He told viewers: “If we don’t have an NHS that has confidence that the Government have their interests at the paramount, at the top of their agenda to protect them, there’s a risk that a proportion of them will say ‘enough is enough, why am I putting my life on the line?’
“That will be an absolute catastrophe for this country if we don’t have the NHS to rely on.
“I’m not sure why we don’t cut out the middlemen that are slowing down the bureaucracy and procurement of PPE and allow our hospitals to have their own budgets.
“They’ve got their own infectious control and microbiology consultants. Why don’t they procure their own materials locally and it would save a lot of the time that we need?”
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Former regional director of public health Professor John Ashton also spoke about the findings on the Government’s failure.
He told GMB: “We were in a bad shape, even before, in my view, the Prime Minister failed to chair COBRA at the beginning of February, when he would have been in a position to see where we were and get started on catching up with the PPE and the testing that we’ve suffered from ever since.”
Professor Ashton dismissed the defence that the UK was in a global competition to get limited resources when the need became clear.
He said: “There are other countries that have done much better than us: New Zealand, South Korea, Germany, to mention just three, there are others as well.”
Ms Atkins defended her party by claiming they had plans which have stood up during the crisis.
She said, for example: “The legislative framework that became the Corona Act.
“We have stood up new testing capacity, we have stood up new PPE capacity. We have done this on the basis of the science of this pandemic.
“I think we all accept that these are unprecedented times and that this virus is creating problems on a weekly basis. We are following the scientific advice.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t know the name of the exercise you were referring to, but I do know about the exercise itself. I am clear that we have followed the science on it.”