The COVID inquiry should have been narrower and more focused … here is why

I’m not sure that the current COVID public inquiry in the UK is proving to be very useful.  So far, we seem to have discovered the following big pieces of information. 

• The Boris Johnson government gave every appearance of being dysfunctional and chaotic.
• The UK was underprepared for this type of pandemic and that was in part due to the fact that we were gearing up for an influenza pandemic.

I say “seem to …” because I suspect that like me you are thinking “but we knew that already.”  AS I’ve commented previously, the inquiry seems to be getting sucked into two rabbit holes.

1. A lot of political intrigue about who was saying what about who in social media conversations.
2. The minutiae of what difference a delay of one or two weeks might have made. 

The political intrigue is irrelevant and the “minutiae” questions risk ending up seconding guessing with some hindsight.  We also risk looking in all the wrong places.  It prevents us from asking bigger questions.  To be sure, perhaps more lives would have been saved if we had gone into lock down two weeks earlier than we did.  However, perhaps we would not have needed such lockdowns if we had been able to close down international travel or take London specific measures.   

I believe that it would be better to keep the inquiry focused on the following questions.

1. Did we have the processes and systems in place to enable us to respond quickly and effectively to a public health crisis of this kind?
2. Were the processes and systems effectively followed?
3. Were the decisions made as a result of these systems effectively implemented.

Now, such an inquiry would be intentionally narrow and hopefully that would shorten the time taken and reduce costs. I believe it would also enable us to reach better decisions from it. I also would argue that you need the right people running it.  The chair of the current inquiry may be an eminent criminal law judge and the inquiry’s lead advocate may be a distinguished KC in areas of financial law but does that give them the relevant expertise, competency and temperament for this type of inquiry?  Really you need it to be led by people whose competency is around areas concerning public health or related fields.

I understand that some people would be concerned that if we went down the road I’m suggesting that by keeping the inquiry focused on public health then the presumption would simply be that we had to do more to minimise transmission, that people wouldn’t ask questions about the wider socio-economic impact.  Well of course, the inquiry would have less to say about such things but the systems in place should have factored in the environment we were in. However, I think such questions belong properly outside of the inquiry’s remit.

Why? Well, because we would be moving into the field of politics. Consider two things here. First, where do you stop?  Were COVID measures economically damaging?  Well probably yes. However, to what extent is that because we shouldn’t have taken those measures and how much of it is because of the economic background.  What if it hadn’t struck just after Brexit? What if we hadn’t seen so many cutbacks over the previous decade? And if we go down that route, then would we have needed to make those cuts if the Blair-Brown Government hadn’t made various decisions back in the noughties?  So where exactly do you stop?

Then look at it from another perspective.  Imagine that instead of the inquiry being about a health crisis, it was about a war. Imagine we had found ourselves in the Ukraine’s position, invaded by a large, hostile neighbour.  After the war, a public inquiry might look at the state of our intelligence services, and the preparedness of our armed forces.  It might even look at our Defence procurement processes too. The inquiry could comment on various aspects of our operational capability.  However, the one big question you wouldn’t want the inquiry to answer would be “Should we have fought the war at all?”  Such decisions belong in a different arena, just as we recognised in the pandemic that politicians had to make the final decisions not experts because they had to consider other factors.

So, in my opinion, a better approach would be a narrowly focused inquiry with its conclusions submitted to Parliament.  It would be for the House of Commons through Select committees and a final debate on the floor of the House to look at the bigger picture.  The inquiry might conclude that the right processes were or were not in place and that decisions were or were not properly executed.  It will be the politicians to determine whether or not the right decisions were made and why.  Of  course, final responsibility for that decision should lie with us, the public.