Bills for the Covid-19 public inquiry have already hit £85m despite hearings not starting until next year, after the government hired top legal and public relations firms.
Departments making key decisions during the pandemic have hired leading law firms on multimillion-pound contracts alongside specialist firms tasked with sifting through millions of sensitive documents and emails for disclosure.
As current and former ministers prepare to face intense scrutiny of their actions when hearings begin in earnest in summer 2023, the Department of Health and Social Care, which oversaw controversial policies on admissions of potentially infected hospital patients into care homes, has hired Pinsent Masons on a £2.2m legal services contract, and the Cabinet Office has hired the same firm on a £7m “public inquiry response unit co-partnering contract”. It has also hired Burges Salmon, another law firm, on a £9.8m legal services deal.
The early outlays of public funds suggest the UK-wide inquiry into the response to and impact of the pandemic will be one of the most expensive ever statutory public inquiries. The costs were totted up by Tussell, a company that monitors government contracts, and first reported by Politico.
The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group said: “If [the inquiry chair] Baroness Hallett allows powerful institutions to run up the costs with eye-wateringly expensive lawyers just to protect their reputations then the inquiry would be a shocking waste of time and money.”
On behalf of the inquiry, the government has agreed a £500,000 “strategic communications” deal with Crest Advisory, an agency founded by a former Downing Street adviser, and it is spending £64,000 on monitoring media coverage of the inquiry, beyond what its own press offices already do.
The inquiry’s own costs appear likely to exceed £100m, while further costs will be borne by the taxpayer through the government legal department and the funding of representation for core participants, which are likely to include bereaved groups, the NHS, representatives of disproportionately affected minorities, and town halls that had a key role in the public health response.
The narrower Grenfell Tower inquiry has been running for more than four years and has so far spent £88m on core costs of the chair, secretariat, legal team and experts, as well as the venue. A further £61m has been spent on lawyers for the core participants.
A spokesperson for the government legal department said the government required “significant legal support, which departments will procure at their own discretion from approved internal and external sources”. They added: “All appointments represent value for money and ensure that the inquiry can fulfil its remit.”
A spokesperson for the inquiry said: “Annual accounts for the UK Covid-19 inquiry will be published on the inquiry website.”
The Covid inquiry’s chair, Heather Hallett, formally opened proceedings in July and said the sprawling investigation would be broken down into at least nine modules, which will run one after another. She said it would examine the “performance and effectiveness” of central government decision-making and its messaging – topics likely to expose current and former ministers.
Lady Hallett faces a trade-off between speed and covering every angle of the pandemic. She said in her opening remarks in July that she wanted to move as “speedily as possible so lessons are learned before another pandemic strikes” and that inequalities would be “at the forefront” of the investigation.
But in a sign of the potential for mission creep, NGOs including Oxfam GB and the People’s Vaccine Alliance have urged her to widen the scope to examine how the UK’s policy on buying up vaccines affected poorer parts of the world and how the UK government “shut out expertise from the global south and allowed great disparity in access to health tools worldwide, allowing the threat of new variants to remain”.
The terms of reference were set earlier in the summer after a public consultation and appear unlikely to change. The first preliminary hearing establishing how the module examining the UK’s preparedness will take place on 20 September, but substantive evidence hearings will not happen before next summer.
• This article was amended on 23 August 2022. Based on information provided by Tussell, an earlier version said incorrectly that the £500,000 “strategic communications” deal with Crest Advisory was agreed by the Home Office.
