The Covid Inquiry has just released its second official report into the UK’s management of the pandemic – and it has torn into Boris Johnson’s government.
Its first report, released in July 2024, critiqued the planning system and the “dangerously mistaken belief” the UK was better prepared for a pandemic than other countries.
This second report is 800 pages long, and examined how the government responded once Covid cases started to hit the UK.
Here’s a look at some of its most revealing findings which the inquiry chair, former Court of Appeal judge, Baroness Hallett, revealed today…
1. UK’s response was ‘too little, too late’
“The inquiry finds that the response of the four governments repeatedly amounted to a case of ‘too little, too late’,” the report reads.
“The failure to appreciate the scale of the threat, or the urgency of response it demanded, meant that by the time the possibility of a mandatory lockdown was first considered it was already too late and a lockdown had become unavoidable.”
It notes that the early Covid crisis in Italy “should have prompted urgent planning across the four nations”, adding: “Instead, the government did not take the pandemic seriously enough until it was too late.”
The report suggests that government scientists underestimated how quickly the virus could be spreading in the early days, too, and that there was also a lack of trust between devolved governments and Westminster.
2. Lockdown could have been avoided
The report suggested if the government had introduced voluntary measures earlier, a mandatory lockdown could have been avoided altogether.
Even if lockdown had been imposed just one week earlier – such as on March 16 – the number of deaths in England caused by the first wave of the virus could have halved, and 23,000 lives may have been saved.
But by the second week of March, the situation was “little short of calamitous” with no proper plan and no testing.
To make matters worse, lockdown was not announced until March 23, 2020 – 18 days after the first person in the UK had died after testing positive for the virus.
3. There was a ‘toxic and chaotic culture inside No.10’
Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings was blamed for cultivating a “culture of fear, mutual suspicion and distrust that poisoned the atmosphere” in No.10.
The report says this then affected the quality of advice and decision-making.
Cummings’ infamous trip to Durham and Barnham Castle also “undermined public confidence in decision making” and increased the risk of people choosing not to follow the rules.
Johnson, meanwhile, did not show the “prime ministerial leadership” needed to “inject urgency into the response”, according to the report.
4. February 2020 was a ‘lost month’
The report asks why then prime minister Johnson did not chair a single Cobra emergency committee meeting that month, at a time when Covid cases across Europe were soaring.
“Mr Johnson should have appreciated sooner that this was an emergency that required prime ministerial leadership to inject urgency into the response,” the report reads.
It also notes that responding to Covid essentially paused during half-term – and that time could have enabled Britain to act sooner.
Johnson spent the whole week holed up in one of the government’s grace-and-favour residences, Chevening, where he was not kept up-to-date on the virus at all.
The report says: “It does not appear that he was briefed, at all or to any significant extent, on Covid-19 and he received no daily updates.”
5. The same ‘inexcusable’ mistakes were repeated
The first lockdown was implemented in the “genuine and reasonable belief it was required,” according to Baroness Hallett.
She said: “They had no choice by then. But it was through their own acts and omissions that they had no choice.”
The report then claims these same errors were repeated when it comes to the subsequent lockdowns.
It claims that not only did none of the UK’s four governments had a strategy for when or how they would exit the first lockdown, but they also did not “give enough attention to the possibility of a second wave”.
The inquiry concluded the UK went on to make the same errors even as subsequent waves of Covid hit the country.
Hallett did later praise the UK’s vaccine programme, calling it a “remarkable achievement” – but noted that the failure to take “swift and decisive action, yet again” led to another lockdown in early 2021.
6. Johnson acted with his own ‘optimistic disposition’
At the start of 2020, Johnson was too optimistic that Covid would amount to nothing – and so he chose to prioritise other governmental issues, according to report.
Hallett also pointed to partygate – when officials and politicians broke social distancing rules in Downing Street – for causing “huge distress” to the public and increasing the number of people who would not follow the rules.
7. Matt Hancock ‘overpromised and underdelivered’
Matt Hancock, then the health secretary, developed a reputation for “overpromising and under-delivering” when he was in government.
He had allegedly told the cabinet “time and time again” that the UK could cope with Covid, but “any confidence that there were detailed and carefully considered procedures in place was misplaced”.
Baroness Hallett said: “There were also concerns about Mr Hancock’s truthfulness and reliability in UK government meetings.”
The Department of Health also offered “misleading assurances” that the country was well-prepared for such an emergency.
Hancock’s behaviour also compounded Johnson’s “optimism” that the virus would amount to nothing.
8. Advisers’ fear over ‘behavioural fatigue’ were unfounded
The report suggested government advisers and scientists held off on imposing lockdown measures out of fear the public would stop following the rules.
However, the report said such a concern “had no grounding in behavioural science and proved damaging, given the imperative to act more decisively and sooner”.
Medical adviser for England, professor Chris Whitty, was also criticised in the report because he “did not wish the UK to be the first country to abandon containment” and felt it was best to wait for the World Health Orgianisation to accept there was a pandemic.
But the report claims this was the “wrong approach, given the extent of the spread of the virus within the UK”.
9. Government gave the public ‘false hope’
Rishi Sunak’s “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme from August 2020 – where the government subsidised food and drinks to boost the hospitality sector – was torn apart, too.
The report warns it was “devised in the absence of any scientific advice” and “undermined public health messaging”.
The second national lockdown was introduced in England on November 5.
But the government then suggested restrictions could ease over Christmas, giving the public “false hope” – considering a new lockdown was implemented at the start of January.
What happens next?
The political fallout will likely continue in the coming days, although it’s hard to gauge the impact considering most of the primary figures involved in the decision-making at the height of the pandemic have since quit.
The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group said while its findings were “vindicating”, it is “devastating to think of the lives that could have been saved under a different prime minister”.
Just under 227,000 people in the UK with Covid listed as one of the causes on their death certificate.
The Covid Inquiry has urged all four UK governments to “learn the lessons” in order to avoid lockdowns in future pandemics.
In a written parliamentary statement, prime minister Keir Starmer acknowledged the failings and insisted that “improvements have been made to the way the government would respond to a major crisis”.
He noted: “That said, it is clear that local government and our public services, including the NHS, are under immense pressure and in many cases have not fully recovered from the pandemic.”
Meanwhile, the Cabinet Office promised at the start of this year that it was in the middle of the “largest ever simulation of a pandemic in UK history”.
The Liberal Democrats have called on Kemi Badenoch to apologise on behalf of the Tories over their “abject failure”.
