The findings of crucial exercises to test planning and responses to pandemics four years before Covid were never shared with local councils, the UK’s Covid inquiry has heard.

In 2016, the UK government ran Exercise Alice, a “table-top” exercise to explore the consequences of the UK experiencing a MERS or SARS-type pandemic, and Exercise Cygnus, to test responses to a serious influenza pandemic.

But councils across the UK were not told about Exercise Alice happening, said Mark Lloyd, chief executive of the UK’s Local Government Association (LGA).

Councils across the UK proved invaluable in the response to the pandemic, deploying their own more effective contact-tracing programmes, helping run Covid testing in the community and providing support for isolating locals.

In a witness statement shared with the inquiry, Lloyd described the lack of disclosure around Exercise Alice as “surprising and regrettable”. Speaking in person at Wednesday’s hearing in Paddington, central London, he said the exercise’s occurrence and its conclusions only became known because of the inquiry.

“Having retrospectively seen that work, it was the first time when issues like quarantining featured in planning,” said Lloyd. “It would have changed what we were doing in our local [emergency] planning to have knowledge of that kind.”

Exercise Cygnus involved eight ‘local resilience forums’ – local partnerships involving representatives from public services, such as the NHS and the environment agency, of which there are 38 in England, Lloyd explained. There was no local input to Exercise Alice.

And even so, local government could only access the conclusions to Exercise Cygnus in 2020 after central government made them public. At the time, the government was facing a legal challenge from the medical community to release the Cygnus report.

Speaking alongside Chris Llewellyn and Alison Allen, the chief executives of the Welsh and Northern Irish LGAs respectively, Lloyd described the lack of information sharing as an “approach to secrecy”.

“If we're not sighted on the recommendations like the 22 set out in Exercise Cygnus – recommendations around excess death management and the consequences for us at the local level – we’re not planning in the way that we should be,” said Lloyd. “It has significant consequences.”

Lloyd added that a larger number of local resilience forums had planned to take part in Exercise Cygnus, but participation dropped after a two-year delay to the exercise taking place. Wales ran its own version of Cygnus in addition to the Welsh government participating in the UK-wide exercise.

Lloyd described exercises like Cygnus as “a top-down approach to these kinds of events”: “Local government is brought in as a participant on a small-scale rather than at the core of the exercise.”

He added that access to data and sharing of important information for planning from central government was challenging before and during the pandemic. “Councils were expected to lead a response in their community to a whole range of issues,” said Lloyd. “We were learning of the issues and the expected response in the afternoon press conferences in the same way as the rest of the nation.”

During the evidence session, the inquiry also heard about other crucial emergency planning documents and information that had not been shared with local government bodies.

Alison Allen, chief executive of Northern Ireland’s LGA, said Northern Ireland’s 2013 risk register, which included the risk of an infectious disease pandemic, had not been shared with local authorities, and nor had they been involved in its production.

When questioned about local authorities’ management of excess deaths and dignity in dying in a pandemic by Pete Weatherby, the lawyer for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, Lloyd said local government must be involved by central government in any future planning.

He confirmed that a draft government document from May 2018 entitled ‘A framework for planners preparing to manage excess deaths’ had not been seen by him or colleagues prior to the inquiry.

The inquiry continues.