‘Next pandemic is around the corner,’ expert warns – but would lockdown ever happen again?
Exactly four years ago today, Boris Johnson announced the UK’s first COVID lockdown, ordering people to “stay at home”.
Working from home became our reality and people were separated from their loved ones, while frontline workers tackled a new and unknown virus.
With a public inquiry under way into how the UK approached COVID-19, many have criticised when and how we went in and out of lockdowns.
So if another pandemic struck, would we have to lock down again – and how would it be different?
Sky News asks scientists and disaster experts whether we would ever be told to stay at home again, what lockdown measures would involve – and whether the public would comply.
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Boris Johnson’s 23 March 2020 statement in full
When could a pandemic happen again?
COVID has often been referred to as a “once in a lifetime” event. But with more than six million estimated COVID deaths globally, the last comparable pandemic only emerged four decades ago.
HIV/AIDs was first identified in 1981 and has killed 36 million people worldwide. Prior to that, the Hong Kong flu pandemic in 1968 caused about a million deaths, and the Spanish flu of 1918 50 million.
Scientists warn global warming and deforestation are also making it increasingly likely that a viral or bacterial agent will “jump” from animals to humans and cause another pandemic.
“We’re creating a situation that is rife for outbreaks,” says Dr Nathalie MacDermott, clinical lecturer in infectious diseases at King’s College London.
“I know that COVID was very hard for people and we want to believe we can just go back to normal and I understand that entirely.
“But the next pandemic is around the corner – it might be two years, it could be 20 years, it could be longer – but we can’t afford to let our guards down. We need to stay vigilant, prepared and ready to make sacrifices again.”
Dr MacDermott explains that by cutting down trees in the Amazon and parts of Africa, animals and insects are moving closer to people’s homes.
And with rising temperatures, outbreaks of mosquito and tick-borne viruses such as dengue, chikungunya, and Crimean Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF) are happening in parts of Europe rarely seen before.
“As temperatures increase around the world, even the UK will become an area where it’s possible for those types of mosquitoes to live,” she says.
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Day 1: Life under lockdown
How long would lockdowns last?
While there were three lockdowns in England, each several months long, Professor Stephen Griffin, virologist at the University of Leeds, argues there should have “only ever been one”.
“Lockdown was an extreme reaction to a situation that had already got out of control,” he says.
But if there was investment in mitigations like air ventilation in public buildings and generic vaccines and antiviral drugs that could be adapted at speed, he argues, lockdowns would be shorter and less severe.
Dr MacDermott says that until the government, scientists and healthcare workers know more about an emerging virus and how it spreads, “a lockdown would be inevitable to some degree”.
Professor Adam Kucharski, co-director of the Centre for Epidemic Preparedness and Response at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that if you can’t contain severe infections and eliminate them completely – like Ebola in Africa and SARS-1 in East Asia – the only way to prevent a large disease epidemic is by heavily reducing transmission until a vaccine or treatment make the population less susceptible.
In the UK, it was eight months before the first COVID vaccine was administered and more than a year before it was rolled out more widely.
Pic: PA
Would we be banned from socialising – and would schools shut?
Professor Lucy Easthope, expert in mass fatalities and pandemics at the University of Bath, says she would want to see what she calls a “nuanced quarantine”.
“Lockdown is never a word I would have used – it’s only really associated with things like school shootings,” she says.
With regards to restrictions on socialising, she stresses how important “community and connection” are for disaster planning.
Outdoor dining pods at a restaurant in Cambridgeshire in 2020. Pic: PA
The 2016 UK flu plan says public gatherings are “an important indicator of normality” and that “there is little direct evidence of the benefits of cancelling such events”.
Authorities should immediately prioritise creating “large ventilated safe spaces” for children, pregnant women, and vulnerable people, she says.
This would involve places like cinemas, leisure centres, and town halls being repurposed as community centres.
She adds the importance of people having a “purpose”, so being able to meet people socially outside should be allowed as soon as the nature of the virus is clear.
Similarly, pubs, bars, cafes, and restaurants should be allowed to open outdoors as soon as possible, she says.
A school closed on 24 March 2020 in Knutsford, Cheshire. Pic: PA
While the flu plan does advise schools in infected areas to shut, contingency measures have been suggested for temporary marquees to host lessons – or just spaces for children to go.
“Lots of children don’t have gardens, so organised ways of getting them outside is important,” Professor Easthope says.
“For the marquees for education, you might expect to see three or four schools consolidated together.”
Another ‘pingdemic’?
The government spent billions on its test and trace system, which included testing centres, the coronavirus helpline, manual contact tracing by what was then Public Health England, and the NHS COVID app.
While rapid tests are important to stop people from spreading the virus further, and the app “had a lot of promise”, more innovative digital contact tracing may be required to avoid relying on another lockdown, Professor Kucharski says.
