UK Covid-19 Inquiry - Module 1 report: progress update - July 2025

9. Red teams

Recommendation Nine – Regular use of red teams

Chair’s recommendation:

The governments of the UK, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should each introduce the use of red teams in the Civil Service to scrutinise and challenge the principles, evidence, policies and advice relating to preparedness for and resilience to whole-system civil emergencies. The red teams should be brought in from outside of government and the Civil Service.

Implementation actions and timescales set out in our January 2025 response:

• By July 2025, we will have scoped the potential use of further ‘red teaming’ and external scrutiny to support the development and implementation of our plans, processes and procedures

Progress update:

• Following consultation with the resilience sector in Scotland, we believe there is significant capacity and expertise across the resilience sector to provide robust external challenge and scrutiny to plans.
• The Scottish Government will continue to work with UK Government and Scottish partners to develop training to increase the number of those formally “Red Team” trained in Scotland.
• The Scottish Government will work to develop and enhance wider existing mechanisms for peer review and challenge in our work, using networks both within the wider civil service (our counterparts in UK Government, Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Executive), as well as a range of partner agencies.
• The Scottish Government will update the Preparing Scotland guidance to strengthen advice on peer review and challenge.
• The National Centre for Resilience have been commissioned to support Scottish Government throughout this year (2025-2026) in facilitating and coordinating access to a range of academic and practitioner expertise, ensuring that independent academic insight and scrutiny is applied to key elements of our approach to planning for emergencies.
• The Scottish Government will establish a mechanism to formally track the application of external challenge to key civil service planning, processes and procedures.