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Today's report says the government's actions in the early days of the pandemic amounted to "herd immunity by infection" - something it has always denied.

What is herd immunity: It is a scientific term describing the point at which a population is protected from a disease, either by enough people being vaccinated or by people having developed antibodies by having the disease.

Why is it controversial: In March 2020, one policy option cited was to protect the most vulnerable and let others who were likely to suffer less severe symptoms catch the virus, build herd immunity and limit the need for lockdowns. This feeds into the question of whether the UK locked down too late.

What was said at the time: The government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance appeared on Sky News, external on 13 March 2020, claiming about 60% of the population would need to contract the virus to achieve herd immunity.

The committee's report notes that Sir Patrick insisted that his comments at the time did not amount to "a policy to seek herd immunity but... a description of the situation".

Here's what we know about herd immunity and the Covid pandemic.

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Another MPs' group has responded to today's report by saying it didn't go far enough in its criticisms.

Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on coronavirus, says the report is "notable by its silence on a number of key areas".

She highlights the "catastrophic mismanagement of schools", the continued under-delivery on donations of vaccines to poorer countries and "no mention of long Covid in 151 pages".

"This report is no substitute for the full public inquiry this government has promised and the government must now commit to releasing interim findings from this inquiry before the next general election," she says.

Image source, Mark Coup

Among those reacting to today's report is the owner of a care company who says his supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) ran out on 16 March 2020.

Mark Coup works at Welcome Independent Living, which deploys care assistants to help vulnerable and elderly people after surgeries.

"Between January and April there was no clarity on what we should be wearing and if masks were available, the price escalated. If we do 3,000 visits a week and it's £1 per mask- suddenly we have £3,000 to find. We became a loss-making organisation suddenly as we struggled to find PPE."

At the start of the pandemic, he says people were being discharged from hospital without being tested for Covid.

"Our carers were in close contact with people who were Covid positive - some we knew they were, and our carers didn't have the correct equipment.

"Imagine if we sent out soldiers into a war zone with guns that didn't work - the world would go mental. But at that time it was okay to send carers into people's homes to care for elderly and vulnerable people without masks."

Scotland faces similar questions over pandemic responsepublished at 12:36 British Summer Time 12 October 2021

12:36 BST 12 October 2021

Philip Sim
BBC Scotland political correspondent

Today's report predominantly focuses on the response to the pandemic in England and the committees did not look at the steps taken individually by Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

There may have been differences in presentation and style, but governments across the UK have largely moved in lockstep throughout the pandemic.

This is in part due to UK-wide programmes like furlough and the vaccine rollout, but the most significant unifying factor has been the virus itself. It has no interest in borders, and the scientific advice has been broadly similar north and south of Gretna.

We all went into lockdown together on 23 March, and on the same day as Test and Trace was launched in England, Test and Protect was introduced in Scotland. Both countries developed a levels system for local restrictions, although Scotland’s had five tiers rather than the English three.

There was a “four nation” approach to easing restrictions for Christmas, and then for tightening them again. The country as a whole then found itself in lockdown come January, and the path out again was similar too - Scotland moved to Level Zero on the same day as England scrapped all legal restrictions.

Governments in Edinburgh and London have faced similar criticisms too, for example over discharging untested hospital patients into care homes early in the pandemic.

None of this is to underplay the importance of messaging and presentation during a crisis, with clear and consistent communication a major factor particularly in the early days.

But ultimately ministers in London and Edinburgh did roughly the same things at roughly the same times – and will be facing similar questions when the public inquiries begin next year.

A woman whose mother died with Covid in a care home says it is "despicable" that MP Jeremy Hunt, a co-author of today's report, likened the government's handling of the pandemic to a "football game" with "two very different halves".

Lindsay Jackson from Derbyshire tells BBC News: "This is not a game. My mother didn't lose her life in a game. I think she lost her life because of mistakes that were made by the government and I want to know about that.

"I want to hear about it in a full judicial inquiry and I don't want political decisions being taken now that are not based on the best advice."

She says today's report confirms fears she had about being allowed to visit her mother in a care home in March 2020.

"I knew in my own mind the lockdown was too slow, I knew the social care sector wasn't being looked after, I knew people shouldn't have been released from hospital without tests, and this just confirms that."

She is calling for the government to move to a public inquiry now rather than wait until spring to see if anyone is culpable.

"And if they are then I want to see them brought to justice and that's not where this report leads us. This is a start but it's not sufficient."

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Labour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth gave his verdict on the report earlier this morning, describing it as "a damning report into monumental errors made by ministers".

"Ministers were warned but responded with complacency," he said on Twitter, external, giving the example of "care homes left unprotected as the virus raged".

