Covid bereaved are right to call for greater clarity on how a future pandemic would be dealt with - Jayne Dowle

Sir Keir Starmer says the government is committed to learning from the inquiry and is already overhauling measures to prepare for future pandemics. We’re going to have to trust him on this. But it’s a big ask. In the last four years, belief in the government to always do the right thing has been severely shaken, if not fractured.

Millions of people once willingly put their faith in Boris Johnson and his ministers, advisors, civil servants and leaders of bodies such as Public Health England.

Quite a few million – and I’ll hold my hands up – did not. But dissent was hushed in the name of national unity as we faced an unprecedented global crisis. Seemingly not only in our own private homes, where we were forced to spend months on end, but also at the very top of government too.

Families and friends became bitterly divided. Maskers and anti-maskers threw insults at each other, rancour festered which has lowered social tolerance levels to zero. We will pay the price for this social disunity forever.

Whilst Johnson tried to make us all stand on our doorsteps banging pans to show our support for frontline workers including nurses, doctors and carers, he was partying in Downing Street.

Loved ones died alone in hospitals and care homes. At funerals we could not even hold the hands of our relatives. So much for the country pulling together in a crisis; it was falling apart.

All this we know. But we must look forward.

The most positive thing to come out of the inquiry, which delivered its first 217-page report last Thursday, one of nine to be produced in the course of the investigation, set to last until 2026 - is the sure and certain knowledge that what happened in the UK between 2020 and 2022 must never be allowed to unfold again.

Baroness Hallet, the Inquiry’s chair, said the report had examined the UK’s preparation in the years leading up to the pandemic, and found there was a “lack of adequate leadership”.

Shockingly, with all that information and the best brains in Britain at its disposal, the government did not even manage to prepare for the right kind of pandemic. There was a pandemic plan, conceived in 2011, but it considered only influenza, not the more easily-transmittable SARS-type viruses which target the respiratory system.

If it wasn’t so deadly – up to now, at least 235,000 British people have lost their lives due to Covid-19, including my children’s father, who died in March 2021 – it would be farcical. Many people are still living with the aftermath of the virus, crippled by exhausting long-term effects. And it’s still with us, as the sight of Covid-positive President Biden climbing his plane to self-isolate in Delaware reminds us.

“The Inquiry has no hesitation in concluding that the processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures within the UK government and devolved administrations and civil services failed their citizens,” Hallett says. A damning verdict.

Hallett identifies key failures including “groupthink” within the civil service, as well as a refusal from ministers to question scientific advice. Never have such levels of self-delusion – and collusion - been laid as bare.

At one of the early TV press conferences, Dr Jenny Harries, then the deputy chief medical officer for England, hailed the UK as an “international exemplar” in its preparedness.

She was clearly convincing herself, and others; it’s revealed that just a year before the pandemic, a government review had praised our “world-leading capabilities”.

Such a belief, said Baroness Hallett, was “dangerously mistaken”.

Ministers were forced to “create policy during the emergency rather than before the emergency”.

Serious issues at Public Health England, the body responsible for health protection at the start of the pandemic, have come to light.

Its chief executive, Duncan Selbie, told the inquiry he had never planned or pushed the government to have a system in place for mass testing.

Why not? The roll-out of Test and Trace long after the pandemic had taken hold proves this.