Britain’s pandemic response was among the worst and the NHS had been ‘seriously weakened’, says leading surgeon

• Three reports lay bare scale of NHS malaise, but will Reeves fund a remedy?

Britain was hit far harder by the Covid-19 pandemic than other developed countries because the NHS had been “seriously weakened” by disastrous government policies over the preceding decade, a wide-ranging report will conclude this week.

An assessment of the NHS by the world-renowned surgeon Prof Ara Darzi, commissioned in July by the health secretary, Wes Streeting, will find that the health service reduced its “routine healthcare activity by a far greater percentage than other health systems” in many key areas during the Covid crisis.