Baroness Heather Hallett, the chair of the inquiry, described the response to the pandemic as "too little, too late".

Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved during the first wave of COVID-19 had a mandatory lockdown been introduced a week earlier, the inquiry also found.

Noting how a "lack of urgency" made a mandatory lockdown "inevitable", the report references modelling data to claim there could have been 23,000 fewer deaths during the first wave in England had it been introduced a week earlier.

The UK government first introduced advisory restrictions on 16 March 2020, including self-isolation, household quarantine and social distancing.

Had these measures been introduced sooner, the report states, the mandatory lockdown which followed from 23 March might not have been necessary at all.

COVID-19 first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019, and as it developed into a worldwide pandemic, the UK went in and out of unprecedented lockdown measures for two years starting from March 2020.

Lady Hallett admitted in her summary that politicians in the government and devolved administrations were forced to make decisions where "there was often no right answer or good outcome".

"Nonetheless," she said, "I can summarise my findings of the response as 'too little, too late'".

'Toxic culture' at the heart of UK government

The report said there was "a toxic and chaotic culture" at the heart of the UK government during the pandemic.

The inquiry heard evidence about the "destabilising behaviour of a number of individuals" - including former No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings.

It said that by failing to tackle this chaotic culture - "and, at times, actively encouraging it" - former PM Boris Johnson "reinforced a culture in which the loudest voices prevailed and the views of other colleagues, particularly women, often went ignored, to the detriment of good decision-making".

'Misleading assurances'

The inquiry found all four governments in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland failed to understand the urgency of response the pandemic demanded in the early part of 2020.

The report reads: "This was compounded, in part, by misleading assurances from the Department of Health and Social Care and the widely held view that the UK was well prepared for a pandemic."

The report notes how the UK government took a "high risk" when it significantly eased restrictions in England in July 2020 - "despite scientific advisers' concerns about the public health risks of doing so".

Lady Hallett has made 19 key recommendations which, if followed, she believes will better protect the UK in any future pandemic and improve decision-making in a crisis.

Repeated failings 'inexcusable'

In a statement following the publication of Thursday's report, Lady Hallett said there was a "serious failure" by all four governments to appreciate the level of "risk and calamity" facing the UK.

She said: "The tempo of the response should have been increased. It was not. February 2020 was a lost month."

Read more:
A timeline of the UK's response to the pandemic

Lady Hallett said the inquiry does not advocate for national lockdowns, which she said should have been avoided if at all possible.

She said: "But to avoid them, governments must take timely and decisive action to control a spreading virus. The four governments of the UK did not."

Lady Hallett said none of the governments were adequately prepared for the challenges and risks that a lockdown presented, and that many of the same failings were repeated later in 2020, which she said was "inexcusable".

She added: "Each government had ample warning that the prevalence of the virus was increasing and would continue to do so into the winter months. Yet again, there was a failure to take timely and effective action."

The 28-point proposal was cooked up between Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff and Kremlin official Kirill Dmitriev without European and Ukrainian involvement.

It effectively dresses up Russian demands as a peace proposal. Demands first made by Russia at the high watermark of its invasion in 2022, before defeats forced it to retreat from much of Ukraine.

Ukraine war latest: Kyiv receives US peace plan

Its proposals are non-starters for Ukrainians.

It would hand over the rest of Donbas, territory they have spent almost four years and lost tens of thousands of men defending.

Analysts estimate at the current rate of advance, it would take Russia four more years to take the land it is proposing simply to give them instead.

It proposes more than halving the size of the Ukrainian military and depriving them of some of their most effective long-range weapons.

And it would bar any foreign forces acting as peacekeepers in Ukraine after any peace deal is done.

The plan comes at an excruciating time for the Ukrainians.

They are being pounded with devastating drone attacks, killing dozens in the last few nights alone.

They are on the verge of losing a key stronghold city, Pokrovsk.

And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is embroiled in the gravest political crisis since the war began, with key officials facing damaging corruption allegations.

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The suspicion is Mr Witkoff and Mr Dmitriev conspired together to choose this moment to put even more pressure on the Ukrainian president.

Perversely, though, it may help him.

There has been universal condemnation and outrage in Kyiv at the Witkoff-Dmitriev plan. Rivals have little choice but to rally around the wartime Ukrainian leader as he faces such unreasonable demands.

The genesis of this plan is unclear.

Was it born from Donald Trump's overinflated belief in his peacemaking abilities? His overrated Gaza ceasefire plan attracted lavish praise from world leaders, but now seems mired in deepening difficulty.

The fear is Mr Trump's team are finding ways to allow him to walk away from this conflict altogether, blaming Ukrainian intransigence for the failure of his diplomacy.

Mr Trump has already ended financial support for Ukraine, acting as an arms dealer instead, selling weapons to Europe to pass on to the invaded democracy.

If he were to take away military intelligence support too, Ukraine would be blind to the kind of attacks that in recent days have killed scores of civilians.

