Lord Sumption:

In theory, these decisions are made collectively by the British Cabinet. In practice, in what has been a feature of the way the British Government has worked some decades, there has been a progressive narrowing of the number of people who make these decisions. We are not absolutely sure how they are being made in the United Kingdom but it very much looks as if they are being made, essentially, by the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for Health and a very small number of other Ministers - two or, at most, three - who are very close to the Prime Minister. My view is that this is not at all satisfactory because the broader the decision-making basis, the greater the measure of discussion, the larger the scope for challenge in parliament and the better the decision-making process is likely to be. Many people have remarked that the successive policies of the British Government on Covid-19 have chopped and changed. The British Government seems to have been taken by surprise by every new development and this has led to a loss in support for its measures to a very significant extent. That problem could have been reduced and possibly avoided if decisions had not been confined to such a very small number of people.