Cove to give evidence as Covid inquiry told Hancock knew lockdown tiers wouldn’t work

Michael Gove arrives ahead of his appearance at the Covid Inquiry.

The UK’s Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities will be questioned at phase 2 of the Covid-19 Inquiry over decision-making in Downing Street during the pandemic.

We’re bring you live coverage here

Ahead of Michael Gove giving evidence today, let’s jut look back at one of the big stories from the inqury last week.

Progressor Dame Angela McLean, the UK’s chief scientific adviser, said Boris Johnson’s government repeatedly made the same mistake of “watching and waiting” before taking action in the face of soaring infections during the pandemic.

Dame Angela criticised a “lack of appreciation that very quick decisions were needed” and said she believed this was the “most significant shortcoming” in decision-making during the pandemic.

She told the inquiry: “If you wait until the thing you’re worried about is really, really bad and growth is exponential and fast, you can very easily end up with things twice as bad at the hospital door, even if you put in a brilliant intervention.”

Last week, business and trade secretary Kemi Badenoch has described being confronted in the street and accused of being part of a Covid-19 conspiracy to cull parts of the population, as she called on the government to do more about the spread of misinformation.

Giving evidence to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry on Thursday, the former equalities minister also questioned the use of category BAME (black and minority ethnic) in analysis of the disproportionate impact of the virus.

Discussing government efforts to improve vaccine uptake during the pandemic, she said some people believed the publicity campaigns were a part of a sinister “secret conspiracy”.

Ms Badenoch said: “There was a fear that a lot of the communications about disproportionate impact was actually a secret conspiracy to scare ethnic minorities into taking vaccines which was a way of the Government culling the population.

“So even the things that we were doing in order to identify risk were being manipulated into conspiracy theories to deter people from doing what would help them mitigate that risk, and that was something I was particularly concerned about.”

Housing secretary Michael Gove, formerly the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, will give evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry alongside former deputy chief medical officer Professor Dame Jenny Harries.

We’ll be bringing you all the latest updates throughout the day.

Last week, the nation’s chief scientific adviser said the government’s failure to act quickly in response to warnings about rising Covid-19 cases in autumn 2020 led to preventable deaths.

Professor Dame Angela McLean criticised a “lack of appreciation that very quick decisions were needed” during the pandemic, and said this was the “most significant shortcoming” in decision-making.

She told the UK Covid-19 public inquiry on Thursday that ministers had enough data to lock down earlier in March 2020, and also failed to act quickly when cases were rising in autumn that year.

Dame Angela said she was in agreement with Professor John Edmunds that ministers were “making the same mistakes again” by not imposing tighter restrictions in the autumn. “If we had acted decisively then we would have learned from March, but we didn’t,” she said.

She criticised a lack of action in September 2020 when she and other scientists were calling for a “circuit breaker” to reduce cases.

When asked if the failure to impose circuit-breaker restrictions was a mistake, she said: “Yes, I believe that was a mistake. If we had a circuit breaker in September cases would have dropped a little bit and then we would have bought some time. The number of infections kept rising through September and October with attendant hospitalisations and, sadly, deaths.”

Sadiq Khan yesterday accused the government of failing to keep him informed about the severity of Covid-19 in early 2020, saying “lives could have been saved” if he had been invited to emergency Cobra meetings.

Giving evidence at the start of a major week for the Covid inquiry, the Mayor of London confirmed multiple requests to attend the meetings in early 2020 were rejected by Downing Street on the grounds that other mayors would also have to be present.

He also criticised a lack of communication from the government, saying it was “unusual” that he had not been given more information on the developing pandemic.

Mr Khan told the inquiry: “The government generally does give us information about a variety of things happening. I’m disappointed the Government weren’t giving us information in February about what they knew then.”

The submission was read out by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who used his appearance to slam the Westminster government’s “London-centric” approach to the pandemic.

Read the full article from Archie Mitchell here

Welcome to our live coverage of the Covid-19 inquiry as housing secretary Michael Gove, formerly the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, will give evidence.

We’ll be bringing you live updates here.