Jessica Bland; Mr Gareth A. Brinkworth; Dr Nikolai Kazantsev – Written evidence (NLR0098)
Crises increasingly arise from cascading failures across interconnected infrastructure, economic, digital, and social systems rather than from single hazards. That is, the answer to Question 1 for this inquiry is that not only are national and international risks clearly interconnected across sectors, but these are the type of crisis we need to be most concerned with.
The UK has made recent progress in analysis of national resilience to these complex risks through initiatives such as the analysis of interactions between acute and long term risks in the 2025 Chronic Risks Analysis and mapping of risks between sectors in the Critical National Infrastructure Knowledge Base.
However, this research needs to be part of an iterative process. In a complex environment, the value of these exercises is more in their frequent practice than in the results of a one-off assessment. There is not a forever answer to Question 2: what national risks could have the most severe impact in a reasonable worst-case scenario?
This response is focused on what needs to be in place to keep asking this question and responding to the changing answer. (This is where we see the barriers to implementing improvements to preparedness in Question 11.) We argue that analytic tools need to be complemented with:
a) institutional mechanisms that ensure simulations of risks and responses is used appropriately by decision-makers, including as a means to analyse emerging or new risks;
b) curriculum that codifies the skills that everyone needs to be more resilient to the range of crises that their communities could face, including deepening understanding of how to respond to the needs of vulnerable populations;
c) national production capability: reconfiguring supply chains for emergency products and services.
Progress on systemic risks
CSER’s 2021 evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Risk Assessment and Risk Planning[1] argued that the UK systematically under-weights extreme and systemic risks, particularly those arising from interactions between critical systems and cascading cross-domain failures.
CSER emphasised the importance of cross-cutting vulnerabilities, such as dependencies between infrastructure systems, supply chains, and societal factors including information integrity and social cohesion. Since then, research on catastrophic risks has continued to highlight the importance of systemic pinch points where failures could cascade across infrastructure and social systems,[2] and of developing strategies that can intercept or mitigate such cascades. Approaches that address these underlying vulnerabilities can reduce risk across multiple threat scenarios simultaneously.
Since then, the UK Government has taken important steps to strengthen analysis of these interdependencies. The Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) Knowledge Base maps vulnerabilities between CNI sectors not just within them.[3] The Chronic Risks Analysis recognises the importance of long term vulnerabilities including those that may become significantly more important in the future, and how they interact with other acute risks.[4] In general, the UK Government Resilience Action Plan signalled a welcome shift from a narrow focus on emergency response toward a broader conception of systemic and whole-of-society resilience.
The three authors of this response each highlights barriers to improving resilience that remain despite this progress.
a. Exploratory, immersive simulations to support decision-makers to consider a wider range of possible future crises
Jessica Bland, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), University of Cambridge
1 . There are different ways that simulation exercises can help improve resilience:
These tests are to practise roles in existing emergency plans, including statutory duties and command structures function. The UK has taken welcome steps to expand the volume and scope of such exercises, including the Autumn 2025 Tier 1 pandemic exercise Pegasus that aimed to challenge current arrangements for pandemic response.[5] Emergency services and health agencies have adopted tabletop exercises to rehearse responses to pandemics, terrorism, natural disasters and industrial accidents. These exercises aim at testing plans, responsibilities and inter‑agency coordination against a bounded crisis narrative. Although much of this is about rehearsing roles, some unexpected disruptions are usual additions. Pegasus used red-teaming[6] to add disruptions that tested participants’ decision-making under pressure.
2. Some tabletop exercises purposefully allow space for participants to develop a strategy rather than practice playing a particular role with clear directives. There are well-established practices in this area used to train diplomats and senior leaders to think on their feet; these can be described as “narrative wargames”.[7] Usually the format is that participants take actions based on information from a group of subject‑matter experts. Those actions are adjudicated, and the next round of the exercise is based on a future world where the actions have played out.
