Only an independent body will ensure government's pandemic accountability | thearticle

There is a settled view that there will be a public inquiry into the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. While the view is sound, the consequence of holding it brings a number of

dangers. To make sense, a public inquiry can only be launched once the pandemic has been brought under control or we know enough to be able to form responsible judgements. This may be a year

or more from now. And Public Inquiries take time. My experience would suggest between two and three years. Only then will the things we need to know emerge fully and the relevant lessons be

set out, leading to recommendations for the future. The first danger is the notion that we must wait four years to learn what happened and how to act, and that anything said in the interim

is at best provisional. As Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter has admirably demonstrated in discussing “excess deaths”, we can already say things, for example, about the comparative speed and

effectiveness of the UK’s response in terms of preventing infection and mortality and the consequent preparedness of the NHS and care homes. We can already point to the relative

co-ordination of government departments and agencies, the degree of international collaboration, and, perhaps most importantly, the communication between government and governed. But,

currently, the commentary on how things are being managed is at best piecemeal and only partially informed. It has proved difficult for those ordinarily charged with holding government to

account, particularly the media, to do so. Parliament, in its current form, is a poor facsimile of what it needs to be and what it has been in the past. There have been calls not to

“politicise” the response to the pandemic even though the issues at stake are supremely political. The government has not always been straightforward (for example in its claims of “following

the science”) and has sometimes appeared confused as to its aims. Perhaps most effective of all in deflecting real accountability, has been the argument that now is not the right time.

Everyone is just too busy. The danger is that this state of affairs will continue. The sense that “things can wait for the public inquiry” has taken hold. But, the notion of holding

decision-makers to account contemporaneously, rather than at some uncertain future date, is gaining some traction. Now is the right time if the right lessons are going to be learned and

acted upon. To fail to recognise this is to condemn us to a continuing diet of fractured, disorganised responses, failing effectively to come close to accountability. The second danger is

that those in government will increasingly proceed with one eye on the pandemic and the other eye on history: what will the public inquiry say? While politics is politics and ever will be,

we want politicians to keep both eyes on the task at hand. Thus, the Prime Minister must give an assurance, and give it now, that papers from the various bodies advising the government will

be made available as they appear. This will ensure that the judgements made in real time and the evidence on which they are based will be available for public scrutiny. They will have to be

released for the public inquiry in due course. It would serve the public interest better if they were released as they appear. It will also ensure that accountability can be attributed

appropriately in real time. The opportunity to reverse-engineer the evidence years later when memories have faded, documents have been “lost”, and people have moved on will be removed.

Issues of confidentiality can be ironed out.