Former prime minister David Cameron and his then chancellor George Osborne will give evidence about how prepared the country was for a pandemic to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry next week.
Deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden and current chancellor Jeremy Hunt are also on the witness list for the week beginning June 19, alongside chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty and former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance.
The inquiry, which launched its public hearings on Tuesday, is split into six areas - with the first looking at whether the UK was adequately prepared for the pandemic before 2020.
On Wednesday the Department of Health accepted pandemic restrictions caused “profound loneliness, pain and anguish” telling the panel it would not argue it got “everything right” in its response.
Fiona Scolding KC, a lawyer representing the department, said the Government was often faced with a choice between “hugely unpalatable options” and decisions were “finely balanced”.
She asked the inquiry to bear in mind the context in which the department was making policy decisions, which she accepted “with the benefit of hindsight” may have been different.
Ms Scolding told Wednesday’s hearing: “The department recognises the strength of feeling among some that certain of the decisions made by us were wrong. For example, some people feel lockdown should have been introduced earlier and for longer; others hold an opposite and contrary view.
“What the department was often faced with was a choice between a series of hugely unpalatable options, all of which were certain to have negative impacts on the citizens of the United Kingdom in one way or another.
“Decisions were often extremely finely balanced. Contrary decisions could rationally have been made, resulting in a very different set of outcomes.
“The department will not seek, during the course of this inquiry, to say that it did everything right, or that it would necessarily have made the same decisions today in 2023 with the benefit of hindsight.”
It comes after lead lawyer to the inquiry Hugo Keith KC suggested a Government preoccupation with planning for departure from the EU may have “crowded out” the work needed to respond to the health emergency that claimed over 225,000 lives.
Links were again drawn between Brexit and the pandemic on Wednesday, with a lawyer for the Welsh Government suggesting the UK’s pandemic influenza review was paused in 2018 because of withdrawal preparations.
Interim reports are scheduled to be published before public hearings conclude by summer 2026.
