Policy boss: 'Blue-light' approach needed in next emergency

Thursday 24 February 2022

The civil service did its very best during the pandemic but should do more to monitor and look after the welfare of staff in case of another emergency, the Government’s chief policymaker has said.

Paying tribute to the work of the public sector during the two years of Covid, Tom Walker, who leads the Government’s Strategic Planning, Policy and Performance department, said the civil service should copy the way the emergency services work if the island faced another pandemic.

Facing questions from the Public Accounts Committee on the performance of ‘S-Triple-P’ during the Covid crisis, Mr Walker said that, from the outset, policymakers had “thrown themselves into the task” but, in hindsight, more could have been done for their welfare and that of their families.

“They responded selflessly to the call to arms but as the pandemic continued, it became clear that the emergency was going to last longer than first thought," he said. "At that point, we sought to normalise arrangements and to ensure people had breaks and were not working quite as long. 

“After six to nine months, we started to rotate people. A number of policy officers who came across from other areas went back to them and we rotated; a bit like being on active duty.”

Pictured: Senior policymakers and statisticians answered questions of the Public Accounts Committee on Wednesday.

He added: “What I really learned from this is just how much the civil service has been on the front line of the emergency response.

“We need to think about that, in terms of how much we can do in the future, and to make improvements.

“In a normal emergency situation, the first responders would be the blue-light services. They are set up for an emergency that might last two or three days: they have a shift and rotating team system which is built into the way they work. 

“Also, they are used to doing debriefs afterwards to decompress.

“In the civil service, we didn’t have either of those set up. I think we have learned that as we have gone on. 

“If I was to have my time again, I would have probably have adopted a practice which was like a blue-light service in responding.” 

Pictured: The civil service can learn a lot from the response set-up of the emergency services, according to Mr Walker.

Mr Walker said that, if he had known then what he knew now, he would have approached the wellbeing of staff in a different way.

“I felt the civil service did lay down their own health and wellbeing for the island. If we did it again, we would learn from other emergency services, and insist that people take breaks.

“I think it was a long time before some people took a holiday but in hindsight, I don’t think that’s right. Had we known it was going to continue, we would have approached it differently, so people can stay fresh and lessen the impact on them and their families. It has been tough.”

Asked about other lessons learned, Mr Walker said he would have taken a different approach around some data management and sharing. 

He added that he would also retain elements of the pandemic response, including the “strategic flexibility and adaptability” that the civil service had adopted.

“Lessons learned” is likely to be a strong feature of any public inquiry into the pandemic response, which the Chief Minister has said he does not object to being held in the future.

Alex Khaldi, the Interim Director of Public Health Policy within SPPP, told Scrutiny that the Covid Response Team had started to embed rotation into its working practices by the time he arrived in September 2020 and over the demanding 18 months of the pandemic, which only began to relent at the end of last year, it had “become good at spotting signs of stress and fatigue”.

Reviewing that period, he said: “I have worked at the highest levels of policy health in the UK Government, and I have never seen anything quite like it in terms of pace and intensity.”