Street signs on building for Whitehall and Downing Street in London.

Five years ago, on 24 March 2020, the United Kingdom entered the first covid-19 lockdown. This Insight looks at the impact the pandemic had on intergovernmental relations between the UK Government and the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

What measures were taken by the UK and devolved administrations?

In response to the covid-19 pandemic, the UK Parliament passed the Coronavirus Act 2020, while the Scottish Parliament passed the Coronavirus (Scotland) Act 2020. The then First Minister of Wales (Mark Drakeford) made a Declaration of threat to public health in Wales on 29 March 2020 under schedule 22 to the 2020 act.

Existing public health legislation was also deployed:

What is the Civil Contingencies Act and why wasn’t it used during the pandemic?

The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 is a single framework for civil protection in the UK, but it was not used during the covid-19 pandemic.

Section 19 of the 2004 act provides three definitions of “emergency”, the first of which is “an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in the United Kingdom or in a Part or region”. Section 21 lays down conditions for making emergency regulations and section 27 for parliamentary approval of those regulations.

Section 29 provides that emergency regulations relating wholly or partly to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can only be made if a “senior” Minister of the Crown has consulted, respectively, the Scottish Ministers, the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) and the First Minister and deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. However, subsection (4) also provides that this requirement may be disapplied if the senior Minister of the Crown thinks the regulations “necessary by reason of urgency”.

The covid-19 pandemic arguably constituted an emergency on the basis that it was “an event or situation” which threatened “serious damage to human welfare in the United Kingdom”. But the Civil Contingencies Act was not used. When asked why, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the then Leader of the House of Commons, said it was because “the problem was known about early enough for it not to qualify as an emergency under the terms of that Act”. He added:

The legal experts say that if we can introduce emergency legislation, we should do so rather than using the Civil Contingencies Act, because if we have time to introduce emergency legislation, we obviously knew about it long enough in advance for the Act not to apply. That is why that Act could not be used.

Simon Hart, then Secretary of State for Wales, states in the 2 March 2020 entry of his diaries (Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip, 2025) that the Civil Contingencies Act was not used because “it would need quite frequent Parliamentary approval, but is UK-wide, compared with public health legislation which is less onerous but fully devolved.”

How did intergovernmental relations work during the pandemic?

Something which was used during the pandemic was the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR). COBR is the mechanism for agreeing the UK Government response to major emergencies which have international, national or multi-regional impact. The Cabinet Manual states that:

Exceptionally, with the consent of the relevant chair, ministers from the Devolved Administrations may be invited to attend meetings. One such exception is Cabinet committee meetings which deal with an emergency response requiring input from both the Government and one or more of the Devolved Administrations.

In 2020, COBR met 20 times to discuss the covid-19 pandemic, with representatives of the devolved administrations attending all but the first few meetings.

At that time, the Joint Ministerial Committee (JMC) was the primary forum for ministers from the UK Government and the devolved administrations to engage with each other.

In its inquiry on intergovernmental working during the pandemic, the House of Commons Scottish Affairs Select Committee heard evidence that the JMC was not used during the pandemic, and that even before the pandemic it was considered “not fit for purpose”. Following a Review of intergovernmental relations in early 2022, the JMC was replaced with a new (but still non-statutory) system of intergovernmental relations.

Intergovernmental discussion also took place through five Ministerial Implementation Groups , which were established to look at specific aspects of the covid-19 response, as well as scientific cooperation between the chief medical officers and chief scientific advisors of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Did the pandemic create intergovernmental tensions?

The Scottish Affairs Committee found that any policy differences between the four parts of the UK were initially “minimal and a matter of timing rather than fundamental divergence”.

However, the committee also found that there was greater divergence following the second review of lockdown restrictions in May 2020, with each part of the UK publishing its own plan for easing the rules and reopening parts of the economy.

The statutory UK Covid-19 Inquiry later heard evidence of resulting tensions between the UK Government and devolved administrations.

Former Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, told the inquiry that Nicola Sturgeon, the then First Minister of Scotland, caused “all sorts of difficulties” as the UK Government would find that “sometimes some kind of spin was put on what was essentially substantively the same decision” and announced in advance of an agreed time. However, Mr Hancock also said his relationship with the devolved health secretaries was “constructive”.

In an interview with the Institute for Government, Ms Sturgeon said the UK Government had “expected” the devolved administrations to do what it thought was right:

a fundamental inability […] to recognise the roles and responsibilities of the devolved administrations. Mark Drakeford I’m sure would say the same. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, get their heads around the fact that they couldn’t just take a blanket approach and that we were responsible for public health decisions […] They saw themselves very much as the lead government and expected us all just to do what they thought was right.

About the author: Dr David Torrance is a researcher at the House of Commons Library, specialising in devolution.

Photo by: bellphotography on Adobe Stock