The UKHSA strategy

Glossy placebo or real programme?

The UK Scare Agency published the 36-page corporate document UKHSA Strategy 2026 to 2029.

The communique subtitle tells us what it’s about: This strategy outlines UKHSA’s ambition and priority deliverables for the next 3 years to protect people from current and future health threats.

Of interest are the current concerns, presumably in order of priority:

Beyond the glossy nature of the document, the reassuring smiles, the corporate T-shirts and endless references to “modernised systems” are the elements we described: surveillance, testing, vaccination, and pharmaceutical interventions are present throughout the document.

There is no mention of the fundamental uncertainty underlying many of the measures employed and advocated by the UKHSA in the past, nor is there an emphasis on honest communication.

All in all, the TOGs have the impression that the production of the glossy brochure is an attempt to calm people’s doubts about the role and links of the UKHSA and to justify the massive budget at its disposal.

But beneath the polished presentation lies something rather more troubling: an agency still unwilling to reckon honestly with the failures and uncertainties of the pandemic years.

Answering FOIs clearly and promptly would be a start. In our view, the UKHSA has a long way to go to make Britons feel protected, scared more like it.

An organisation genuinely committed to openness would start here. Transparency is not achieved through glossy PDFs and carefully curated photographs of scientists peering into microscopes. It is achieved when institutions willingly expose their assumptions, evidence and decision-making processes to scrutiny.

The smiling photographs may reassure some readers. Others will see something else entirely: the quiet consolidation of a permanent health security state.

This post was written by two old geezers who think the Scare Agency may have used management consultants to produce a placebo brochure.