Was the Covid Inquiry worth it? Like a Rorschach test, it seems to have confirmed everyone’s preconceptions, either about the pandemic or about the inquiry itself. “A £200m ‘I told you so’”, as some outlets put it, Baroness Hallett’s 800-page report – the work of over three years – has some grim conclusions. The starkest can be filed under “too little, too late”: 23,000 lives could have been saved in the first wave had the UK locked down a week earlier.
But we knew that – or rather, we knew the models drawn up by epidemiologists suggested that. We also knew there were various flaws with those models, thus reigniting the furious rows that raged throughout the pandemic years about lockdowns and mortality estimates and the balance between civil liberties and saving lives. For some, the inclusion of this headline figure confirms just how callous and negligent the government was in its Covid response; others will take it as evidence the Inquiry had its own agenda, or at the very least was overly susceptible to figures that were, in the words of Michael Gove, “projections not predictions”. What we gain from this assessment is debatable.
On the personnel side, too, the report cements existing insights rather than offering new ones. Boris Johnson was indecisive and out of his depth, Dominic Cummings was toxic, Matt Hancock tried to fool everyone that he was in control. No one who has watched any of the core cast being grilled by the Inquiry’s barristers will be surprised by any of this – indeed, much of it was covered in the media in real-time. You’d have to have slept through the pandemic and the subsequent years to have any hope at all that Johnson and his team were likely to come out of this well.
The most frustrating thing is that the political drive-by (such as Cummings engendering a “culture of fear, mutual suspicion and distrust” in the heart of government, or Johnson’s “surprising” decision not to chair a single Cobra meeting in the “lost month” of February 2020) is so intoxicating, it overshadows the less explosive but more critical lessons buried deep in the report. Namely: the failure to in any meaningful way consider the impact on children.
“The vast majority of children were not at risk of serious direct harm from Covid-19,” the report reads. But they suffered greatly from school closures and the sudden shrinking of their social worlds. All four governments in the UK “failed sufficiently to consider the consequences of school closures for children’s education and physical and mental health”. Later, it notes that “the decision as to whether London should be locked down was considered more carefully and at greater length than the decision of 18 March 2020 to close schools”. One of Patrick Vallance’s diaries memos in May 2020 describes Johnson as being “clearly bamboozled” by the issue.
For the most vulnerable children – those at risk of abuse or neglect within the home – the failure to consider the ramifications was even less forgivable. School closures and the wider impact of lockdowns “did not just expose them to greater harm within the home, but also reduced the role of schools as a vital part of the child protection system.” In terms of child protection, “this lack of visibility of children put them at even greater risk”.
The impact on the most disadvantaged – children in small, overcrowded flats with no outdoor space – also got ignored. One of the saddest parts of the report is the quote from Lee Cain, No10’s director of communications, on the lack of diversity when policy was been hashed out and the inevitable result. He recalls asking how many people in the cabinet room had received free school meals. “Nobody had – resulting in a policy and political blindspot”.
Witness evidence from Johnson’s deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara makes a similar point: the lack of women in decision-making spaces (Cain referred to the women who did attend as a “secondary cast”) resulted in glaring policy gaps. Rooms full of men with stay-at-home wives failed to grasp that households of working (or, indeed, single) parents would fare very differently when tasked with juggling childcare and education in lockdown. It should have been obvious that school closures were always going to harm the least advantaged children most. The fact this wasn’t even considered is damning.
None of this is to suggest the risk to children’s education and wellbeing should have taken precedence over the need to reduce transmission and save lives. But it should at least have factored into the decision-making process. The consequences of not doing so can be seen in a multitude of distressing metrics: the rise in school absences, the persistent gap in educational attainment, not to mention the mental health crisis among teenagers and young adults who spent their formative years locked down.
These consequences were not only predictable but predicted at the time. I recall speaking to the disaster planner Lucy Easthope about her experience trying to get officials at the Department for Education to understand that closing schools would have an impact long after those schools reopened: “If you try to imply that education is something that can be sent as an email, you will fundamentally change the relationship between child and school.” Other experts in education, psychology and disaster response stressed the need not just to confront the crisis in the short term but consider the situation three, five, ten years into the future. The government didn’t want to listen.
All of this gets lost in the row over whether 23,000 preventable deaths is an accurate figure, or rehashing the toxicity of Dominic Cummings and incompetence of Matt Hancock. Five and a half years after the UK’s first lockdown was announced, we are still more concerned with the politics and the personalities than confronting the ongoing impact of decisions that were made back then, in rooms full of men who thought they were too clever to listen to outsiders. The Covid Inquiry has been an epic experiment in national group therapy – I know, I sat in on many of the sessions and watched the trauma being unpacked and evaluated in real-time. It’s provided us with villains and a narrative we can understand, all for £2.85 per person.
And the deeper lessons, about groupthink and diversity and how to balance an immediate crisis with the potential damage years into the future? Learning them would serve us and future generations in far better stead and pointing fingers at individuals whose careers in public life are already finished. But that’s not as cathartic as reigniting the blame game.
[Further reading: Tinkering with ECHR definitions will not help the government]
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