“The pingdemic was to some extent the NHS app doing what it was designed to do,” he says.
“But with the digital contact tracing infrastructure that some Asian countries had, you can limit disruption to those people at higher risk in a particular outbreak rather than reverting to blanket measures.”
He cautions that it would require “hard conversations” around privacy, but options include using smartphone location and debit card transactions to link people to identified cases.
In some countries, leaving quarantine would see people’s phones automatically notify tracers of potential further spread.
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March 2020: Sky News speaks to people about life under lockdown in Sheffield
Would the public comply?
When public health experts gave evidence to the COVID inquiry last year, they said they were wrong to assume the public would soon tire of a lockdown and suffer “behavioural fatigue”.
Social psychologist and crowd behaviour expert Chris Cocking says it was a lack of trust in government that caused compliance rates to fall – not simply getting “tired” of restrictions.
“The overall message should be positive,” the principal lecturer at the University of Brighton says. “Because if another situation arose, where it became necessary, people would be likely to comply.”
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He says if another lockdown was needed, the current Tory government would either have to minimise scandals over their own rule-breaking – or change hands completely to keep the public on board.
He adds: “If we had a new government, people would be far more likely to have faith in them because they would be less likely to say, ‘it’s the same bunch as before – why should we do it again?’
“And if they put more effort into not having situations like ‘Partygate’ or Dominic Cummings driving to Barnard Castle, they could appeal to the public’s shared sense of identity, and it would be possible for compliance rates to remain relatively high.”
COVID national memorial wall in London. Pic: PA
From COVID fines to arrests made during Black Lives Matter protests and the Sarah Everard vigil, Professor Easthope describes lockdown legislation as “definitely bad” and “cruelly applied”.
Dr Cocking argues lockdown laws are largely irrelevant to people’s decision to adhere to restrictions or not.
“It’s not the laws in place, it’s whether people psychologically identify with the need to comply,” he says.
And for people who don’t, engaging with each reason individually is important to avoid creating a mass movement of “lockdown sceptics”.
“People might feel unable to comply with restrictions for lots of different reasons. But it’s a real mistake to lump them all together because you then identify them all as part of the same group, which further alienates them from the authorities,” Dr Cocking adds.
Would we be well enough prepared?
Four years before COVID, the UK had carried out secret pandemic preparedness exercises for both flu and coronavirus outbreaks.
A detailed report on the flu exercise was compiled, but public health officials have told the COVID inquiry that the coronavirus drill wasn’t acted on.
A flu pandemic plan was compiled after Exercise Cygnus in 2016. Pic: Cabinet Office
According to Professors Kucharski and Easthope, the more extensive flu plan could be easily adapted.
“The separation of a flu plan from a coronavirus plan is nonsense,” Professor Kucharski says.
“The characteristics of COVID were a lot like the sort of infection in a flu pandemic. It should have been a wider discussion about what the acceptable outcome was from the horrendous trade-offs we were going to have to make.”
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How widespread is COVID now?
Professor Easthope says in the late 2010s, she and other emergency planners identified holes in infrastructure that meant the UK “wasn’t ready for even a relatively manageable pandemic” in terms of health and social care. She also says stockpiles of PPE “failed” in 2017.
But she says the internet’s capacity to cope with so many processes moving online is both “enabling and unifying”.
“We just didn’t know how well it would perform, but in the end, it was one of the reasons we didn’t fall apart completely,” she says.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson told Sky News: “Throughout the pandemic, the government acted to save lives and livelihoods, prevent the NHS being overwhelmed and deliver a world-leading vaccine rollout which protected millions of lives across the nation.
“We have always said there are lessons to be learnt from the pandemic and we are committed to learning from the COVID-19 inquiry’s findings which will play a key role in informing the government’s planning and preparations for the future. We will consider all recommendations made to the department in full.”
Environment Agency bosses have been accused of “failing” to tell a cross-party committee of peers about three large-scale illegal waste sites – including one that was recently exposed by Sky News.
Our investigation into waste crime in Wigan heard from residents who repeatedly complained to the Environment Agency that 20 to 30 lorries a day drove down their street last winter and dumped industrial amounts of waste.
The rubbish now sits at a staggering 25,000 tonnes. It burnt for nine days in July, and has seen local homes infested with rats and flies.
Since then, a similarly sized site in Kidlington near the River Cherwell in Oxfordshire sparked national outrage. One man has been arrested in connection with the dumping.
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‘Epidemic’ of waste crime in Britain
Despite the scale of these two locations – which were well known to the Environment Agency – it neglected to name them when asked by the Lord’s Environment Committee’s inquiry into waste crime how many “significant” sites there were around the country.
Phil Davies and Steve Molyneux of the Environment Agency gave evidence on 17 September.