Europe and Ukraine cannot reject the plan entirely and risk alienating Mr Trump.

They will play for time and hope against all the evidence he can still be persuaded to desert the Kremlin and put pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the war, rather than force Ukraine to surrender instead.

But unless John Healey backs his rhetoric up with a far more urgent push to rearm - and to rebuild wider national resilience - he risks his words ringing as hollow as his military.

The defence secretary on Wednesday repeated government plans to increase defence spending and work with NATO allies to bolster European security.

Instead of focusing purely on the threat, he also stressed how plans to buy weapons and build arms factories will create jobs and economic growth.

In a sign of the government's priorities, job creation is typically the top line of any Ministry of Defence press release about its latest investment in missiles, drones and warships rather than why the equipment is vital to defend the nation.

I doubt expanding employment opportunities was the motivating factor in the 1930s when the UK converted car factories into Spitfire production lines to prepare for war with Nazi Germany.

Yet communicating to the public what war readiness really means must surely be just as important today.

Mr Healey also chose this moment of national peril to attempt to score political points by criticising the previous Conservative government for hollowing out the armed forces - when the military was left in a similarly underfunded state during the last Labour government.

A report by a group of MPs, released on the same day as Mr Healey rattled his sabre at Russia, underlined the scale of the challenge the UK faces.

It accused the government of lacking a national plan to defend itself from attack.

The Defence Select Committee also warned that Mr Healey, Sir Keir Starmer and the rest of the cabinet are moving at a "glacial" pace to fix the problem and are failing to launch a "national conversation on defence and security" - something the prime minister had promised last year.

The report backed up the findings of a wargame podcast by Sky News and Tortoise that simulated what might happen if Russia launched waves of missile strikes against the UK.

The series showed how successive defence cuts since the end of the Cold War means the army, navy and air force are woefully equipped to defend the home front.

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But credible national defences also require the wider country to be prepared for war.

A set of plans setting out what must happen in the transition from peace to war was quietly shelved at the start of this century, so there no longer exists a rehearsed and resourced system to ensure local authorities, businesses and the wider population know what to do.

Mr Healey revealed that the Russian spy ship had directed a laser light presumably to dazzle pilots of a Royal Air Force reconnaissance aircraft that was tracking it.

"That Russian action is deeply dangerous," he said.

"So, my message to Russia and to Putin, is this: We see you. We know what you are doing. And if Yantar travels south this week, we are ready."

He did not spell out what this might mean but it could include attempts to block the Russian vessel's passage, or even fire warning shots to force it to retreat.

However, any direct engagement could trigger a retaliation from Moscow.

For now, the Russian ship - fitted with spying equipment to monitor critical national infrastructure such as communications cables on the seabed - has moved away from the UK coast. It was at its closest between 5 and 11 November.

The military is still tracking its movements closely in case the ship returns.

Speaking as Chancellor Rachel Reeves considers ways of easing the pressure on households in next week's budget, energy minister Michael Shanks conceded that Labour's election pledge to cut bills by £300 by converting the UK to clean power has not been delivered.

The UK has the second-highest domestic and the highest industrial electricity prices among developed nations, despite renewable sources providing more than 50% of UK electricity last year.

"The truth is, we do have to build that infrastructure in order to remove the volatility of fossil fuels from people's bills," Mr Shanks said.

"We obviously hope that that will happen as quickly as possible, but there's no shortcut to this, and there's not an easy solution to building the clean power system that brings down bills."

His comments come amid growing scepticism about the compatibility of cutting bills as well as carbon emissions, and growing evidence that the government's pursuit of a clean power grid by 2030 is contributing to higher bills.

While wholesale gas prices have fallen from their peak following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, energy bills remain around 35% higher than before the war, inflated by the rising cost of reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

The price of subsidising offshore wind and building and managing the grid has increased sharply, driven by supply chain inflation and the rising cost of financing major capital projects.

In response, the government has had to increase the maximum price it will pay for offshore wind by more than 10% in the latest renewables auction, and extend price guarantees from 15 years to 20.

The auction concludes early next year, but it's possible it could see the price of new wind power set higher than the current average wholesale cost of electricity, primarily set by gas.

Renewable subsidies and network costs make up more than a third of bills and are set to grow. The cost of new nuclear power generation will be added to bills from January.

The government has also increased so-called social costs funded through bills, including the warm home discount, a £150 payment made to around six million of the least-affluent households.

Gas remains central to the UK's power network, with around 50 active gas-fired power stations underpinning an increasingly renewable grid, and is also crucial to pricing.

Because of the way the energy market works, wholesale gas sets the price for all sources of electricity, the majority of the time.

At Connah's Quay, a gas-fired power station run by the German state-owned energy company Uniper on the Dee estuary in north Wales, four giant turbines, each capable of powering 300,000 homes, are fired up on demand when the grid needs them.