3. Intelligence Rising is a table-top game (developed at CSER) in this vein, examining global AI governance from the perspective of political and technology leaders in a range of countries. Some types of insight from this game only came through repeated plays. Certain dynamics came up frequently: firms' safety‑washing in public while cutting corners in private and anxious governments flirting with military options to head off rival deployments. As players and facilitators became more familiar, they found inventive ways to manage these dynamics, some of which pointed at new policy solutions such as regional collaborations or public-private institutions.[8]
4. In this case, the repetitive practice of a simulation led to exploration of a wider range of possible futures than those imagined by the games’ designers and adjudicators, including the range of possible challenges and responses to those challenges. This insight can be invaluable in preparing for crises in a highly uncertain world; it is not just testing existing plans, strategies or capabilities, but developing new understanding of key risks and improvising responses to them.
5. CSER has attempted to re-enact some of these outcomes from the long-running Intelligence Rising, seeing if it is possible to gain similar insights in a shorter time in response to new systemic risks. Working with policy and academic experts global technology governance, in summer 2024 the team developed a roleplay in four 2-hour sessions. They then spent 10 weeks developing this further, focusing on new risks from satellite infrastructure and changing geopolitics with a visiting researcher from the government and an expert games designer. A draft game was iterated through online sessions with experts and then played in person over a day with a mixture of experts and decision-makers. This exercise brought to the surface some of the potential consequences of US influence on UK satellite infrastructure for communication and imaging, and led to suggestions for new coalitions between countries that can supply space infrastructure or back-up systems.[9]
6. Through this experimentation, CSER has seen up close how simulations can be used to engage with uncertainty about consequences of interconnected risks. In a volatile world, this synthesis across expert areas, converted into exercises for decision-makers to engage with, is as important as the more usual simulation exercises.
7. We recommended that the Committee considers the value of a dedicated regular assessment of emerging systemic risk using simulation. This could be embedded in, for example, the UK Resilience Academy. This capacity should be clearly differentiated from other kinds of simulation exercises and what they can and cannot achieve.
b. Education as a foundation for national preparedness and resilience
Gareth A. Brinkworth, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge
8. This section considers the role of the school/education system and draws on Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded doctoral research at the University of Cambridge. The section addresses Questions 5, 10, 11, and 14 of the Committee’s call. The analysis proceeds from the position – supported by a substantial body of scholarship (e.g., Beck, 1992; Kemp, 2021; Nightingale et al., 2019) – that many global and existential-scale risks are at least partly socially produced, being rooted in institutional arrangements, political choices, and power structures rather than arising solely from technological or natural hazards. If this is broadly correct, then preparedness and resilience require both technical aptitude and the capacity of citizens to critically examine and, where necessary, seek to change the social conditions that generate risk. Indeed, the Cabinet Office's Chronic Risks Analysis has begun to incorporate the structural dimensions of risk – including geopolitical and economic drivers. However, while the analytical infrastructure is advancing, there has been no corresponding investment in developing citizens capable of engaging critically with the risks it reveals.
Question 5: How can a shared vision be developed to improve preparedness and resilience across the whole of society?
9. Formal schooling arguably provides the developmental foundation. It is, in most democracies, the only institution that systematically develops the capabilities of nearly every citizen during their formative years – and unlike Key Stage 5 and university, where disciplinary specialisation divides the curriculum, schools offer a common educational experience with corresponding scope for cultivating widely held norms, dispositions, and capabilities across the population. Key Stages 2–4 (ages 7–16) coincide with critical periods in the development of moral reasoning, civic identity, and the capacity for abstract thinking (Flanagan & Levine, 2010; Piaget, 1976; Torney-Purta et al., 2001), making this a key window. Indeed, schooling has previously been deployed in Britain and elsewhere precisely to cultivate shared dispositions in response to perceived national threats (as discussed below under Question 14).
Question 10: How should communication concerning preparedness and resilience, including the national curriculum, be targeted for particular groups, including young people aged 11-17, students, and vulnerable people?
10. However, we do not yet know the answer to this question with sufficient confidence. There is, to my knowledge, no established research programme (except my own doctoral research) which is dedicated to identifying the capabilities that young people aged 11–17 need to develop to help society mitigate the diversity of serious risks the UK faces. The existing academic literature offers some indicative findings, but these are fragmented across risk domains, largely theoretical rather than empirical, biased towards knowledge and reflection over action, and insufficiently engaged with the interdisciplinary risk scholarship essential to informing the educational response.