He said that there should be a public inquiry now to ensure that mistakes of "such tragic magnitude" are never repeated again.

The government says an independent public inquiry will begin in the spring, but there have been calls from some campaigners for it to start sooner.

Families who lost loved ones to Covid have been reacting to the findings of today's report. Sue from West Sussex says she was allowed 15 minutes to say goodbye to her mother as she died in a care home.

"We had to drop her off and leave her surrounded by strangers in masks. She had vascular dementia which was tough enough and then the home immediately went into lockdown," she tells BBC Radio 5 Live.

The next time Sue saw her mother was four months later, when she was granted a 15 minute visit as she lay dying with Covid.

Of the 11 residents on her mother's floor, nine died in one week, she says.

"I know the politicians are very proud of a lot that happened, and they should be, but this was a disaster," she says.

"There is a lot of joy as the country moves forward but there's thousands and thousands scarred and they shouldn't be forgotten and they should understand what people went through and are still suffering with and make sure this never happens again."

When Health Secretary Sajid Javid left home this morning, broadcasters were waiting outside to talk to him about today's report on the Covid response.

Javid smiled and greeted the journalists but did not answer any of their questions about whether it was a mistake not to go into lockdown earlier or whether the Test and Trace programme was slow and chaotic.

Instead the health secretary - who was only appointed in June this year after Matt Hancock resigned - made his way to a waiting car and left.

Image source, PA Media

Today's report into the government's handling of the pandemic is written by a cross-party group of MPs.

But the prime minister has previously announced a separate independent public inquiry will be launched in spring 2022.

Public inquiries often take years to complete, partly due to the huge amount of evidence that needs to be read.

It's not known yet who will lead the inquiry but they will be independent from government - sometimes judges or experts in a particular field are chosen.

At the end, a public inquiry usually draws up a report and makes recommendations to the government.

Here's everything we know about the public inquiry so far.

What is the report? MPs on the Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee have been considering what lessons can be learned from the government’s handling of the pandemic and today's report presents their findings.

Who gave evidence? Politicians, scientific advisers and experts involved in the pandemic response have spoken to the committee but the wider public and bereaved families did not contribute. You might remember back in May the prime minister's former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, was questioned by MPs for hours about what was going on inside No 10 in the early days of the pandemic, and former Health Secretary Matt Hancock also gave evidence.

What happens now? The report is given to government to learn lessons from and any action to be taken as a result of its findings will be announced. There will also be a separate independent public inquiry in the spring.

What does the report say about herd immunity?published at 10:53 British Summer Time 12 October 2021

10:53 BST 12 October 2021

Nick Triggle
Health Correspondent

The report by a cross-party group of MPs into the UK’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has once again raised the issue of whether the government’s initial approach was herd immunity through infection – something the government has always denied.

Herd immunity is when a large portion of a community becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of it less likely.

The report stops short of saying this was the conscious policy, instead saying ministers and their scientific advisers thought the only way to handle Covid was to try to manage the spread rather than doing more to stop it.

It says “in practice” this amounted to accepting herd immunity by infection.

In interviews this morning, Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, said rather than an active decision that it was desirable, it was more a result of “fatalism” that nothing else could be done.

This could be characterised as herd immunity by default, but the fact remains the result is the same – in the early weeks of the pandemic the government was content to let the virus spread through the population before a dramatic change in approach when the national lockdown was announced on 23 March 2020.

More from the Office for National Statistics which says 91 care home resident deaths involving Covid-19 were registered in England and Wales in the week to 1 October - down from 110 the previous week.

In total, 43,473 care home residents in England and Wales have had Covid-19 recorded on their death certificate since the pandemic began.

The ONS figures cover deaths of care home residents in all settings, not just in care homes.

As we look at the findings and reaction to the report on the government's handling of the pandemic, new data on coronavirus deaths has just come in.

A total of 783 deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 1 October mentioned Covid-19 on the death certificate, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

This is down 12% on the previous week and is the lowest number of deaths since the week to 3 September.

A total of 163,437 deaths have occurred in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate, the ONS says.

Dominic Cummings, the prime minister's former chief adviser, has said the government's system for dealing with a crisis was a "disaster" and had been "bad for many years before Covid".

Speaking to broadcasters about the report on the government's handling of the pandemic this morning, he said: "Me and others put in place work to try and improve the system in 2020 after the first wave. Unfortunately the prime minister being the joke that he is has not pushed that work through."

Cummings has been highly critical of the government since leaving No 10 in November last year after internal battles over his role.

In May, he spoke to MPs on the health and science committees about the government's handling of crisis, claiming that the prime minister had initially dismissed Covid as a "scare story" and the UK had been too slow to lock down.

