What is the role of the government in national crises?

The roles and responsibilities of state governments are to anticipate crises and then to provide safe and secure ways through the episode to restore normality. There are also increasing public and business expectations that governments should be able to prevent these crises or ameliorate them as quickly as possible by mobilising resources or reorganising its own actions and priorities, as in the 2008 international financial crisis. There is also a growing understanding, after 40 years of globalisation, that the episodes that occur in one part of the world will have effects elsewhere (OECD 2017). This has been the case of COVID-19 where governments have had to intervene to manage the effects of the pandemic and attempt to reduce its spread (NAO 2020a).

In considering the roles of government, in anticipating and responding to major crises that affect the state, the primary requirement is that of leadership, the deployment of assets and management of the transition to a more acceptable way of life, even if this is not the same as that before the emergency occurred. In considering the management of health risks, public health strategies have consistently required people to change their habits and behaviours, with investment in public infrastructure such as clean water and through a regulatory environment that has reinforced these standards. However, despite these, there can be disasters which are regarded as having a major political dimension such as the Grenfell Tower fire (Macleod 2018) and corporate failure in rail accidents (Machin and Mayr 2013). Increasing regulatory standards are a consistent government response to disasters, taking the lessons learned and applying them. At the same time, the business environment is constantly attempting to reduce regulatory standards, through lobbying government (Davidson 2017) and regarding them as costs (McGregor-Lowndes and Ryan 2009).

The public sector at all scales of government are responders of last resort when crises occur within their spheres of responsibility. In the UK, the pressures on all public sector budgets in the period of austerity since 2010 (Gamble 2015; Morphet and Clifford 2020) have inevitably led to service reductions and, in some cases, complete cuts (NAO 2018).