11. A scoping review of global academic literature across four risk domains – climate change, AI, nuclear conflict, and bio/nanotechnologies – conducted as part of this research programme identifies the following capabilities as most frequently prioritised for risk-related education (in descending order of frequency). These findings should be treated as indicative rather than definitive.
- Critical Thinking
- Ethical Understanding/Application
- Knowledge (Domain-specific)
- Problem-Solving/Decision-Making
- Citizenship (Including Global)
- Analysis/Evaluation
- Global/Historical/Contextual/Social Awareness
- Reflective Thinking
- Reasoning/Rationality
- Communication/Dialogue
- Collaboration
- Responsibility/Accountability
- Respect/Tolerance
- Environmental Orientation
- Empathy/Compassion
- Multiperspectivity
- Political/Legal/Civic Awareness
- Knowledge (Scientific)
- Social Justice/Human Rights Orientation
- Conflict Resolution
12. In practice, each risk domain emphases particular capabilities largely in isolation, with limited cross-domain coherence. For example, nuclear risk education tends to emphasise collaboration whereas AI education focuses narrowly on ethical reasoning and technical knowledge with almost no attention to collaboration. The result is that a pupil educated to navigate one category of threat may be unprepared for another – a significant limitation given that risks increasingly interact and compound.
13. The existing literature is overwhelmingly theoretical: of the studies articulating desirable capabilities, very few evaluate actual pedagogical interventions. There is therefore a significant gap between what the literature recommends and what we know actually works in practice.
14. The literature is dominated by cognitive and reflective capabilities while action-oriented capabilities are recommended less frequently. The evidence base, in other words, favours the formation of reflective and ethical knowers over effective actors. Given the social basis of many existential-scale threats, knowledge alone will likely not be sufficient: it is likely that genuine preparedness and resilience also require the capacity to act.
15. The literature displays a striking lack of urgency: only a minority of reviewed sources explicitly reference serious society-wide risks, and very few engaged with existential and global catastrophic risk scholarship. Much of the educational research concerned with these threats may therefore proceed without adequate understanding of the interdisciplinary risk scholarship essential to informing the educational response.
16. Current provision is arguably even more limited than the academic literature. The 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review found “minimal explicit inclusion of climate education in the national curriculum” and noted that references to AI were similarly limited, with teachers identifying the lack of curricular visibility as a barrier to effective provision (DfE, 2025).
17. A companion survey of pupils paints a complementary picture (Walshe et al., 2025). 29% of pupils felt unable to influence how their school was responding to climate change and sustainability – suggesting a gap between knowledge transmission and the development of genuine agency. Qualitative research corroborates this pattern: when asked what comes to mind about climate change, 88% of secondary pupils’ responses focused on content knowledge, while emotional responses were dominated by fear (59%) and expressions of powerlessness at being ignored by older, more powerful decision-makers (Rushton et al., 2023). The gap between knowledge and agency, in other words, is something that most young people appear to experience as a source of distress.
18. The survey also revealed significant equity dimensions: boys and pupils from more socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds were less likely both to feel knowledgeable and to express motivation to act (Walshe et al., 2025). If these disparities hold across other risk domains, they suggest that access to even limited relevant education is inequitably distributed – a concern that connects directly to the justice and distributional questions raised in Section A.
Question 11: What barriers have there been to implementing improvements to preparedness and resilience, such as inaction, inappropriate structures, inadequate funding, and short-term thinking?
19. The neglect of action-oriented capabilities in current curricula is structural. Relevant capabilities – such as civic agency, collaborative problem-solving, and critical engagement with institutional structures – do not align easily with the narrower conceptions of economic utility that have traditionally shaped both curriculum content and assessment priorities (Biesta, 2009; Nussbaum, 2012; Ball, 2003). Assessment is particularly consequential: in a system where teachers are time-pressed and accountability is tied to examination outcomes, what is not assessed is, in practice, rarely taught.
20. It is notable that even the most significant current reform initiative – the 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review (DfE, 2025) – while recommending welcome additions in areas such as democratic understanding and media literacy, frames its recommendations for climate and AI education primarily in terms of subject knowledge, digital literacy, and practical skills. Ideas of climate justice and action-oriented education are minimally expressed (Rushton & Walshe, 2025), and the capacity to critically examine the social and institutional structures that create risk is not addressed. An education system that teaches learners to understand society but not to change it may represent a structural barrier to genuine preparedness and resilience.
