The prime minister is wrong to say that coronavirus lessons can wait

As the UK reached the tragic milestone off 100,000 lives lost to Covid-19, the prime minister struck an appropriately sombre tone. But his insistence that his government “did everything we could” to save lives only prompts more questions. Most acutely – if the prime minister does not think his government could have done anything more, what does that say about its ability to learn from the crisis?

In July 2020, Boris Johnson committed to holding an independent public inquiry into the government’s pandemic response, but argued that the time was not right. It is a line he and his ministers have stuck to since, with the prime minister today declaring that “there will be a time when we must learn the lessons of what has happened. I think that moment is not now.”

It is right that a full, statutory public inquiry should wait until the crisis has passed – it requires the full engagement of government which will only be possible when the worst of the pandemic is over.  But a full inquiry, which looks back, is not sufficient. There should also be the opportunity for government to learn lessons whilst events unfold. During a crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic it is particularly critical to learn timely lessons to ensure mistakes are not repeated. This is why we called for rapid review last June, ahead of the second wave. While that moment has, regrettably, passed, the government is wrong to maintain that the time for learning lessons still has not arrived.

The government has made the same mistakes again and again

There are positive lessons to take on board immediately. The government has made a promising start to its vaccine roll-out programme, built around bold, early decisions and investment, resilient supply chains and coherent plans for delivery. These should be learned from and, where possible, replicated across other programmes.

But the mistakes must be learned from too. The UK finds itself at the wrong end of all tables comparing coronavirus mortality rates across the globe. Some of this is down to circumstances beyond the government’s control, such as population density, demographics, and the emergence of a new and highly-transmissible strain of the virus in Kent. But in a number of areas mistakes which the government made in its response to the first wave have been repeated.

Following the first lockdown, the government twice more delayed its decision to introduce lockdowns even as Covid-19 cases rose rapidly. Until recently it repeatedly failed to introduce stricter border controls. More than once it issued confusing messages to the public – promoting a policy before a last minute u-turn, including over the Christmas easing of restrictions and the decision to shut schools just a day after the prime minister insisted it was safe to keep them open. Over the last year the IfG has published reports on government decision-making and its use of science advice, identifying problems that remain unaddressed and continue to hinder the government’s handling of the crisis.

A full inquiry requires time to set up – but there are lessons to learn immediately

Setting up inquiries take time. Choosing an appropriate chair, setting clear terms of reference, and ensuring adequate resourcing is not a straightforward task. Given that, there is no reason why preliminary work should not begin now to ensure that the ground is prepared for the inquiry to begin as soon as appropriate. There will be plenty to cover, when the time is right. Along with his sombre tone, the prime minister should demonstrate that he is thinking about how to make an inquiry work.

But the lessons that emerge from the inquiry that the prime minister seems to have in mind will be for future pandemics. For now, the government should do more to signal and demonstrate that it has learned and is learning from the decisions – and mistakes – it has made in its response to the coronavirus crisis.

The crisis is still gripping the country, and the emergence of new and more dangerous coronavirus variants makes it likely that the government will be dealing with Covid-19 for months and possibly years to come. Questions over when to go into lockdown, and how to leave it, how to operate borders, to what extent to reopen schools and businesses, are not going away. Learning now – to inform these decisions – is critically important.

Politicians may find it hard to publicly admit failures, but they do need to understand them – and in this case, the prime minister is wrong to give the impression that now is not the time to do so. The problem for the UK government is not the absence of lessons. It is the denial that this is the time to learn them.