Just six sites were cited, but three more have been exposed in the past few weeks alone. These are Wigan, Kidlington and a mound of dumped waste in Wadborough.
Now, the Lords are worried there are more environmentally destructive locations the public aren’t aware of.
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In a letter to the EA’s chair Alan Lovell and chief executive Philip Duffy, Baroness Sheehan, chair of the Environment and Climate Change Committee, said: “We are increasingly concerned that there may be other sites of a similarly large and environmentally damaging scale.”
She asked how much progress has been made to remove waste from the various sites, why restriction notices in places like Wigan weren’t served sooner – and for a full list of other sites of a similar size.
Baroness Sheehan also expressed her “disappointment” that these three new locations “were not deemed necessary to bring to the committee’s attention”, though she thanked journalists for “bringing these sites to the public attention”.
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UK’s ‘biggest ecological disaster’
Her original report saw the Lords call for an independent “root and branch” inquiry into how waste crime is tackled. She said the crime, which costs the UK £1bn every year, has been “critically under-prioritised”.
Sky News has been investigating the scourge of waste crime all year, exposing how criminal gangs involved in drugs, weapons and people trafficking can make “millions” from illegally dumping waste.
In the summer, we tracked down a group of suspected organised fly-tippers who waved wads of cash on TikTok after dumping waste in the countryside.
It’s so lucrative, it was dubbed the “new narcotics” by a former head of the Environment Agency.
A new long-awaited child poverty strategy is promising to lift half a million children out of poverty by the end of this parliament – but critics have branded it unambitious.
The headline announcement in the government’s plan is the pledge to lift the two-child benefit cap, announced in Rachel Reeves’s budget last week.
It also includes:
• Providing upfront childcare support for parents on universal credit returning to work
• An £8m fund to end the placement of families in bed and breakfasts beyond a six-week limit
• Reforms to cut the cost of baby formula
• A new legal duty on councils to notify schools, health visitors, and GPs when a child is placed in temporary accommodation
Many of the measures have previously been announced.
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Two-child cap ‘a real victory for the left’
The government also pointed to its plan in the budget to cut energy bills by £150 a year, and its previously promised £950m boost to a local authority housing fund, which it says will deliver 5,000 high-quality homes for better temporary accommodation.
Downing Street said the strategy would lift 550,000 children out of poverty by 2030, saying that would be the biggest reduction in a single parliament since records began.
But charities had been hoping for a 10-year strategy and argue the plan lacks ambition.
A record 4.5 million children (about 31%) are living in poverty in the UK – 900,000 more since 2010/11, according to government figures.
Phillip Anderson, the Strategic Director for External Affairs at the National Children’s Bureau (NCB), told Sky News: “Abolishing the two-child limit is a hell of a centre piece, but beyond that it’s mainly a summary of previously announced policies and commitments.
“The really big thing for me is it misses the opportunity to talk about the longer term. It was supposed to be a 10-year strategy, we wanted to see real ambition and ideally legally binding targets for reducing poverty.
“The government itself says there will still be around four million children living in poverty after these measures and the strategy has very little to say to them.”
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‘A budget for benefits street’
‘Budget for benefits street’ row
The biggest measure in the strategy is the plan to lift the two-child benefit cap from April. This is estimated to lift 450,000 children out of poverty by 2030, at a cost of £3bn.
The government has long been under pressure from backbench Labour MPs to scrap the cap, with most experts arguing that it is the quickest, most cost-effective way to drive-down poverty this parliament.
The cap, introduced by Conservative chancellor George Osborne in 2017, means parents can only claim universal credit or tax credits for their first two children. It meant the average affected household losing £4,300 per year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated in 2024.
The government argues that a failure to tackle child poverty holds back the economy, and young people at school, cutting their employment and earning prospects in later life.
However, the Conservatives argue parents on benefits should have to make the same financial choices about children as everyone else.
Shadow chancellor Mel Stride said: “Work is the best way out poverty but since this government took office, unemployment has risen every single month and this budget for Benefits Street will only make the situation worse. “
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OBR leak: This has happened before
‘Bring back Sure Start’
Lord Bird, a crossbench peer who founded the Big Issue and grew up in poverty, said while he supported the lifting of the cap there needed to be “more joined up thinking” across government for a longer-term strategy.
He has been pushing for the creation of a government ministry of “poverty prevention and cure”, and for legally binding targets on child poverty.
“You have to be able to measure yourself, you can’t have the government marking its own homework,” he told Sky News.
Lord Bird also said he was a “great believer” in resurrecting Sure Start centres and expanding them beyond early years.
The New Labour programme offered support services for pre-school children and their parents and is widely seen to have improved health and educational outcomes. By its peak in 2009-2010 there were 3,600 centres – the majority of which closed following cuts by the subsequent Conservative government.