21. These curricular gaps are compounded by limitations in the research that might inform reform. Academic research in this area tends to be reactive rather than anticipatory (mirroring the implementation gap identified in Section A). For example, nuclear-focused educational literature only emerged during the Cold War and educational preparation for the societal implications of AI is only now beginning to emerge – leaving much of the population less prepared to understand or critically engage with the threats and opportunities that AI already presents. This reactive pattern is compounded by the considerable lead times inherent in educational reform: changes to the national curriculum take years to design, consult upon, and implement; teacher training and professional development require further investment before new content reaches classrooms effectively; and the capabilities developed in school-age learners may not translate into meaningful societal capacity for a generation. This is a longer lag than in most policy domains, and one that makes delay disproportionately costly.
Question 14: How were preparedness and resilience achieved in the past, such as during the Second World War, and what are the implications for the current environment?
22. Historically, risk-driven educational reform has tended to focus on producing technically skilled and ideologically aligned citizens capable of defending the nation-state and its prevailing order. Two cases illustrate this tendency.
23. In Industrial Revolution-era Britain, the ruling classes perceived the rapidly urbanising working class and its rising political consciousness as a threat to the existing social order (Thompson, 1963; Stedman Jones, 1984). The introduction of mass schooling was designed primarily to maintain social control: curricula emphasised religious instruction, moral discipline, and basic vocational skills sufficient to produce a compliant and proficient workforce, whilst actively limiting the development of capabilities that might enable social mobility or political agitation (Stone, 1969) and so constraining the formation of agentic and critically engaged citizens.
24. In the Cold War United States, the Soviet launch of Sputnik catalysed unprecedented federal investment in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, with schooling positioned as the ‘first line of defense [sic]’ (Rickover, 1960). The 1958 National Defense [sic] Education Act funded wholesale curricular reform to expand the STEM workforce and maintain technological superiority (Rudolph, 2002; Jolly, 2009). The prioritisation of technical competence came at the expense of critical civic education, arguably diminishing society's capacity to scrutinise power arrangements – particularly the growing interdependence of military and corporate interests (Wolin, 2008).
25. These two cases are illustrative rather than exhaustive – similar patterns are evident in Meiji-era Japan (1868–1912; Shibata, 2004; Tsurumi, 1974; Platt, 2005), Prussian educational modernisation (1807–1840s; Schleunes, 1979), and post-Tiananmen Chinese patriotic education (1991–; Zhao, 1998). Across these examples, educational responses to perceived threats may have offered short-term national protection, but consistently constrained citizens' capacity to critically examine the structures that generate risk.
26. The implications of this pattern for the current environment are twofold. First, the historical cases show educational reform conceived entirely in national terms – yet many of today's most serious risks transcend national borders and the governance capacity of any single state. A single nation's educational response cannot resolve dynamics such as great-power competition, but it can determine whether citizens are equipped to scrutinise the terms on which their own state participates in them.
27. Second, these historical approaches may not only have been insufficient – they may have been actively counterproductive. It is at least plausible – though the causal chains are long and largely untested – that the sustained production of technically skilled but critically passive citizens contributed to the entrenchment of the very systems from which several of today's most serious threats have emerged: unchecked industrialisation and its contribution to the current climate crisis (Jones et al., 2023), the military-industrial complex (Wolin, 2008), and the acceleration of ungoverned technologies (Kemp, 2021).
28. One broader lesson is that an education system can build preparedness and resilience while generating new risks at the same time. Avoiding this requires deliberate attention to the kind of citizens education produces, not only the knowledge and skills it transmits. If the risks are interconnected, transnational, and socially produced, there is a case for ensuring that educational approaches develop not only knowledge and technical skill, but also the civic agency, collaborative capacity, and critical autonomy to match. As the evidence presented under Questions 10 and 11 suggests, current curricula and reform initiatives show little sign of being designed with this distinction in mind.
