The government has promised a public inquiry into the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Given the high death toll, spread in care homes, problems with testing and personal protective equipment, it had little choice.
Yet public inquiries, though regularly demanded and occasionally delivered, can be frustrating affairs, not so much because of their conclusions but because of the time taken to reach them. Moreover, this crisis is far from over. The epidemiologists’ warnings that Covid-19 would be hard to suppress have turned out to be correct and, while vaccine developments are encouraging, mass inoculation is still months away. An inquiry that did not begin until the pandemic was declared to be over might produce a measure of delayed accountability and some obvious lessons for the next health emergency but would have little value in helping us address the current set of challenges. Yet, at such a demanding time, an inquiry now could well be an additional burden for hard-pressed ministers and their departments. Is there a way to set things in motion to get timely results in a way that does not turn into a major distraction?
First, we need to decide what we want from an inquiry. There are usually three basic objectives. The first is to provide a reliable account of what actually happened. This requires looking at the processes of decision-making, from the gathering of information and identification of options to practical implementation. The second is to expose wrongdoing, for example culpable negligence or errors which, even with the benefit of hindsight, were clearly egregious. The third is to “learn lessons,” which normally take the form of recommendations to improve processes.
The panel of the Iraq Inquiry, on which I sat, decided, after toying with a shorter report, that it had to go for a detailed account of the sequence of events being covered. Some eight years of decision-making was being assessed. This helps explain why the report took us so long to complete. Given the controversies surrounding the decision to go to war and, to be frank, the expectations that the inquiry was there to provide a whitewash, the detail was vital, even though this involved tortuous negotiations on getting key documents declassified. In the end the advantage of this approach was that not only did it provide a firm foundation for assigning blame and making recommendations, but also supplied others with the evidence to develop alternative explanations of what went wrong (inquiries are rarely set up to look at what went right) and consider issues that were given insufficient attention.
The first task of a Covid-19 inquiry will also be to establish the facts of this tragic episode. This may involve extracting evidence from reluctant witnesses and recalcitrant bureaucracies anxious to protect their reputations. Yet the real challenge in this case will lie in investigating a situation with a global context and many diverse strands. The difficulty may lie not so much in gathering evidence, for there is a mass of material already available, but in developing a framework within which it can be analysed and the actions of the government and other public bodies evaluated. It is therefore important not to be bound by standard models of what we think an inquiry should look like, with a suitable judge taking charge or perhaps, like the one in which I was involved, presided over by a committee of privy counsellors. This will require a different approach.
While there may be some confidentiality issues in this case, there are comparatively few complicated issues of national security involved to get in the way of transparency (intelligence sources, privileged conversations with foreign governments and so on). Moreover, much is already known. It is possible to trace the development of scientific advice (SAGE is putting its minutes and papers into the public domain). A number of parliamentary committees have conducted extensive hearings while there has also been some first-rate investigative journalism.
The problem is that the number of discrete issues and the amount of pertinent information threatens to be overwhelming. The performance of a number of bodies will need to be scrutinised—the NHS, Public Health England, the Care Quality Commission—but also the differing responses and outcomes of the four parts of the UK. Nor can an inquiry have a narrow UK national focus. Around the world countries have been facing the same issues and dealing with them in a variety of ways. It has become common to make unfavourable comparisons between the UK and those with lower death tolls, but whether or not these are fair depends on assumptions about starting points and the feasibility of the various possible interventions (border closures, testing and contact tracing, quarantines, partial or total lockdowns). National statistics vary enormously in their reliability and how they were reached. Without comparisons evaluation is impossible—but the comparisons are not straightforward. Some countries that seemed exemplary in their responses or just lucky in escaping the worst early on have latterly been hit, often quite badly.
The current situation is too urgent to wait for an inquiry’s recommendations. If organisations are not fit for purpose they should be reformed now. During the course of the crisis a number of organisations have changed and new ones—for example the Joint Biosecurity Centre—have come into being. Views about appropriate and effective measures have been revised with an improved understanding of the nature of the virus. The problems of closing borders are now better appreciated while masks have moved from apparently being pointless and counterproductive to being mandatory.
Those opposing lockdowns have pointed to the economic costs, and it will be important to assess the interaction of economic and public health considerations. There is now great anxiety about winter months as Covid-19 mingles with seasonal flu and the weather pushes everybody indoors. Even as an effective vaccine moves into production, rolling out a mass inoculation programme will not be simple or without controversy. How this is handled may also be a topic worthy of an inquiry.
There is no point in making a Covid inquiry of such potential range and complexity judicial. Interrogating witnesses may provide the spectacle but in this case most of the evidence can be gathered away from hearings. The hard work will lie in analysing the material, and in developing and applying an evaluative framework that can stand the test of time. A single wise old judge is not going to be able to take account of the wealth of material and produce a useful report in sufficient time. This will need a panel of individuals—independent and with open minds—with backgrounds in a number of fields, including public health, medicine, bio-medical research, statistics, epidemiology, economics, organisations and policy-making. Such a panel could oversee a number of distinctive strands simultaneously. This would need a sizeable staff, including a research director to make sure that there was no duplication of the extensive research effort already underway globally.
All things considered what should the process look like? There is no need to work in secret or hold back until a final report. The panel could publish interim reports and special studies, seeking to raise the level of the ongoing public debate and contribute to policy-making. An authoritative judgment on the government’s performance will be required, which may end up being more positive that the current consensus on this matter. It could hardly be more damning. There will be successes to point to (hopefully vaccines) and uncertainties to acknowledge. The main value of an inquiry, after such a traumatic time, is to make possible a general reckoning. Why we were caught out by this terrible virus and why did it hit us so badly?
