithal to escalate its operations and achieve goals in a fraction of the time it would normally take. In short, to be in a calm but constant state of surge-readiness.
The Surge Unit would also be charged with encouraging and even empowering all organisations – companies, the NHS, NGOs, Local Authorities and others – to have the thinking, the planning and the resources to be fully surge-prepared. And to be so for the things they want and choose to do, not just for circumstances beyond their control.
What can’t be emphasised enough is the importance of the right kind of thinking and the beliefs that support it. Without can-do beliefs and the habit of imagining surge options, emergency planning can be rigid, dutiful and driven by have-tos. The job of the Surge Unit would be to ensure that even novel and unexpected situations could be met with confident and effective responses. It would be down to specific departments to make actual surge-readiness decisions – what and how much of something to stockpile, for example. The Surge Unit’s job would be to see to it that taking them was part of its very DNA.
Fortunately, the coronavirus situation has provided us with some exemplary and inspirational models of this kind of thinking in practice. You don’t convert a massive events centre into a hospital with 4,000 beds, and do it in just nine days, unless you first imagine it as a realisable option. If you are an F1 team, you don’t join forces with other engineering outfits to develop and produce ventilators unless you have a mindset that understands how experiences in one field are transferrable to another.
This approach is evident elsewhere too: drinks makers are morphing at break-neck speed into producers of hand sanitisers, and clothing manufacturers are turning their hand to making PPE. The green shoots of surge-consciousness are already beginning to appear.
If a Surge Unit does its job, then what now seem like miracles will be meat and drink accomplishments.
Encouraging every organisation to develop a surge gear would need to be modelled with integrity – ie by each and every government department. This would require, for each department, an assessment of current capacity, clarity regarding role-shifting arrangements, flexibility in working practices to make gear-shifts possible (including not over-committing people to normal work activities) and identified reserve capacity – more people/resources to call on if necessary. But the fundamental first requirement would be instilling a new mindset – without that, everything else is just operational readjustment.
How much would a Surge Unit cost? Not a huge amount. What’s required is a power-house of a team, bigger but not necessarily massively bigger than the Behavioural Insights Team in its early days (seven members), but with the clout and credibility to punch above its weight. It might well develop a training arm, but the critical requirement is for its messages to go viral. In the aftermath of this crisis, those messages should seem closer to common sense (or the bleedin’ obvious) than left of field. If the Government has learned anything, then the financial cost of such a unit should seem a tiny price to pay for the outcomes it could bring.
It would need to be made up of people with demonstrable surge consciousness as well as in-depth experiences of surge activity in one field or another. They would need to come from diverse backgrounds – emergency medicine, flood management, retail management, economics, disaster relief and others. This range of perspectives should make it possible not only to fulfil the primary task of getting the government and every organisation in the UK to acquire a surge gear, but also to develop an inter-disciplinary approach that we might call Surge Dynamics. This would enable the Surge Unit to help every bit of our social fabric to better understand surge events and how to create and operate them.
In relation to disasters alone, this could be of immeasurable benefit. Why? Because every high-impact disaster event, like the coronavirus pandemic, is fundamentally surge-like in character and requires surge-like responses. Surge Dynamics would provide the common framework by which all disasters – as well as a huge range of other events – could be described, analysed and managed. I can’t even begin to identify here the enormous benefits that would come from this.
Click here to subscribe to our daily briefing – the best pieces from CapX and across the web.
CapX depends on the generosity of its readers. If you value what we do, please consider making a donation.