29. On the basis of the evidence presented above, the Committee may wish to consider the following recommendations:
i. Fund a dedicated research programme to identify the capabilities young people need to navigate serious interconnected risks, and to test whether specific pedagogical approaches can develop them. No such programme currently exists, current research is fragmented across domains, and the evidence base is mostly theoretical.
ii. Audit the national curriculum's fitness for purpose in developing identified preparedness and resilience-relevant capabilities across Key Stages 2–4. We do not currently know the extent to which existing curriculum content and assessment frameworks support or inhibit the development of necessary capabilities. Without this baseline understanding, reform efforts cannot be effectively targeted.
iii. Require future curriculum and assessment reform to address action-oriented capabilities explicitly, not only subject knowledge and practical skills. The 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review is a welcome step but does not extend to the civic agency, collaborative capacity, and critical autonomy that genuine preparedness and resilience is likely to require.
iv. Design for equity. Available evidence suggests that access to even limited resilience-relevant education is unequally distributed, with disadvantaged pupils and boys less likely to feel knowledgeable or motivated to act. Any reform should treat equity as a design criterion, not an afterthought.
v. Act early. The lag between educational reform and societal impact is generational – far longer than in most policy domains. Early action on an imperfect evidence base may be preferable to delayed action on a perfect one.
c. National production capability as a key enabler for national preparedness and resilience
Dr Nikolai Kazantsev, Research Fellow at Clare Hall College and Institute for Manufacturing (IfM). Dissertation supervisor at MPhil in Global Risk and Resilience (CSER), University of Cambridge.
Q11. What barriers have there been to implementing improvements to preparedness and resilience, such as inaction, inappropriate structures, inadequate funding, and short-term thinking?
30. There is insufficient attention to the national production capability [10]needed in the emergence stage of the large impact risk, such as pandemics[11], when pre-existing stockpiles and commercial agreements can not suffice. National production capability includes expanding manufacturing capacities along supply chains of components for emergency production, and its dynamic matching with current demand levels[12]. “Our evidence adds to existing policy by specifying what a ‘national production capability’ entails in practice, and by proposing how it can be measured, governed and digitally supported.
31. The recent COVID‑19 outbreak exposed severe difficulties in deploying emergency production during demand shock caused by the pandemic (cf. COVID-19 Public Enquiry). In particular, production of N95/FFP3 masks, gowns, aprons, gloves, test kits and intensive care ventilators was constrained, and required a national effort in delivery.
32. ONS statistics indicate that manufacturing accounts for around 8% of UK gross value added (GVA)[13]. COVID-19 has proven that the UK is capable of increasing local manufacturing capacity, but that happens with a delay. During the last pandemic, it took seven months (up to September 2020) until the local manufacturing capacity for PPEs was established to meet 70% of forecasted demand from December onwards (for all but one product category, as raw materials for gloves are not available in the UK). The UK National Audit Office[14] found that ‘it took a long time for it to receive the large volumes of PPE ordered, particularly from new suppliers,’ and that this lag meant the new system could ‘barely satisfy’ local organisations for a substantial period.
33. The Department of Health and Social Care estimated it had 3.9 billion more PPE items than needed (around 10% of total purchased), with 1.5 billion items in storage estimated to have passed their expiry date[15]. The UK government procured a massive surplus of PPE by September 2020 which resulted in years of excess stock that has since been destroyed or written off, raising serious concerns about public money spent. Financial Times[16] reported that approximately £10 billion of the £13.6 billion spent on PPE was written off as unusable or wasted, and by mid‑2024, over 1.05 million pallets (23%) of surplus PPE had been recycled or incinerated at an original purchase cost of £8.64 billion, including £1.4 billion worth from a single contract alone, which is understood to be the most wasteful of the pandemic[17].
34. In 2025, Exercise Pegasus tested the national ability to respond without immediate access to therapeutics or vaccines, demonstrating the importance of taking a holistic approach - including by supporting supply chain resilience and UK manufacturing to ensure greater agility to respond to different scenarios in times of need[18].
35. National production capability is needed to deploy UK manufacturing capacities faster, and better follow the demand, i.e., produce close to what is demanded monthly. The current lack of clarity as to whether this capability is available for the UK now demands further research on how national resilience can be sustained in order to adjust supply to meet any future threats.
