Michael Simmons

Did Eat Out to Help Out increase Covid? It’s a conclusion the inquiry and lockdown’s cheerleaders seem keen to push. Today they got their wish with Sir Patrick Vallance telling the inquiry it is ‘very difficult to see how it wouldn’t have had an effect on transmission’. Those comments have already been taken out of context with headlines concluding that the link had now been confirmed. But that’s not what the data tells us. Or what Vallance was saying. Eat Out to Help Out came up because of a written statement from Rishi Sunak that was read out to the inquiry. In it the Prime Minister says, 'I don’t recall any concerns about the scheme being expressed during ministerial discussions’.

Two stories are emerging from the Covid Inquiry: one that it wants to tell and one that it does not. The first is a tale of foul-mouthed incompetence, of which there’s no shortage of evidence dredged from the private messages of the main actors. The more important story can be found in the submitted statements – hundreds of pages of thoughts, documents and reflections. They raise an important question which Baroness Hallett’s inquiry shows little interest in answering: was lockdown based on a false premise, conjured up by poorly drafted models? Only later did No.

Did we lock down on a false premise? Yesterday was Ben Warner’s turn at the Covid Inquiry. He was an adviser, and one of the ‘tech bros’ brought in by Dominic Cummings to advise No. 10 on data. He was present at many of the early Sage – and other – meetings where the government’s established mitigation (herd immunity) plan was switched to the suppression (lockdown) strategy.  In Cummings’s evidence to the inquiry last week, he said that models didn’t play a big part in moving the government towards lockdown. Part of the written inquiry evidence supplied by his data man, Ben Warner’s, supports that too.

Some 140,000 children missed more than half of the school days they should have attended this spring. Research by the Children’s Commissioner, published today, finds that only 5 per cent of these ‘severely absent’ kids go on to achieve five GCSEs. For year ten and 11 pupils who are persistently absent – meaning they miss one day of school a fortnight – just over a third get the minimum five GCSEs. For rarely absent children the figure is 78 per cent. The Commissioner, Dame Rachel De Souza, is calling for attendance league tables to be set up.  It’s no surprise that attendance dropped during Covid. But after lockdown many children just simply didn’t come back to school, as Harriet Sergeant pointed out in a cover piece for the magazine earlier this year.

SPI-M-O are at the Covid inquiry this week. They’re the shadowy group of mathematical modellers who contributed – more than most – to the evidence that backed up lockdown. On Monday we heard from Professor Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University. Surprisingly – for an inquiry that seems from the outset to be focused on the deaths of the vulnerable and how we should have ‘locked down sooner’ – Professor Woolhouse focused his evidence on the mistakes of lockdown. Lockdown was ‘disproportionate, unsustainable and not as effective as was being claimed’, he told the inquiry. He also said they were ‘a failure of public health policy’. Blame lay with the government, who had simply failed to ask the modellers to come up with anything different.

Britain’s first ‘drug consumption room’ will get the go-ahead later today. A health centre in the east end of Glasgow (where nearly 200 people died from drugs last year) is expected to be used for a pilot project. It will offer nurse-led supervision for drug users while they take heroin, cocaine and other illegal drugs. Sterile needles will be provided too. The NHS and Glasgow City Council, who proposed the scheme, hope that the ‘400 to 500 people [regularly] injecting drugs in public places in Glasgow’ will move off the streets and into the consumption room.

Scotland’s first census results have finally been released: just 444 days after England managed to publish theirs. The once-a-decade count of the population was disastrous at worst and botched at best. As the first deadline for returning the census loomed last April, some 700,000 households – a quarter of the country – were threatened with £1,000 fines for not completing it. It had taken over a month to reach a 74 per cent response rate. Eleven years ago it took just ten days. Now that the results are in, the final response rate was 89 per cent: well short of the official target of 94 and the 97 per cent achieved in England and Wales. When the first deadline was extended, the SNP did not apologise.

Scotland continues to suffer drug deaths at levels unseen anywhere else in the UK or Europe. Three Scots die as a result of drugs every single day. That is nearly three times worse than any other country for which records exist. This scandalous figure has just been updated, and shows that, although the number of drug deaths in Scotland fell by a fifth in 2022, it is still nearly double what it was when the SNP came to power. It is also four times as high as it was at the turn of the century. A fall, the government says, is progress. But why so slow? Why did more than 8,000 Scots lose their lives to drugs before the numbers began to drop? The figures show drug-related deaths have fallen to 1,051 – 279 fewer than the year before and the lowest level since 2017.

Yet another of Rishi Sunak’s five targets looks to have slipped out of reach. Waiting lists for NHS treatment in England have climbed to another record high and now stand just shy of 7.6 million. There was a slight improvement for the longest waits: those waiting more than a year dropped slightly but still stand at a staggering 383,000. A very unlucky 314 have found themselves languishing on the lists for more than two years. Ministers gave the NHS a target to clear waits of more than 65 weeks by April next year, but there’s been little progress on those either. NHS managers were quick to blame strike action – Junior Doctors are set to walk out again over pay tomorrow from 7a.m. The health services’ figures point to over 100,000 appointments being postponed in June alone.