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Despite its dire Covid-19 response, the UK government wants even more control

<span>Photograph: Reuters</span>
Photograph: Reuters

As the UK begins to pick through the economic, social and personal wreckage of our failed response to coronavirus, two competing visions for the future are emerging: centralise, control and privatise, or localise and disperse.

Not even one of the worst pandemic death tolls in the world is enough to encourage a little humility

Both Downing Street and health and social care secretary Matt Hancock, with an eye on the forthcoming public inquiry, have convinced themselves that the weaknesses exposed by our pandemic response were the result of too little power at the centre.

Hancock expresses frustration that when he pulled on the Public Health England lever there wasn’t much attached to it, while both he and Boris Johnson are railing against their lack of direct control over NHS England and its chief executive, Simon Stevens. Ever the shrewd political operator, Stevens has extracted huge amounts of additional funding from the Treasury while keeping a low media profile.

Related: Government's dithering risks unleashing a second Covid-19 wave in England | Richard Vize

But Hancock was the fundamental cause of the poor public health response. Ignoring desperate pleas from local government public health directors to be given a leading role in tackling the pandemic, particularly around testing and contact tracing, the government has instead used the private sector to build new infrastructure such as the testing centres and lighthouse labs from scratch, disconnected from councils and the NHS.

Even now – four months after lockdown began – councils are struggling to get real-time, detailed information on infected people in their area.

Hancock has learned precisely the wrong lesson. As the whispering campaign against Public Health England gathers pace, and as social care also comes under the gaze of the new breed of big state Conservatives, greater central control of public health infrastructure is a serious risk.

But for those who have taken a hard look at the data, the imperative for post-coronavirus restructuring points in the opposite direction. Evidence abounds for local solutions to both the symptoms of the pandemic and the underlying causes, such as poverty and poor housing.

Analysing the way different parts of the country will have different needs in the recovery, Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has endorsed the plea by the Local Government Association to break away from Whitehall control and allow more local decision-making based on local needs and knowledge.

Former permanent secretary Sir Richard Mottram, who used to lead the government’s crisis management machinery, has highlighted the need for governments to coordinate and lead rather than control every layer of the system.

Health experts such as Gabriel Scally, a member of Independent Sage, and former King’s Fund chief executive Chris Ham, are arguing for a locally based approach to be put at the heart of the continuing public health response to the pandemic, such as local contact tracing and stronger collaboration with community groups.

But the battle between central and local control will be fought on the ground of ideology, not the messy terrain of evidence about the effectiveness of public services. The culture of this government is to see distributed power with checks and balances as an obstruction to be attacked, not a system to be strengthened.

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Whether it be the independence of the intelligence and security committee, court rulings on the legality of government decisions or even accountability to parliament, the answer is to hoard power at the centre and suppress dissent. Not even one of the worst pandemic death tolls in the world is enough to encourage a little humility.