36. Following a methodology[19] to assess future pandemic risks that cascade deeper into the healthcare system in case of inaction, the production requirements for a number of emergency product designs can be identified.
37. In contrast to conventional products, emergency products are optimised for scale up, and can be produced by reconfiguring existing production lines with as much local sourcing as possible. These designs are highly modular, open, and contain only necessary functions to fit to the purpose of use during the disruption.
38. Putting any of the catastrophic risks from the National Risk Register into the center of the Government Office for Science’s ‘Futures Wheel’[20] identifies consequences of that as 1st, 2nd and 3rd order levels of emergency production needed when a virus emerges into society, Figure 1.
Figure 1. The cascade effect of no-action to emergent risk, with increasing demand for complex emergency production over time
39. Carrying out the same exercise with the other five risks with impact 5 (catastrophic), reveals that the same products are needed to respond to several risks, and hence national resilience requires to focus on emergency production of a limited number of products to respond (Table 1).
Table 1. The mapping of emergency production needed to respond to the risk marked with the impact 5 (source - National Risk Register 2025)
40. Building on the table, PPEs are the most likely emergency products for the planning of manufacturing capacity.
41. We recommend that the Committee considers the value of maintaining a national register of emergency products and services needed to mitigate risks with the potential catastrophic impact to UK society. This capability could be embedded in, for example, to the next version of the National Risk Register (2025), and guide preparedness of national production capability to make, assemble and deliver these products.
42. The current government approach frames resilience as a ‘whole‑of‑society’, long‑term endeavour requiring continuous assessment, targeted intervention and broader societal action[21]. The same logic should be applied to the industrial sector, and hence we should include industrial firms in supporting national production capability in relevant supply chains. This is also supported by the related Department of Health and Social Care policy paper[22], an outcome 3: the whole-system response is supported by appropriate PPE.
43. A number of firms from different industries can be induced in emergency consortia to support existing supply chains with resources and capacities in responding to deliver emergency products faster [23], [24], Figure 2.
44. The recent pandemic produced mixed examples of deploying new supply chains capacities for delivering emergency products. For example, Elite, Polystar, PFF, Lincoln companies have repurposed their factories from producing plastic bags to producing plastic aprons to respond to the COVID-19 demand shock for PPEs. At the same time, the same capacity for gloves could not be achieved due to the lack of the key material components, which became a bottleneck. The similar impact was seen in production of disinfecting liquid by distilleries due to the lack of packaging.
Figure 2. The vision of two supply chains supporting production of the bill of materials of selected emergency product
45. Capacity planning includes services as well, related to the application of emergency products. Module 1 and Module 2 of COVID-19 Public Enquiry both flag PPE and testing capacity as a central missing for the community testing in 2020, and a good candidate for a future emergency consortium across supply chains. The enquiry reveals that the government ‘missed the chance for testing and PPE to increase investment in testing capacity many weeks earlier than happened, and it should have been possible to learn there was not enough PPE protective clothing equipment for all healthcare workers in hospitals, care homes and assorted public services’. Continuing testing in the community would ‘buy time’ to deal with the crisis, giving an additional six to eight weeks to ensure health systems were up to capacity (also linked with the outcome 7: contact and outbreak management and community testing infrastructure in DHSC policy paper[25]. As such, a medium-term actions from 2027 to 2028 include ‘to further develop UK onshore vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics manufacturing capacity through investments in the life sciences sector’; and for 2030: develop capacity and systems for test production and processing to support more rapid roll-out of testing to the whole population.
46. Supply chain reconfiguration for emergency production and services could have been done faster, better and cheaper had the preparedness of national capabilities been put in place, particularly regarding regulation and standards[26].
47. Preparedness includes certification of emergency product design that can be produced locally and mapping production options for product components, assembly and delivery[27]. By doing so, we can assess the manufacturing and service capacity potentially needed to operationalise the national production capability. In this case, the government does not need to pay for any unused capacity upfront before the risk materialises.
48. As seen by the model analysing production of intensive healthcare ventilators[28], such preparedness (had they been enabled for ventilators before COVID-19 outbreak emerged) could have reduced emergency production lead time by 6 weeks and costs by 43%.
