The latest Covid inquiry report barely caused a ripple in Westminster yesterday. It’s not just that this is the sixth module of the inquiry, which has been running since 2022, but also that the report itself has offered little in the way of revelations. The care sector suffered particularly as a result of poor pre-pandemic planning. Ministers’ claim to have thrown a ‘protective ring’ around care homes was manifestly untrue. Care staff were particularly exposed, given the lack of financial support enabling them to stay away from work if they had symptoms. None of these points had escaped anyone prior to the inquiry opening, let alone before the publication of this report.
Public inquiries are supposed to offer a definitive account of what happened, and then provide recommendations on how to stop the same mistakes from being made again. This report offers both, but without any sense that this was the only way to uncover that information. What is even more troubling is that there is little pressure for this government – or whoever comes next – to implement those recommendations. Are we really going to be better prepared for the next pandemic, or will each government from now on look back at Covid and say ‘we won’t be as bad as the lot in charge back then’ – or, as the governments in the run-up to that pandemic did, make preparations for the wrong thing?
The response from ministers yesterday has shown us what this government sees the Covid inquiry as being useful for: they have focused on the way in which the report underlines what they have already been saying about the social care sector and particularly the lot of care workers. Yvette Cooper used her department’s questions sessions in the Commons today to make that point, telling MPs at health and social care questions: ‘We will provide a full response to the report‘s recommendations in due course, but I agree with the chair when she said that “for too long the adult social care has been undervalued and underrecognised”. That has to end and I hope we can work across parties to support the Prime Minister’s vision for a national care service.’
In his own written statement, Andy Burnham pointed to the work the government was doing to ‘delivering reform through significant additional investment in adult social care, including introducing a fair pay agreement for care workers and developing a new workforce action plan’. It’s almost as though ministers have already decided what went wrong in the pandemic, and what they want to fix. That’s their prerogative: they are elected and have the mandate to decide what matters in terms of reform. It does beg the question, though, of the point of this £200 million inquiry, given there are significantly cheaper ways of underlining a conclusion someone has already reached.
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