Report: SHAPE the Future – Resilience, recovery and renewal

This report provides a synthesis of the relevant evidence from within the Academy’s research networks on the state of play five years on from the publication of ‘Covid Decade’. We have drawn upon relevant Academy-funded research and policy work alongside the knowledge and insights of our Fellowship. While extensive, this is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of all evidence, but is intended to re-energise the important debate on the long-term legacy of COVID-19 and how the country best prepares for future threats.

The British Academy’s 2021 ‘Covid Decade’ reports sought to understand the long-term societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and to explore what steps policymakers could take to respond. Five years on, the vast and complex legacies of the pandemic and the response to it by government, business and civil society, are now entangled in wider social, institutional and democratic pressures which make it impossible to separate out questions of recovery from COVID-19 from wider questions of preparedness and planning for future crises.

Using the evidence we have collected, this report reassesses the situation against each of the nine long-term impacts identified in the original Covid Decade reports and the policy response in each case to date (Section 2). The picture is undoubtedly mixed. While some direct effects have eased and some of the greater attention and awareness of issues raised by the pandemic has been sustained, much of the evidence suggests that core aspects of inequality, mistrust, and public service strain have become more entrenched. There are also additional problems identified, such as the pressure on the criminal justice system and the crumbling of social and cultural infrastructures, which were not fully identified in the original reports, but which add additional dimensions to the original nine long-term impacts.

Following the analysis of the nine impacts, the report provides four additional lessons to inform how Government prepares for, responds to, and recovers from whole-system civil emergencies in the future (Section 3), including but not limited to Covid-style pandemics, natural and environmental hazards, and failures of key national systems and infrastructures.

Finally, the report revisits the CLEAR principles from the ‘Shaping the Covid Decade’ report (Section 4). These emphasised the need for a policy environment that is more Communicative, Learning-oriented, Engaging, Adaptive and Relational in its design, and we examine examples of how the CLEAR principles can be mobilised to help embed the four additional lessons across government and the public sector to support better planning, preparedness and response to whole-system civil emergencies.