The short amount of time allocated for former government ministers including David Cameron and George Osborne to be cross-examined at the Covid-19 public inquiry next week has been described as “alarming” by lawyers for the bereaved.
Cameron will become the first politician to give evidence under oath when he is sworn in on Monday, the inquiry announced. He will be followed by Osborne, as well as Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor; and Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, as the inquiry steps up its investigation into the UK’s preparedness for the pandemic that has claimed at least 226,977 lives in the country.
Cameron is scheduled to appear at 11am in a morning session that usually runs until about 1pm. However, a senior civil servant, Sir Chris Wormald, permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care, must also give evidence in that period. The arrangements suggest Cameron may not be questioned for much more than an hour, although timings are flexible.
Oliver Letwin, a Cabinet Office minister from 2010 to 2016, will give evidence from 10am on Tuesday in a morning session shared with Osborne. Letwin has told the inquiry in a witness statement that the UK was “much better prepared” for an influenza pandemic than for Covid. The Cabinet Office led the UK’s pandemic preparedness and response structures.
“Politicians are well equipped to fend off critical questions and it takes time to pierce their armour,” said Elkan Abrahamson, the lawyer who represents the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group. “We have grave concerns that the time limits will allow the slick politicians to escape accountability for their actions which had such tragic consequences.”
The senior Conservatives are expected to be questioned about the impact of their austerity policies on the readiness of the NHS and social care system and wider levels of public health from 2010 onwards.
“David Cameron and George Osborne have serious questions to answer,” said the Trades Union Congress (TUC) Covid inquiry lead, Nathan Oswin. “It is frustrating they will spend such little time under oath when their austerity policies left the UK so underprepared for the pandemic.”
Doctors, represented through the British Medical Association, on Tuesday told the inquiry that the government’s 2012 health service changes “fractured the links between public health specialists and NHS” and that the UK went into the pandemic with too few hospital beds. These failures were “brutally exposed by the pandemic and the systems are now in an even worse state”.
The TUC, representing workers, has urged the inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, to closely consider the effects of pre-pandemic austerity. In his opening statement, Hugo Keith KC, counsel to the inquiry, told Lady Hallett: “If you conclude that as a country, we were insufficiently resilient and that in future, different political and financial choices may have to be made in order to render us better able to [deal with the] shock, you will want to say so.”
The inquiry will also hear next week from England’s former and current chief medical officers Dame Sally Davies and Sir Chris Whitty, the former chief scientific advisers Sir Mark Walport and Sir Patrick Vallance, and several senior civil servants in the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health and Social Care.
In the third day of evidence, David Alexander, professor of risk and disaster reduction at University College London and an expert witness to the inquiry, warned that the government was still not doing enough to keep the public safe from future risks.
He told the inquiry the UK was “very good at foresight” and running planning exercises but “the extent to which the results of such exercises are taken into account … is a very different matter”.
“The bottom line is: do you think the British government within the limits of his competency keeps the public safe?” he said. “My answer to that is no, or not sufficiently.”
He said contingency plans had time horizons that were too short and needed to be more adaptable.
“Government has an essential, fundamental and central role in providing safety to its population and I think they could do more and better in that.”
Alexander and Bruce Mann, former director of the Cabinet Office civil contingencies secretariat and an expert witness, also said preparations for a possible no-deal Brexit affected important government pandemic preparations.
These included work to refresh the UK’s 2011 pandemic preparedness strategy and pandemic influenza communication strategy, as well as on healthcare provision, adult social care and the design of central response structures.
This was “not a political point”, Mann said. For the Northern Ireland executive, Brexit planning was broadly beneficial in terms of building generic resilience and preparedness.
Another witness, David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, described how “precision lockdowns” helped Asian countries with experience of Sars keep mortality rates up to 10 times lower than in the UK.
He said South Korea reported 680 Covid deaths for every million in the population and Singapore 294, whereas the UK reported 3,038, the US 3,344 and Italy 3,150.
Asian countries “locked down where the source of infection was”, he said. “That’s good, basic epidemiology and outbreak control.”
He said failures in preparedness could have been prevented by “ensuring a surge capacity within the NHS that is available from the start of an epidemic or pandemic, and more effectively encouraging healthy lifestyles that prevent obesity and comorbidities that make people more susceptible to serious illness and death after infection.”
The inquiry continues.
