The impact of austerity and Brexit on the UK’s readiness for Covid will be spelt out at noon on Thursday when the statutory public inquiry into the pandemic gives its first verdict on the country’s response.
Politicians including David Cameron, George Osborne and Matt Hancock are braced to face criticism about their decision-making and priorities in the years running up to the arrival of Covid in early 2020 sparking a pandemic that claimed at least 230,000 lives across the UK.
Senior health officials will also be held accountable for a strategy that focused heavily on pandemic flu. Heather Hallett, the former court of appeal judge chairing the inquiry, is likely to draw conclusions about the lack of transparency over pandemic-planning exercises in the years before Covid, including one into pandemic flu which warned: “The UK’s current preparedness … is not sufficient to cope with the extreme demands of a severe pandemic.”
Brenda Doherty, a spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, a group representing nearly 7,000 bereaved people, said the report – the first of at least 10 planned in the next two to three years – would be “a huge milestone for bereaved families like mine”.
Doherty’s mother, Ruth Burke, 82, died from Covid acquired in hospital while awaiting discharge in March 2020 in Northern Ireland. She said: “The years leading up to [this] have been draining. We know, however, that the inquiry’s recommendations have the potential to save lives in the future, if lessons have been learned from the loss of our loved ones.”
Families of people who died with Covid will gather outside the public inquiry hearing rooms in Paddington, west London, on Thursday before joining doctors from the British Medical Association (BMA) and representatives of the Trades Union Congress at the Covid memorial wall across the river from the Houses of Parliament.
In her report on module one of the inquiry looking into resilience and preparedness, Lady Hallett will reach conclusions on the government’s handling of the national stockpile of personal protective equipment as well as the UK’s emergency preparedness, resilience and response structures. These were deemed so complex during the summer 2023 evidence hearings that they were repeatedly compared to “a bowl of spaghetti”.
A key finding will centre on whether it was reasonable for the government to have focused planning for an influenza, rather than coronavirus, pandemic. Another will be on how little planning was given to the need for, and consequences of, lockdowns.
The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group is calling for urgent reforms from the Labour government, including the appointment of a secretary of state for resilience and civil emergencies, a standing scientific committee on pandemics, crisis training for ministers and officials and the establishment of a “red team” to challenge pandemic preparations.
A spokesperson said: “Plans for a pandemic were fatally inadequate; they were outdated, poorly communicated across the government, disregarded the impact of inequalities and were primarily concerned with pandemic flu. Such pandemic planning as there was did not address inequalities, and nothing was done to mitigate vulnerabilities caused by structural discrimination, institutional racism or health inequalities. Our loved ones, colleagues and communities paid the price for that failure.”
In what the former health secretary Matt Hancock called “a flawed doctrine”, the UK had planned for pandemic flu, which has symptomatic transmission, helping people know when to isolate. There were no plans for lockdowns or quarantining. The national risk assessment in 2019 said there was a moderate risk of an emerging respiratory coronavirus infection, but assessed it would kill only 2,000 people.
Hallett was also asked to consider why mortality was 2.6 times higher in the most deprived than the least deprived tenth of areas; why mortality was highest in people from the Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Black Caribbean communities; and why rates were higher among people with a self-reported disability or a learning disability.
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Addressing Hallett during last summer’s hearings, the counsel to the inquiry, Hugo Keith, said: “The big question for module one is to what extent were those terrible outcomes either foreseen or capable of mitigation? Fundamentally, in relation to significant aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic, we were taken by surprise?”
Under cross-examination, Cameron and Osborne, who were prime minister and chancellor respectively from 2010 to 2016, denied austerity was a factor in the response, with Osborne saying that cutting the deficit “had a material and positive effect on the UK’s ability to respond” to Covid.
But the BMA told Hallett that “after six weeks of hearings it is clear that the UK entered the pandemic with critically under-resourced and underfunded health and public health services”.
Keith said the inquiry would draw conclusions about “to what degree have our public services, especially those of health and social care, suffered from underinvestment?”
Hallett heard evidence the UK had been made more vulnerable by Brexit. Sixteen separate pandemic preparation projects were “stopped” or reduced as a result of officials being diverted to brace for a no-deal Brexit.
