Government Response to Covid-19: Public Inquiry

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes the Fifth Report of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee of Session 2019-21, A Public Inquiry into the Government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, HC 541; and calls on the Government to provide an updated response to that set out in the Committee’s Fourth Special Report of Session 2019-21, A Public Inquiry into the Government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic: Government’s response to the Committee’s Fifth Report, HC 995, setting out how the Government intends to implement the Committee’s recommendations, to ensure that the administrative arrangements necessary to set up the public inquiry committed to by the Prime Minister to the House on 11 May 2021, in particular the appointment of an inquiry chair, take place in a timely manner and no later than the end of this year, and to agree: that the Government’s preferred candidate to chair the inquiry should be subject to a pre-appointment hearing by the relevant select committee for the sponsoring Government department.

It is a privilege to move the motion, in the name of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, into the very important subject of the Government’s response to the covid-19 pandemic and the promised public inquiry.

We, as a Committee, have taken evidence from some very well informed help, if I may put it that way, and we have brought our deliberations forward in the reports under discussion today. We thank our witnesses who gave evidence—Emma Norris from the Institute for Government, Dr Alastair Stark from the University of Queensland, Jason Beer, QC, Lord Butler of Brockwell, Sir Robert Francis, QC, Dame Una O’Brien and Baroness Prashar of Runnymede—and all those who submitted written evidence to the inquiry. I also thank fellow Committee members for their well-informed deliberation on these matters.

We are all used now, I think, to public inquiries as a routine part of the UK political landscape, and it is clear that the issues with which we have been grappling over the past 18 months, and the very difficult measures that the Government have taken to combat the pandemic, are very much the right subject for a public inquiry. However, although we are used to public inquiries, there is very little guidance about how public inquiries should be established, Chairs appointed and terms of reference agreed, so, in the absence of such guidance, our Committee has happily stepped into that void with a view to taking discussions forward.

The Prime Minister has committed in principle to establishing a public inquiry, and in May 2021 he suggested that it should be established in spring 2022. The first message that the Committee would like to give is that that timetable really ought to be brought forward, for the simple reason that it takes a number of months before an inquiry can get under way in terms of establishing its secretariat and so on. I guess one issue that we were keen to grapple with is that the farther away from events an inquiry is established, the less we can learn in a timely fashion. So we would strongly encourage the Government to think about how they can be setting up that inquiry from now. It really should not get in the way of the fight against the pandemic, especially given where we are with regard to vaccination.

Obviously, we need to be very sure about the purpose of the inquiry. As a Committee, we were very keen to ensure that the inquiry should be about learning lessons, not apportioning blame. The facts of the matter are that the Government, and all our public services, were dealing with unprecedented challenges, and there can be no right or wrong answers when the evidence on which you seek to make decisions is changing before your very eyes from day to day. Ultimately, it will come down to a matter of judgment exercised at the time.

I really hope that we can enter the inquiry very much in that spirit, because although I have not agreed with every aspect of the Government’s decision making on this matter, I absolutely recognise that everyone involved in that process was doing so honourably, with the best of intentions. We are not going to be honest about lessons learned unless we can approach the inquiry on that basis. We in this place need to give some very clear messages that we are doing so in the spirit of learning.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I commend the Committee for its thoughtful and thorough report.

I listened carefully to what the hon. Lady just said about one of the recommendations, and I understand about learning lessons; that is often what Committees do. I would challenge any Member, particularly Members who have been in this House for a long time, to remember the lessons learned and recommendations from the mad cow disease inquiry; my guess is that nobody will.

We already know that there have been heroes and villains over the last 18 months, and I would hope that any inquiry would identify those heroes and villains. Mistakes have been made in some cases because mistakes were bound to be made, but some mistakes have been made wilfully and we need to know who was responsible for them.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Clearly, where there is wilful bad behaviour it should be exposed, but we need to set the tone: this inquiry is about how the Government and society have dealt with a very difficult set of issues. The heroes and villains to whom he refers will find a way of being outed, if I can put it in such a way, without it being the entire focus or ethos of the inquiry.

We obviously need to be very clear about the inquiry’s terms of reference, to inform what the focus will be, and about how the various themes that could be looked at will be examined. The chair will obviously be a very important appointment. This is by tradition the choice of the relevant Minister, but, again, respect for and the authority of the inquiry will be very much set by who the chair is. The Committee was very attracted to the idea of a chairman and panel approach, recognising that some of the issues that will be considered by the inquiry are broad ranging so it would be right for the chairman to have access to appropriate expertise in various areas. The Committee also felt that the appointment should be subject to a pre-commencement hearing with the relevant Select Committee, given the very high level of parliamentary interest in this inquiry. That would be an unprecedented step, but, again, in terms of setting the tone of how the inquiry will be progressed, it could be a very important innovation, and I hope the Government will consider that.

