[10] The bill to implement the proposals was introduced to the House of Commons in January 2011, and was the subject of a report by the Health Select Committee in October.

[16] The 2012 Act, which established PHE as a national body, also returned the responsibility for a range of community and public health services to local authorities.

[18] The move was in response to mistakes in decision making during the COVID-19 pandemic, including issues with the supply of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers, low community testing capabilities, and insufficient data resourcing.

[19] Several health experts, including Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust, criticised the move to abolish PHE during an ongoing pandemic,[20][21] with Richard Murray, Chief Executive of The King's Fund, stating that PHE "appears to have been found guilty without a trial" and it is "unclear what problem government are hoping to solve".

[23] PHE would be combined with NHS Test and Trace to form a National Institute for Health Protection, under a new leadership structure headed by Conservative peer Dido Harding as interim CEO.

[citation needed] While it was originally announced that PHE would be wound up on 31 March 2021, the body continued to have a 'shadow existence' until 1 October 2021, to support the transition of responsibilities to its successor organisations.

[33] Other senior personnel include:[34] PHE took over the responsibility for 'Be Clear on Cancer' campaigns after it was created in the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

[41] PHE carried out contact tracing in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, but this ceased on 12 March 2020 in view of the wide spread of infection in the population.

[42] From 19 March, consistent with the opinion of the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens, PHE no longer classified COVID-19 as a "high consequence infectious disease" (HCID).

This reversed an interim recommendation made in January 2020, due to more information about the disease confirming low overall mortality rates, greater clinical awareness, and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.

Concerns were raised – by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine[47][48] and others – that PHE's figures were over-estimates, since they included anyone who had a positive COVID-19 test, no matter how long ago.

[54] The following month, economists at the University of Warwick estimated that the delayed contact tracing led to more than 125,000 additional infections and 1,500 deaths,[55] although PHE disputed their findings.

[58] The agency was criticised by The Lancet for allegedly using weak evidence in a review of electronic cigarettes to endorse an estimate that e-cigarette use is 95% less hazardous than smoking: "it is on this extraordinarily flimsy foundation that PHE based the major conclusion and message of its report" ... this "raises serious questions not only about the conclusions of the PHE report, but also about the quality of the agency's peer review process.

"[59] Authors of the PHE report subsequently published a document clarifying that their endorsement of the 95% claim did not stand on the single study criticised in The Lancet, but on their broad review of toxicological evidence.