Last week the former chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, said that our pandemic policy had “damaged a generation”. I was asked to advise the government on our pandemic response — and I completely agree with her. Thanks to the government’s Covid policy, rates of anorexia and other eating disorders in teens are rising; so are depression and self-harm. What is particularly painful, however, is that I warned the government this would happen and I was ignored.

I am an emergency planner — it’s my job to prepare us for the myriad risks and threats that we face as a nation and to consider the consequences of the action we take. I have been working on our pandemic preparedness since 2001 as an independent adviser to the Cabinet Office and the Home Office.

At the beginning of the pandemic I was asked to provide advice to the Department for Education, the Department of Health and Social Care and the prime minister’s office, and I was specifically asked to consider the needs of children and the effects that school closures might have on them. My view on the matter was clear: I repeatedly warned the government and their advisers that closing schools would cause serious damage to mental health, development and life chances of children. I warned that it would lead to a rise in child abuse cases and school avoidance. Many of these things we now know to be true.