One of the issues that needs to be considered by the inquiry is of course the response by the Department of Health and Social Care in terms of management of risk of transmission and so on, but we need to consider in the round the tools adopted by the Government to deal with that, including the impact on liberties and the impact on our economy. There will be obvious consequences in the longer term for the nation’s wellbeing in the round. We also need to consider the wider behaviour of public services in that regard.

There also needs to be a way of considering the impacts in the devolved nations, including whether this should be a UK-wide inquiry or there should be separate inquiries; quite possibly there should be a combination of both.

[Dawn Butler (Brent Central) (Lab)]

Will the Committee also be considering whether the ministerial code has been broken, either by deliberately misleading the House or other actions?

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

I would clearly expect any inquiry to consider such matters, but there are other ways of bringing complaints forward about breaches of the ministerial code, and any action taken on that is of course a matter for the Prime Minister.

As I have mentioned, in taking forward the public inquiry we must work on the basis that everyone did their best, making decisions based on information known at the time. I would expect an inquiry to consider whether the impacts of policy interventions on individual liberties were proportionate and whether they were effective. We need an examination of the tools employed and whether they were effective in delivering the outcome intended. For example, we had a whole programme of local lockdowns, as you will be well aware, Madam Deputy Speaker, but was it a legitimate tool to close down legitimate business activity when the areas of mass infection had high housing density and multigenerational households, and was that the right tool? Again, we need to consider that to ensure that the Government properly assessed the balance between economic harm, liberty and health.

I imagine that any inquiry will find that the development and deployment of vaccines has been an unqualified triumph. In terms of lessons learned, we need to learn from the good things as well as from things that did not go quite as well as they should have. We need a proper examination of how test, track and trace took so long to get off the ground, because that really was not an unqualified success, and we need to consider whether the balance was right between the centre and local government. We also need to consider the issues around the supply of personal protective equipment. Having reacted to the suggestion that there were huge shortages, the fact of the matter is that we now have massive stockpiles and there are considerable costs to the taxpayer of maintaining those stockpiles. Again, we need to properly consider how those decisions came to be made.

I invite the House and the Government to consider the reflections of Bishop James Jones following his distinguished chairmanship of the Hillsborough inquiry. He talked about:

“The patronising disposition of unaccountable power”.

I think that phrase is a very convenient way of expressing how institutions of the state can often operate to protect their own reputations at the expense of the public, whom they are meant to serve. This is a really important principle to consider, given that the inquiry will judge not just lives lost, but the impact on business and jobs, as well as the wider impact on health and the harm that has been caused by the decisions taken over the last year, even though they were perhaps the best decisions that could have been made. It is a behaviour that public institutions can fall into unless we in Parliament give them proper challenge.

Perhaps another of the lessons we need to learn about the last year is that quite often Parliament has not played its full role in scrutinising decisions made by the Government. We have often been asked to give retrospective authority to decisions, and I hope that we all share the view that parliamentary scrutiny actually makes for better decision making.

I will leave hon. Members with a final thought. Our liberties are not in the gift of Government—they are ours. It really is down to consent given by Parliament on behalf of the public to ensure that those liberties, when we do surrender them, as we have in the last year, are not taken for granted by Government. In that regard, considering the behaviour of all our state institutions over this year is a very important job of scrutiny that the new inquiry would have to do to make sure that the shift towards state power that we have witnessed over the last year is not one that becomes permanent.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

I thank everyone who has contributed to this debate. There is a great degree of consensus: we all want this inquiry to be very much focused on learning lessons. I guess the real issue of contention is timing, more than anything else. That reflects the tension between doing the job properly and thoroughly, and potentially making timely reflections so that we can act quickly. I want to associate myself with the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin). We need to focus on the outcome of the inquiry to get it right, and that outcome must be confidence—confidence from the public that we have learned those lessons and confidence across the system that we have taken steps to ensure that we deal with such issues more effectively in future. In that regard, I welcome the tone with which my right hon. Friend the Minister addressed the issues we considered today. I hope that that reflects how the Government take this issue forward.

It will take time for the inquiry to get up and running, so the sooner we can get on with making the appointments and setting the approach the better. It will be some considerable time before the inquiry starts to impact on those parts of the Government that are dealing with the pandemic now. I hope that we will be able to reflect on that again in due course.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House notes the Fifth Report of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee of Session 2019-21, A Public Inquiry into the Government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, HC 541; and calls on the Government to provide an updated response to that set out in the Committee’s Fourth Special Report of Session 2019-21, A Public Inquiry into the Government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic: Government’s response to the Committee’s Fifth Report, HC 995, setting out how the Government intends to implement the Committee’s recommendations, to ensure that the administrative arrangements necessary to set up the public inquiry committed to by the Prime Minister to the House on 11 May 2021, in particular the appointment of an inquiry chair, take place in a timely manner and no later than the end of this year, and to agree: that the Government’s preferred candidate to chair the inquiry should be subject to a pre-appointment hearing by the relevant select committee for the sponsoring Government department.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I shall now suspend the House to enable the necessary arrangements for the next business to be made.