Matt Hancock has blamed failures in the UK’s pandemic planning on local authorities, civil servants and overconfidence on the part of the World Health Organisation.

Grilling the former health secretary at the Covid-19 inquiry today about the adult social care sector, chief counsel Hugo Keith said: “[Your] department had no means for finding out whether they had the right pandemic plans, whether local authorities had planned sufficiently, let alone how many numbers were in the care sector.”

Hancock agreed, adding: “It was terrible”. He went on to claim that despite being the head of the Department of Health and Social Care, he “didn’t have the levers to act” on adult social care as it is the responsibility of local authorities.

The former secretary of state also lay some of the blame for his government’s failures on the World Health Organisation, which he suggested had been too complimentary of the UK’s pandemic plans.

Hancock said that when he took office in July 2018, he “was assured that the UK planning was among the best and, in some instances, the best in the world”, adding: “That wasn't the civil servants’ own assessment, that was the World Health Organization assessment for the UK.”

In reality, Hancock said, “the attitude, the doctrine of the UK was to plan for the consequences of a disaster: can we buy enough body bags, where are we going to bury the dead? And that was completely wrong.”

He said that the focus should have instead been, “how do you stop a disaster happening in the first place?”

Hancock also branded the UK’s 2011 Pandemic Strategy “woefully inadequate” and said Exercise Cygnus, the 2016 operation that tested the UK’s pandemic preparedness, “was flawed in its central assumption about how best to respond to a pandemic”.

He acknowledged that large-scale testing and contact tracing “did not exist” before Covid struck, and that the UK lacked anti-viral treatments suitable for a coronavirus pandemic.

When Keith suggested that as the secretary of state, he “could have pursued and harried [civil servants] until something was done” about these issues, Hancock appeared to shirk responsibility.

He said that “this was an unprecedented pandemic” and “nobody was to know”. Keith disagreed, suggesting Hancock bore “responsibility for that calamitous state of affairs”.

Hancock replied: “I bear responsibility for all the things that happened, not only in my department but also the agencies that reported to me as secretary of state.”

The former health secretary will return to give evidence in the inquiry’s second module, which will cover the UK’s decision-making during the pandemic and is scheduled to start in autumn.

He described himself as “emotionally committed to making sure that [the inquiry is] a success” and referred to his “brutal honesty” in answering the questions. He added that he was “profoundly sorry for each death that has occurred”.

Hancock was followed by Duncan Selby, the former chief executive of Public Health England. Selby criticised cuts to public health funding made between 2015 and 2021, calling them “depressing”. He added that there had not been enough spending to tackle health inequalities, demonstrating a lack of “sufficient interest” in the issue on behalf of the government.

The inquiry continues.