49. The principle underscored in the UK Covid-19 Inquiry reads that “proper preparation for a pandemic costs money… Money spent on systems for our protection is vital and will be vastly outweighed by the cost of not doing so”.. It is worth acknowledging that emergency preparedness competes poorly against immediate political and fiscal pressures because its benefits are realised mainly when a crisis occurs (Cabinet Office, 2025).
50. Success criteria for maintaining the national production capability on the top of the UK manufacturing base need to be widely acknowledged before any national risk, like pandemic, happens, not after (see Personal protective equipment (PPE) strategy: stabilise and build resilience). In particular, chapter 5.4 highlights an open concern about the best way to incentivise and sustain the achieved high level of UK PPE manufacture for the future. Chapter 5.5 mentioned the need to adapt tendering principles and criteria to deliver our overall approach to resilience, ensuring that the experience and learning gained from the crisis procurement processes are applied in the future, for example, the need for short lead times for delivery.
51. Governmental departments need to be explicitly rewarded for investments that reduce future emergency response costs and societal disruption, considering Value for Money (VfM) regarding risk recovery. In this case, success criteria for maintaining the national production capability should be added to the key performance indicators (KPIs) with long‑term risk reduction criteria, (e.g. weeks to stand up specified capacity; minimum on‑shore capacity for particular emergency products; maximum acceptable lag in switching production).
52. We recommend that the Committee considers the value of planning local manufacturing capacity for emergency production. Such planning should be treated as a part of national capability building rather than solely a pandemic preparedness planning. Local Resilience Forums would have significantly strengthened the assembly of some products requiring limited time for workforce training and certification.
53. Static mapping of possible suppliers per component is insufficient, since the production base changes over time with companies emerging and leaving the market.
54. Digitalisation and new digital technology provides additional opportunities for production capacity planning for national production capability and national resilience.
55. New services will support a ‘whole-of-society’ approach with distributed production facilities, with Health Security Agency (UK HSA) to consider where additional capacity for the selected emergency product can be added.
56. Options to work with “big tech” to use live location data and artificial intelligence (AI) for a more rapid, large-scale production capacity management during pandemics’ are to be explored in the implementation of the strategy [29] .
57. As confirmed in my earlier discussions with the main coordinator of emergency consortium to produce ventilators during COVID-19 (‘Ventilator Challenge UK’) Dick Elsy, CBE FREng, and reflected in the recent industrial paper, UK needs a national AI tool that will triage production options in the real time (The main reason is included in 53).
58. Creating such a tool supported will add to the national visibility over the production potentials, and sourcing of critical components, materials and workforce. It will increase awareness of real capacity for emergency production available now to fit to the range of demand levels, and support further preparedness in the supply chain area to better mitigate the risk in the future.The tool will automatically scan and maintain up‑to‑date information on firms’ capabilities, interpret unstructured data on production facilities, and support planners in identifying feasible emergency production partners under different scenarios.
59. For example, a model of the UK healthcare system[30] was developed and is being currently calibrated on the data from the COVID-19 Public Enquiry[31] to demonstrate how the tool will be helpful for national resilience.
60. While simulating the context of the ‘Disease X’ pandemic, expected by the World Economic Forum (features include the transmission rate of Omicron variant, and mortality rate of Wuhan variant), the model shows how the timely provision of the limited number of emergency products helps to better control the impact of emerging pandemics on society (measured by the numbers of infected, hospitalised, and dead), before vaccines are being rolled out.
61. After vaccination the simulation shows that combined optimization of PPE production, vaccination in 100 days, and dynamic ICU expansion could have reduced deaths by 67% and lockdown costs by 60% had preparedness been in place before COVID-19.
62. This type of model and digital tool could be institutionalised within government decision‑making, rather than remaining an academic exercise.
63. For example, the United States has repeatedly used the Defense Production Act to direct private firms to prioritise and expand domestic production of critical goods in emergencies, effectively creating a temporary on‑shore emergency production capability. The model can help to support capacity planning for such critical goods in advance.
64. We recommend that the Committee considers the value of creating a national AI tool to strengthen national resilience. This tool would triage the national production capacity for manufacturing the required number of emergency products, and could offer substantial support to the Department of Health and Social Care (2026) Pandemic Preparedness Strategy.
20 April 2026