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Lord Bird on the ‘great distraction’ from child poverty
PM to meet families
Sir Keir Starmer’s government have since announced 1,000 Best Start Family Hubs – but many Labour MPs feel this announcement went under the radar and ministers missed a trick in not calling them “Sure Starts” as it is a name people are familiar with.
The prime minister is expected to meet families and children in Wales on Friday, alongside the Welsh First Minister, to make the case for his strategy and meet those he hopes will benefit from it.
Several other charities have urged ministers to go further. Both Crisis and Shelter called for the government to unfreeze housing benefit and build more social rent homes, while the Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, said that “if we are to end child poverty – not just reduce it” measures like free bus travel for school-age children would be needed.
The strategy comes after the government set up a child poverty taskforce in July 2024, which was initially due to report back in May. The taskforce’s findings have not yet been published – only the government’s response.
Sir Keir said: “Too many children are growing up in poverty, held back from getting on in life, and too many families are struggling without the basics: a secure home, warm meals and the support they need to make ends meet.
“I will not stand by and watch that happen, because the cost of doing nothing is too high for children, for families and for Britain.”
Nigel Farage has launched a tirade against the BBC after he was asked about claims he used racist and antisemitic language when he was at school, which he denied.
The Reform UK leader accused the broadcaster of “double standards”, pointing to its past television shows when he claimed the BBC “were very happy to use blackface”.
The outburst comes as he faces continued pressure over allegations he made racist and antisemitic comments while a pupil at top private school Dulwich College nearly 50 years ago.
Mr Farage was asked by the BBC about an interview his deputy, Richard Tice, gave on Thursday, in which he claimed those accusing his boss of racism were engaging in “made-up twaddle”.
The Reform leader said the framing of the question by the BBC interviewer had been “despicable”.
“I think to frame a question around the leader of Reform’s ‘relationship with Hitler’, which is how she framed it, was despicable, disgusting beyond belief,” he said.
“The double standards and hypocrisy of the BBC are absolutely astonishing.
“At the time I was alleged to have made these remarks, one of your most popular weekly shows was ‘The Black and White Minstrels’. The BBC were very happy to use blackface.”
He added: “I cannot put up with the double standards at the BBC about what I’m alleged to have said 49 years ago, and what you were putting out on mainstream content.
“So I want an apology from the BBC for virtually everything you did during the 1970s and 80s.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. Pic: PA
Turning to the substance of the allegations, Mr Farage read out a letter that he said was from someone who he went to school with.
He quotes the unnamed Jewish pupil as saying: “While there was plenty of macho, tongue-in-cheek schoolboy banter, it was humour. And yes, sometimes it was offensive […] but never with malice.
“I never heard him racially abuse anyone. If he had, he would have been reported and punished. He wasn’t.”
Mr Farage went on to quote the unnamed former school mate as saying claims from former pupils reported by the Guardian and BBC were “without evidence, except for belatedly politically-dubious recollections from nearly half a century ago”.
He said the former pupil who had written to him had described the culture in the 1970s and at Dulwich College as “very different”, and “lots of boys said things they’d regret today”.
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Mr Farage has been under pressure since mid-November when reports from former classmates of alleged racist comments surfaced. The Guardian claims it has spoken to 20 former classmates who recall such language.
Challenged in an interview on 24 November if the claims were true, Mr Farage said: “No, this is 49 years ago by the way, 49 years ago. Have I ever tried to take it out on any individual on the basis of where they’re from? No.”
He added: “I would never, ever do it in a hurtful or insulting way. It’s 49 years ago. It’s 49 years ago. I had just entered my teens. Can I remember everything that happened at school? No, I can’t. Have I ever been part of an extremist organisation or engaged in direct, unpleasant, personal abuse, genuine abuse, on that basis? No.”
Challenged again about whether he had racially abused anyone, Farage responded: “No, not with intent.”
A Conservative spokesman said Mr Farage was too busy defending himself to “defend democracy” from election postponements announced by Labour.
“Nigel Farage just called a press conference and used it to rant at journalists over historic allegations of racism and antisemitism – allegations he has just admitted are true.
“Farage is too busy furiously defending himself to defend democracy from the Labour Party’s elections delays.
“Reform’s one-man band is in chaos once again.”
Labour Party chair Anna Turley said: “Nigel Farage can’t get his story straight. It really shouldn’t be this difficult to say whether he racially abused people in the past.
“So far, he’s claimed he can’t remember, that it’s not true, that he never ‘directly’ abused anyone, that he was responsible for ‘offensive banter’, and deflected by saying other people were racist too.
“Instead of shamelessly demanding apologies from others, Nigel Farage should be apologising to the victims of his alleged appalling remarks.”
She added that Reform UK was “simply not fit for high office”.
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