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" "[From MacNamara's written evidence] For example, the long-term impact of a generation of young people being deprived of schooling and peer-group contact for an extended period of time were hard to bring in as a balancing argument because the harm was not immediately quantifiable, or amenable to being reduced into a data set and presented in a diagram.
Similarly, less visible impacts suffer in this format. I remember it being far too difficult to get people to pay attention to domestic violence and lockdown - and the No 10 Private Secretary (Hannah Young) having to push back against the assertion that it was not an urgent problem because it was “not showing up in the data".
Helen MacNamara CB (born c. 1976) is a British former civil servant, who served as the Deputy Cabinet Secretary in the Cabinet Office from 2020 to 2021. She had previously worked as Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet from January 2019 and was Director General for Propriety and Ethics in 2018. Previous to this, she was the Director General for Housing and Planning in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. She worked for Jeremy Heywood in the Cabinet Secretariat from 2013 to 2016. As a Director in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport she worked on the London 2012 Olympic bid and staging of the 2012 Summer Olympics. Earlier in her career, she worked as Principal Private Secretary to Tessa Jowell and was responsible for setting up the Leveson Inquiry into British media ethics and the subsequent cross-party response.
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[From MacNamara's written evidence] In terms of the policy response the exclusion of a female perspective led to significant negative consequences, including the lack of thought given to childcare in the context of school closures.
There was a serious lack of thinking about domestic abuse and the vulnerable, about carers and informal networks for how people look after each other in families and communities.
[From MacNamara's written statement about a meeting in the prime minister's study on on Friday, 13 March 2020] I have just been talking to the official Mark Sweeney, who is in charge of coordinating with the Department for Health. He said I have been told for years that there is a whole plan for this. There is no plan.
We are in huge trouble. I have come through here to the Prime Minister’s office to tell you all that I think we are absolutely f-----.
I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people. As soon as I have been told this, I have come through to see you. It seems from the conversation you are having that that is correct.