Energy boss: Remove policy costs from bills

Because renewables are intermittent, the UK will need to maintain and pay for a full gas network, even when renewables make up the majority of generation, and we use it a fraction of the time.

"The fundamental problem is we cannot store electricity in very large volumes, and so we have to have these plants ready to generate when customers need it," says Michael Lewis, chief executive of Uniper.

"You're paying for hundreds of hours when they are not used, but they're still there and they're ready to go at a moment's notice."

He agrees that shifting away from gas will ultimately reduce costs, but there are measures the government can take in the short term.

"We have quite a lot of policy costs on our energy bills in the UK, for instance, renewables incentives, a warm home discount and other taxes. If we remove those from energy bills and put them into general taxation, that will have a big dampening effect on energy prices, but fundamentally it is about gas."

The chancellor is understood to be considering a range of options to cut bills in the short term, including shifting some policy costs and green levies from bills into general taxation, as well as cutting VAT.

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Tories and Reform against green energy

Stubbornly high energy bills have already fractured the political consensus on net zero among the major parties.

Under Kemi Badenoch, the Conservatives have reversed a policy introduced by Theresa May. Shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho, who held the post in the last Conservative government, explained why: "Net zero is now forcing people to make decisions which are making people poorer. And that's not what people signed up to.

"So when it comes to energy bills, we know that they're going up over the next five years to pay for green levies.

"We are losing jobs to other countries, industry is going, and that not only is a bad thing for our country, but it also is a bad thing for climate change."

Reform UK, meanwhile, have made opposition to net zero a central theme.

"No more renewables," says Reform's deputy leader Richard Tice. "They've been a catastrophe... that's the reason why we've got the highest electricity prices in the developed world because of the scandal and the lies told about renewables.

"They haven't made our energy cheaper, they haven't brought down the bills."

Mr Shanks says his opponents are wrong and insists renewables remain the only long-term choice: "The cost of subsidy is increasing because of the global cost of building things, but it's still significantly cheaper than it would be to build gas.

"And look, there's a bigger argument here, that we're all still paying the price of the volatility of fossil fuels. And in the past 50 years, more than half of the economic shocks this country's faced have been the direct result of fossil fuel crises across the world."

The National Crime Agency has revealed a billion-dollar money laundering network is operating in 28 towns and cities across the UK.

Couriers collect "dirty" cash generated from drugs, firearms and immigration gangs, which is then converted into cryptocurrency.

Officials say these illicit transactions have a direct link to "geopolitical events causing suffering around the world".

This network was first exposed because of Operation Destabilise - and to date, 128 arrests have been made, with more than £25m in cash and digital assets seized.

According to the NCA, the enterprise is so prolific that it purchased a bank to facilitate payments that supported Russia's military efforts and helped sidestep sanctions.

Posters have been put up in motorway service stations to target couriers, which warn it is "just a matter of time" before they will be arrested.

The NCA's deputy director for economic crime, Sal Melki, has warned the threat posed by this money laundering network is significant.

He added: "Cash couriers play an intrinsic role in this global scheme. They are in our communities and making the criminal ecosystem function - because if you cannot profit from your crimes, why bother.

"They are paid very little for the risks they take and face years in prison, while those they work for enjoy huge profits."

Mr Melki went on to warn that "easy money leads to hard time" - and earning just a few hundred pounds through laundering could lead to years behind bars.

The NCA says Operation Destabilise has already had an impact in criminal circles, with some members of the network now reluctant to operate in London.

Those involved in the money laundering effort have also started to charge higher fees - reflecting the difficulty of cleaning ill-gotten gains.

Cryptocurrencies are often regarded as a haven for criminals because they are perceived to be anonymous, but it is possible to trace these transactions.

Chainalysis is a company that monitors suspicious activity on blockchains, a type of database that keeps records of who sends and receives digital assets - as well as how much.

Its vice president of communications Madeleine Kennedy told Sky News: "Public blockchains are transparent by design, which makes cryptocurrencies a poor vehicle for money laundering.

"With the right tools, law enforcement can trace illicit funds - whether they're connected to drug trafficking, sanctions evasion, or cybercrime - and use those insights to disrupt networks and recover assets."

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Last December, a global investigation led by the NCA smashed two networks whose money laundering activities were prevalent in 30 countries.

Bundles of cash were seized during raids, with detectives describing Smart and TGR as the invisible link between "Russian elites, crypto-rich cybercriminals and drug gangs in the UK".

One of the network's ringleaders, a Russian national called Ekatarina Zhdanova, is currently in custody in France and awaiting trial for separate financial offences.

Security minister Dan Jarvis added: "This complex operation has exposed the corrupt tactics Russia used to avoid sanctions and fund its illegal war in Ukraine.

"We are working tirelessly to detect, disrupt and prosecute anyone engaging in activity for a hostile foreign state. It will never be tolerated on our streets."