UK Covid inquiry to launch amid continuing row over evidence

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry holds its first public hearing on Tuesday, starting an investigation scheduled to last at least until 2026 and expected to cost well over £100mn. 

Its chair, Baroness Heather Hallett, intends to listen to evidence on almost every aspect of a pandemic that has killed 227,000 people in Britain and infected many millions more, from preparedness and government decision-making to the impact on care homes and the health service.

As well as learning lessons for handling future pandemics, Hallett has made clear she intends the inquiry to “commemorate the hardship and loss that so many people in the UK suffered”.

But the inquiry’s opening has been overshadowed by the resignation from parliament on Friday of former prime minister Boris Johnson over the Commons investigation into whether he lied to parliament over lockdown breaches, as well as an unresolved political and legal storm over the government’s refusal to hand over all the evidence that Hallett believes is essential for a full investigation.

How will the inquiry work and how does it compare with Covid investigations elsewhere? 

The UK inquiry is split into six investigations, called modules, looking at different aspects of Covid and its impact. Module 1 begins on Tuesday with six consecutive weeks questioning 70 witnesses about UK pandemic preparedness and emergency planning.

Ahead of the hearing, the Cabinet Office announced on Monday an updated biological security strategy, including a Biothreats Radar that will monitor developing risks from infectious diseases and biological attacks. It said the government was spending £1.5bn a year on the strategy.

The inquiry’s most contentious sessions are likely to come when Module 2, covering “core political and administrative decision-making”, starts in October.

The inquiry will emphasise its commemorative side on Tuesday, with the screening of a film showing people’s experiences of loss and the unveiling of the first panels of a huge tapestry that will capture the impact of Covid around the country.

To give a voice to people who lost friends and family, the inquiry has launched a project called “Every Story Matters” which enables individuals to describe their experiences. But Thalia Maragh, representing Bereaved Families for Justice, said many families had “simply not engaged” with the project, in part because they wanted to submit evidence directly to the inquiry rather than having their accounts collated by mediators.

Several independent commissions are already investigating the pandemic elsewhere in the world — and Sweden’s has already reported. Responding to criticism of the size and duration of the UK inquiry, lead counsel Hugo Keith KC said few other countries were conducting formal legal proceedings to investigate so many aspects of the pandemic. 

Keith said investigations elsewhere that got started more quickly “did not have the force of law behind them”.

There has already been a huge row about the inquiry. What is that about?

The UK government is at loggerheads with the inquiry over what material it must hand over. The Cabinet Office has taken legal action challenging the inquiry’s request for unredacted WhatsApp messages from ministers and key advisers, arguing that this would breach the privacy of those who had worked in government.

Ministers point out that 55,000 documents have already been passed to the inquiry and insist that only “unambiguously irrelevant” material would be redacted. Hallett has said it is for her to determine what is relevant to her lines of investigation.

Bereaved families and opposition parties have accused the government of mounting a cover-up.

Hannah White, director of the Institute for Government think-tank, warned: “Setting the precedent that people who are the subject of a public inquiry get to define the relevance of it would fundamentally undermine the credibility and value of this and all future public inquiries.”

The government’s judicial review will be heard in court on June 30.

What are the biggest issues facing the inquiry?

The first module “will have to look at the major gaps in UK preparedness”, said Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. “One question will be why the UK didn’t have a flexible response plan. We were preparing for a flu pandemic and then a different virus arrived.”

Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, said: “Before Covid the UK was rated on paper as one of the two or three best-prepared countries in the world. When the pandemic arrived, this turned out to be a myth.”

One issue for the inquiry to examine, Hunter said, was the acute shortage of personal protective equipment. “We had contracts in place to supply PPE but the trouble was that they were just-in-time purchasing contracts which couldn’t be fulfilled when everyone else wanted PPE at the same time. We had stopped stockpiling PPE to save money.”

Perhaps the most emotive question is whether lockdowns were too stringent and lasted too long, causing excessive collateral damage, or whether, on the contrary, they were imposed too slowly and relaxed too soon, at the cost of many thousands of lives.

“Health experts know that lockdowns have a place in fighting a pandemic but the timing and the use made of them should be much smarter than during Covid,” said Michael Head, senior health researcher at the University of Southampton.

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Which politicians’ reputations are on the line? 

Prime minister Rishi Sunak has most to lose reputationally, after weathering the pandemic well as chancellor. He will face intense scrutiny over the economic calculations that played into government decision-making, which were more opaque at the time than the scientific and medical factors.

His image could also be dented by examination of specific Treasury schemes such as the emergency Covid loan programmes, which are estimated to have lost up to £16bn due to fraud and error.

Johnson’s reputation is already deeply scarred but the inquiry nonetheless risks turning up further evidence that leaves his party concluding he is unfit to govern, blocking any potential comeback.

Also under pressure is Matt Hancock, pandemic-era health secretary until he was forced to resign in June 2021 after breaching social distancing guidance by kissing a colleague. Hancock faces interrogation on Covid-testing weaknesses and patient discharges from hospital into care homes. 

Former prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne may also undergo a reappraisal, amid scrutiny of whether they duly weighed up the impact of their austerity measures on the resilience of the health service and the nation’s pandemic preparedness.