The prime minister hit back at some of Cummings' allegations, insisting that the government's priority had always been to "save lives".

Steve Barclay, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and former chief secretary to the Treasury, has rejected the accusation that there was "group-think" in the government's handling of the pandemic.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he says ministers always followed scientific advice and protected the NHS from huge pressures like those seen in Italy.

"One can't apply hindsight to the challenges that we faced," he adds.

Asked why it took so long for the government to put the UK into lockdown, he says at the time, the "expectation" was that people would tolerate restrictions for a "far shorter period than actually has proven to be the case, and therefore there was an issue of timing the lockdown and ensuring that that was done at the point of optimal impact".

Barclay says there were "difficult judgements" to be made on lockdowns, and refuses to accept the timing of the autumn 2020 lockdown was an error, saying the government followed the science.

Pressed on whether the government's delay in locking down caused avoidable Covid deaths, Barclay reiterates the prime minister's apology in May for the "suffering the country has experienced" and says the government takes responsibility for its handling of the pandemic.

Some of the families of those who died during the pandemic say today's report into failings is "laughable".

Hannah Brady, spokesperson for the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, criticised a passage in the report that said the "success of the vaccine programme has redeemed many of the persistent failings of other parts of the national response".

She says: "What a surprise: a committee led by the previous health secretary and which exclusively spoke to his friends in Government, found that the deaths of 150,000 people were 'redeemed' by the vaccine rollout."

She says the committee "explicitly refused" to speak to the campaign group or those who had lost loved ones and the document "manages to barely mention the over 150,000 bereaved families".

"The report it's produced is laughable, and more interested in political arguments about whether you can bring laptops to Cobra meetings than it is in the experiences of those who tragically lost parents, partners or children to Covid-19."

Report blames structures rather than individualspublished at 09:32 British Summer Time 12 October 2021

09:32 BST 12 October 2021

Adam Fleming
Chief political correspondent

This vast report uses the word "understand" or "understanding" fifty times in its 150 pages. And that sums it up, really: it's about learning rather than accusing.

Which means it points the finger for some pretty major mistakes at structures, systems, attitudes and groups of people rather than named individuals.

Who's to blame for the late decision to lock down at the end of March 2020 which may have cost thousands of lives? Ministers trusted the scientists, who trusted the data which turned out to wrong, shrouded in "groupthink" about what the virus was or how many people might - acceptably - die.

Who's to blame for discharging patients to care homes to free up hospital beds? The NHS needed the capacity, there weren't tests to test the patients and we might never know whether it was them or the staff that spread the virus to such deadly effect.

It will be a frustrating read for people seeking closure or justice. The government has already felt much of the political heat because a lot of this unfolded in front of our eyes, or was uncovered by the media at the time or was revealed by witnesses to this inquiry.

That makes me wonder if there will be any more politics or new information when the official inquiry begins next year.

Challenged on whether he is "forgiving" of some of the errors made during the pandemic, Hunt says he knows, from his time as health secretary between 2012 and 2018, how "incredibly difficult" these decisions are, never mind during a pandemic.

He reiterates that there were some "extraordinary" achievements, including the government pre-buying 400 million vaccine doses that saved "enormous numbers of lives".

Hunt admits that despite doing a lot of work on pandemic preparedness, he was part of the "group-think" mentality during his time as health secretary, adding that he also focused on flu as the most likely scenario, which he says was "wrong".

Jeremy Hunt, who was health secretary from 2012 to 2018 and is now chairman of the Health and Social Care Committee that co-authored today's report, says MPs concluded the government's handling of the pandemic was like a "football game" with "two very different halves".

He told us this morning: "In the first half, we had some serious errors, we could have avoided the lockdown. But having got into the position where we had to have one - we should have locked down earlier. But in the second half, we had the vaccine rollout... the discovery of treatments which have saved a million lives around the world."

When asked about the cause of the "serious" errors, he reiterated the report's point that there was an issue of "group-think".

Image source, PA Media

The government's chief scientific adviser says the times he found "most difficult" during the pandemic were the press "intrusion" into his personal life.

In an interview recorded for BBC Radio 4 before today's report by MPs was published, Sir Patrick Vallance says: "Those were the times when you thought, 'actually is this really something I can do?'

"When you've got my family being affected by press being intrusive into things which weren't actually germane to the job I was doing."

Asked if, when the pressure set in, he ever considered resigning, he says everyone felt occasions when there was "enormous pressure" and questioned, ''Am I doing a good job, am I the right person in the job at the moment, am I able to get the evidence through clearly enough or not? And is my message being heard and understood?

"It's not enough as a science adviser to say 'I just went in there and told them'. It's 'have I done enough and have I assured myself that this has been properly understood?'"