Planning for any future pandemic must include impact on economy – Diane Dodds

Planning for any future pandemics must include the impact on the economy, a former Stormont minister has said.

DUP MLA Diane Dodds, who served as economy minister from January 2020 to June 2021, also stressed the importance of data as she gave evidence to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry on Wednesday.

She said food security and connectivity, with just one flight a day into the region at one stage during the pandemic, were huge concerns.

“The impact on airports, the impact on communications and linkages for families and so on was very, very grave,” she told the inquiry in London.

“Those were really huge concerns and we had specific industries in Northern Ireland that we were also very concerned about, like aerospace.

“The impact on the aerospace industry in Northern Ireland of the pandemic was very, very huge and has taken quite some time to recover from, and when I think those were flagged up as concerns, I suppose I always am a little bit niggled by the fact that it didn’t produce enough action, because connectivity is a massive issue when you live in Northern Ireland, with the rest of the United Kingdom.”

Mrs Dodds said pandemic modelling had focused on health, while “assuming a business-as-usual approach in terms of the economy”, which led to rolling out schemes to support businesses during lockdowns “almost in real time”.

In the context of a pandemic, “we didn’t know how it was going to progress and how long it was going to be”, which was “quite difficult and significant”.

“I think that we do need some kind of response that allows us to plan more significantly than we did,” she added.

“I don’t think anyone could have foreseen the pandemic, and the way that the pandemic played out. It was one of those incredible times to be in government.”

She added: “I haven’t been in the Northern Ireland Executive since 2021, and I am not sure whether some of those discussions may or may not have taken place, but there certainly does need to be pandemic planning for the future.

“That is not just about health, but that is also about the impact on the economy, the impact on employment, the impact on long-term unemployment that some of it has caused.

“And I think that we should understand from what has happened and learn lessons and understand from the data that we now have how that should work better for the future.”

Mrs Dodds concluded her evidence by stressing the importance of data.

“The issue of data, of access to data, which helps us to move more quickly, is actually really, really important,” she said.

“We saw that in the absence of accurate data, things can go wrong, or they can be slower than they need to be, and I think that that was a huge lesson for us, because we had to go looking for it in all sorts of different places.

“I hope that we learn and have the plan, so that some of these things are not new or out of the blue to us in the future, because the most important thing is that we can respond quickly to anything, God forbid, that might happen.”