UK owes it to Covid victims to start a public inquiry now

China held a “national day of reflection”, in memory of its Covid-19 “martyrs”, on April 4th last year, only a few months after its first coronavirus case. Trains, ships and cars sounded their horns and sirens in a three-minute “wail of grief”.

The UK’s day of reflection fell last Tuesday, a year after the belated declaration of a national lockdown, and grief was also its keynote.

Obviously, it is right to pay respects to the many dead and their families, and to pay tribute to frontline health workers and others who helped the UK through what prime minister Boris Johnson called “an epic of endurance and privation”.

But they have already endured too long a wait for a proper public inquiry into the handling of the crisis.

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It is not enough to “reflect”, “support” and “hope”, words projected on to the side of Lichfield Cathedral during last week’s commemoration. A more productive three-step method would be review, study and learn.

Chris Whitty, the UK government’s chief medical officer, came closest to summing up the goal at the reflection day press conference. Johnson batted back a question about why the UK had suffered the highest death toll in Europe by arguing again that international comparisons were “premature at this stage”. Whitty then admitted that “we had a bad outcome. Many other countries had a bad outcome. What we want to try and do is to minimise mortality in the future and learn lessons from the past.”

It may be obvious that the UK and US, with their disproportionately poor record of deaths, or China, where the virus began, should carry out inquiries. Not so obvious is that countries such as Australia or New Zealand, which have suffered less, should do so too. But the Whitty principle should also apply there, if only to distinguish between fluke happy outcomes and the results of successful preparation, and to refine approaches for a future crisis.

International envy

In New Zealand, praise mixed with international envy has drowned out some sharp local criticism of Jacinda Ardern and her government’s handling of the crisis. The authors of a critical official report into their Covid surveillance and testing strategy wrote that despite the country’s first-class response overall, it was still “timely to reflect on lessons learnt and to identify what could be improved”.

The UK government should have copied the approach of air crash investigators, who seek to draw quick conclusions in interim reports to prevent the recurrence of immediately obvious human or mechanical failures.

A sound inquiry would examine errors that seem trivial in themselves but might have contributed to a larger failure

The transparency-loving Swedes and Norwegians are applying this phased technique. A Swedish commission has already concluded that the country’s policy for protecting the elderly in care homes failed. It promises a second interim analysis of the controversial pandemic strategy by October and a final report by next February.

Norway’s coronavirus commission said at the outset it would not prey on the time of politicians and public servants still dealing with the virus itself. Yet it committed to publish at least a partial assessment of the country’s initial planning for, and handling of, the crisis by the end of this month. The Norwegian commission might even be the first to make the international comparisons that Johnson considers premature: it has a mandate to “consider how the pandemic and the ensuing social ramifications have been managed in countries similar to Norway”.

Collect memories

Pressure in the UK is mounting, from victims’ groups, the Guardian newspaper, and the leader of the Labour party among others, but precious time is already being lost. With it is going the opportunity to collect memories before they fade or are wilfully distorted by participants to fit a rosier narrative in their own self-interest.

There is still a chance to learn from mistakes, though, as all self-improving organisations should. A sound inquiry would examine errors that seem trivial in themselves but might have contributed to a larger failure. Investigators should also distinguish bad mistakes from “good” ones, made in the spirit of experimentation at a time of profound uncertainty.

“It’s never going be convenient” to start an inquiry, points out Marcus Shepheard, senior researcher at the Institute for Government, an independent think-tank. It will be essential to set the correct scope and avoid a focus on assigning blame.

Unfortunately, the UK is good at dragging out inquiries, and sometimes poor at implementing their recommendations. Lord Mark Saville, who took 12 years to complete the independent probe into British soldiers’ killing of unarmed civilians in Derry on Bloody Sunday, told the Times last week that a coronavirus inquiry was likely to run until after the next general election, due in 2024. All the more reason to start investigating now.

– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2021