Commonground
Senior Moderator
Published 25 March 2026
Executive summary
The UK government has learned crucial lessons from COVID-19. These have shaped our approach to preparing for future pandemics, while also ensuring that we are able to adapt to any future pandemic threats - not just preparing for the pandemic we just had.
This includes the need for an ethical, equitable and compassionate approach to planning and response that learns from how the COVID-19 pandemic, and the government’s response to the crisis, impacted people and communities.
In its response to the Covid-19 Inquiry module 1 report, the UK government committed to developing a new strategy for improving pandemic preparedness to better protect the population from future threats.
The UK government has a renewed mission to:
This is a strategy to rebuild our readiness for pandemics and prepare for different scenarios while learning from past pandemics. It is not, however, a plan for responding to a pandemic, and does not lay out operational detail and roles and responsibilities for how the UK government will respond.
The strategy builds on lessons from the UK Covid-19 Inquiry and initial findings from Exercise Pegasus (see ‘Introduction and principles’ for more details), the full report of which will be published by winter 2026.
Implementation of the strategy will continue to draw from:
continued: https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...ach-to-implementing-the-strategy-england-only
Executive summary
The UK government has learned crucial lessons from COVID-19. These have shaped our approach to preparing for future pandemics, while also ensuring that we are able to adapt to any future pandemic threats - not just preparing for the pandemic we just had.
This includes the need for an ethical, equitable and compassionate approach to planning and response that learns from how the COVID-19 pandemic, and the government’s response to the crisis, impacted people and communities.
In its response to the Covid-19 Inquiry module 1 report, the UK government committed to developing a new strategy for improving pandemic preparedness to better protect the population from future threats.
The UK government has a renewed mission to:
protect the health of the population, and help mitigate unequal and wider impacts on society, by progressively improving our pandemic preparedness capabilities between now and 2030.
This is a strategy to rebuild our readiness for pandemics and prepare for different scenarios while learning from past pandemics. It is not, however, a plan for responding to a pandemic, and does not lay out operational detail and roles and responsibilities for how the UK government will respond.
The strategy builds on lessons from the UK Covid-19 Inquiry and initial findings from Exercise Pegasus (see ‘Introduction and principles’ for more details), the full report of which will be published by winter 2026.
Implementation of the strategy will continue to draw from:
continued: https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...ach-to-implementing-the-strategy-england-only