Tens of thousands of members of the UK public will be able to provide witness testimony to the long-awaited public hearings into the Covid-19 pandemic, the lead counsel to the official inquiry promised as it opened in London on Tuesday.
Hugh Keith QC said a “listening exercise” would take place alongside public hearings. It would involve specialists who will take individual testimony, summarise and analyse it so it can be assimilated into the evidence.
This would “provide an opportunity for people to tell us their experiences without the formality of giving evidence”, and would “accommodate vastly more people”, he said. The process would be designed to take the “accounts of tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of people”, he added.
The commitment was aimed at allaying the concerns of groups representing the bereaved that individual stories would not be heard. It was underlined by Baroness Heather Hallett, the retired Court of Appeal judge who is heading the probe, who promised: “Those who have suffered will be at the heart of the inquiry.”
The inquiry was commissioned by Boris Johnson this year before he resigned as prime minister but its opening was delayed by the death of Queen Elizabeth last month.
Its remit was so wide that it has been broken up into separate phases, the first of which will address how well prepared the UK was for a pandemic of its kind and provide recommendations to protect the country better in future.
The first witnesses, who will include Johnson, will provide evidence at public hearings lasting at least a month starting next May.
The core participants in the first part of the inquiry will include public health officials and ministers along with groups representing bereaved relatives.
The second phase of the inquiry will scrutinise the high-level decision made as Covid took hold, including the timing of national lockdowns and the imposition of social distancing and other restrictions.
A parliamentary report by MPs on the health and social care committee and the science and technology committee published last year found that the delay in imposing the first lockdown at the end of March 2020 was a “serious error” and that a “meaningful test and trace” operation should have come sooner.
Other parts of the inquiry will look into the effectiveness of the vaccine programme, government procurement, and the impact that the pandemic had on the health and care service.
Hallett said she was determined that the inquiry would not “drag on for decades” and pledged to ensure it was both independent and fair.
Nearly 190,000 people died of Covid-19 in the UK within 28 days of testing positive for the disease, the inquiry heard and there were more deaths in which Covid may have played a part.
“The inquiry will analyse our state of readiness for the pandemic and the response to it and determine whether that level of loss was inevitable, or whether things could have been done better,” Hallett said.