Covid inquiry reaches ‘bittersweet’ final day of witness testimony

Bereaved families have marked the final day of witness testimony in the long-running Covid inquiry by saying government “incompetence, chaos and callousness is now on the public record”.Matt Fowler, the co-founder of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK (CBFFJ), urged officials to use the inquiry as a blueprint “to take brave, decisive, urgent action” and warned that the country was still not prepared for a future crisis.“We will continue to fight for the inquiry’s recommendations to be implemented in full, and we will push back against the growing tide of conspiracy theorists that want to ignore the evidence and politicise saving lives,” he said outside Dorland House in London, where the inquiry hearings took place.The Covid inquiry has become the most expensive in history, with total costs now at £203.98m, covering the inquiry setup, the chair and lawyers’ salaries and the running of hearings.Previously the most expensive public inquiry was the Bloody Sunday inquiry, which cost £191.2m. The Covid inquiry has been criticised by groups such as the Taxpayers’ Alliance for being long and costly.A Covid inquiry spokesperson said it had a broader scope than any previous public inquiry and the now completed public hearings were the most expensive part of its work.In total there were 238 public hearing days held across the UK, with 381 individual witnesses and more than 600,000 evidence documents, equating to about 5m pages of evidence.Last year, the government said there were 286 full-time staff members working on the inquiry’s 10 separate investigations, called modules.These covered resilience and preparedness, decision-making and political governance, the healthcare system, vaccines, procurement, the care sector, test and trace, children and young people, the economic response and the impact on society.Evidence for all 10 modules has now been heard, but the inquiry chair, Lady Hallett, has published her final findings only on the first two.Her first report concluded that the UK’s pandemic planning was beset by “fatal strategic flaws” and that citizens were failed, while the second accused Boris Johnson of presiding over a “toxic and chaotic” culture in government and said he could have saved 20,000 lives if he had locked down a week earlier.CBFFJ, the group of more than 7,000 families who pushed for an inquiry, have broadly welcomed the findings, saying they were “hard-hitting, clear-sighted and damning”, while adding that the recommendations should have gone further.On Wednesday afternoon, a large group of bereaved people gathered on the steps outside the inquiry holding photos of their deceased family members and signs with slogans such as “Partygate is your legacy Boris”. They held a minute’s silence for the victims of the pandemic and vowed to keep fighting for justice.Naomi Fulop, whose 94-year-old mother, Christina, died in January 2021 after contracting Covid at home from a care worker who wasn’t equipped with adequate PPE, said the day was “bittersweet” for families.“It’s very satisfying to have got the end of an inquiry we fought for, and the two reports vindicate what we’ve been saying for years, but there’s also sadness. It’s a big moment,” she said.“There are times when it has been very hard to listen to, but I want everything to be exposed, even if its painful. There are people who came every day. And this is absolutely not the end.”Fulop added that she understood people’s concerns about the financial cost of the exercise but said it “absolutely has been worth it”.“Every single person was affected by the pandemic so per head of population, it isn’t a huge amount. And if real change does happen, then it’s definitely worth it. It costs a lot to be prepared for a pandemic, but it costs a lot more if you’re not prepared.”The group said the impending results of Exercise Pegasus, the largest simulation of a pandemic in UK history to identify gaps in the system, would show how much work is still to be done.CBFFJ also said they would keep campaigning for the Hillsborough Law, which would enforce a legal “duty of candour” on public authorities, saying this would help keep costs of future inquiries down.Fowler said the group would “fight to remove Covid crooks from the Lords and any public office that they might still cling to”, as well as “pursue accountability for the deaths of our loved ones”.An inquiry spokesperson said five of the remaining reports would be published this year and three in the first half of 2027. “Only a fraction of the billions spent during the Covid-19 pandemic needs to be saved next time for this inquiry to have been worth it,” they said.