David Cameron will become the first politician to give evidence under oath at the UK Covid-19 public inquiry next week when the former prime minister is cross-examined on Monday, the inquiry has announced.
The former chancellor George Osborne will also give evidence on Tuesday and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, and Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, will become the first serving cabinet ministers to enter the witness box when they are sworn in on Wednesday as the inquiry steps up its investigation into the UK’s preparedness for the pandemic that claimed at least 226,977 lives in the country.
The senior Conservatives are expected to be questioned on the impact of their austerity policies on the readiness of the NHS and social care system and wider levels of public health from 2010 onwards.
But lawyers for the bereaved and workers are concerned that their appearances are expected to be relatively brief. The timetable published on Thursday suggests they will each be questioned for about an hour. They do not believe it is enough given the potential impact their policies may have had.
“David Cameron and George Osborne have serious questions to answer,” said the Trades Union Congress (TUC) Covid inquiry lead, Nathan Oswin. “It is frustrating they will spend such little time under oath when their austerity policies left the UK so underprepared for the pandemic.”
Doctors, represented through the British Medical Association, on Tuesday told the inquiry the government’s 2012 health service changes “fractured the links between public health specialists and NHS” and the UK went into the pandemic with too few hospital beds. These failures were “brutally exposed by the pandemic and the systems are now in an even worse state”.
Oliver Letwin, a Cabinet Office minister from 2010 to 2016, will give evidence on Tuesday. He has told the inquiry in a witness statement that the UK was “much better prepared” for an influenza pandemic than for Covid. The Cabinet Office led the UK’s pandemic preparedness and response structures.
The TUC, representing workers, has urged the inquiry chair Heather Hallett to closely consider the effects of pre-pandemic austerity. In his opening statement, Hugo Keith KC, counsel to the inquiry, told Lady Hallett: “If you conclude that as a country, we were insufficiently resilient and that in future, different political and financial choices may have to be made in order to render us better able to [deal with the] shock, you will want to say so”.
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The inquiry will also hear next week from the former and current chief medical officers for England Dame Sally Davies and Sir Chris Whitty, the former chief scientific advisers Sir Mark Walport and Sir Patrick Vallance and several senior civil servants in the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health and Social Care.
