Boris Johnson has announced the launch of the Covid public inquiry and finalised its terms of reference. Sessions will take place across the UK from next year as it aims to identify lessons from the government’s handling of the pandemic. The announcement comes days after bereaved families warned they could take legal action against the government over delays.
Inquiry chair Baroness Hallett said the hearings would be “firmly independent”, with reports issued regularly. More details about the next stages of the inquiry will be set out next month, the former High Court judge said. She said her team would travel around the UK to hear people’s experiences.
Baroness Hallett will also examine how Covid affected different categories of people, its effect on bereaved families and how the findings could be applied to other national emergencies. She said a “listening exercise” was scheduled for autumn to allow anyone who wanted to share their experiences to do so.
In a letter to Baroness Hallett, the prime minister said he accepted “in full” the terms she had set out for the inquiry, calling them “broad and challenging”. He said he would appoint two more panel members to the investigation in the coming months so it has “access to the full range of expertise needed”.
The inquiry’s aims include:
- Listening to the experiences of people affected by Covid by travelling across the UK
- Making the inquiry open, fair and balanced
- Publishing regular reports on the progress
- Preventing suffering and hardship in any future pandemic
It will look at how decisions on limiting the spread of Covid were made and communicated, the use of lockdowns and face coverings, the impact of the pandemic on children and health and care sector workers and the protection of the clinically vulnerable.
Hannah Brady, spokesperson for the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice campaign, said the launch was “a special day for bereaved families from all corners of the country” and hoped “our awful experiences are learned from”. But she said it was “pitiful” that the investigation was launched two days after the campaign group said it was considering a judicial review over “time wasting”. “It goes to show that the government were simply delaying the process for as long as they could get away with,” she added.
Several reports have already put the UK government’s handling of the pandemic under the spotlight.
In total more than 179,000 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive Covid test. But the number of people with Covid on their death certificates is more than 196,000.
It’s unlikely that any report will highlight BJ’s indifference to the onset of the pandemic - he preferred to shack up with Ms Symonds at Chequers to attending COBRA meetings. How much emphasis is placed on BJ’s procrastination and subsequent prevarication is also open to question. There is no question about his decision to release infected elderly patients back into care, though - thousands of unnecessary deaths resulting from that decision couldn’t be hidden. The government’s incompetence, profligacy and corruption have all been documented by critics and, of course, the PM has a criminal record. If, indeed, the report is "full, it should run to more than a dozen volumes.
