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The Labor Party has supported calls for a full-blown public inquiry to learn the lessons of the Covid pandemic, with Rachel Reeves arguing that it should begin when the prime minister’s roadmap comes to an end in June.
Reeves, who follows Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove, told The Guardian that the government should start preparing now, to allow an investigation to begin in earnest over the summer.
“We are supposed to be off the roadmap by June 21,” Reeves said. “Let’s get ready for it now, and as of June 21 this research can really start and utilize the summer months when we should be better protected, and the vaccine has been implemented for most adults.”
Reeves and Labor leader Keir Starmer have heard firsthand from grieving family members in recent weeks, a moving experience that, he says, hardened their view that a public inquiry should be conducted.
“It was one of the most difficult meetings, with people whose pain was still so raw and fresh. Some amazing people speak of a terrible loss, “he said. “They want an investigation because they want to understand what happened and if something else could have been done, but also, and I think this is probably the strongest argument, the lessons to be learned, because this is unlikely to be the last virus or disease that presents itself to us. “
“They are denied justice and cannot have a closure until they better understand what happened,” he added.
He urged the government to work with bereaved families to decide how the investigation should be conducted.
“They mostly need research. So I think they should really be in the driver’s seat on how this is done, but it must be independent, it must be held in public. And it must have adequate resources, “he said.
The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice campaign group is calling for a statutory investigation led by a judge to be urgently convened.
Reeves said: “I don’t expect Boris Johnson to listen to Keir Starmer or me when calling for an investigation, but I do hope that he will have the decency to listen to the voices of those who have lost someone and will do the right thing. . “
Reeves has written to Gove, urging him to agree to go ahead with an investigation.
“This should be an independent and completely public investigation, and it should not be delayed,” it says in the letter. “We can learn from the Chilcot and Hillsborough investigations on how this can be started in this Parliament. With such a great loss of life, justice delayed will be justice denied.
Reeves has openly criticized the government’s outsourcing of key aspects of the pandemic response and the “crony contracts” awarded to conservative donors and contacts as the government scrambled to procure personal protective equipment.
He said an investigation should look at all aspects of managing the pandemic, from why frontline workers weren’t better protected to the time of lockdown measures and tragic deaths in the care system.
“Many people lost loved ones in nursing homes and were unable to say goodbye,” he said. He added that the pandemic had exposed many of the weaknesses in the care system, which Johnson claimed on his first day in office that he had a plan to fix.
“It’s casualization, fragmentation, profit-making, so many things about the current system are broken,” Reeves said. “This virus exploits vulnerabilities, and the vulnerabilities were in the care system.”
Additionally, Reeves called for the investigation to examine the lack of resilience that Labor says left both public services and individual households particularly at risk from the pandemic.
He cited the fact that the UK has fewer intensive care beds per head than many other European countries (7.3 intensive care beds per 100,000 people, compared to 33.8 in Germany, for example) and had exhausted its arsenal of PPE equipment before the crisis.
“It is also the resilience of families,” he added. Eleven and a half million adults entered this crisis with less than £ 100 in savings. There are a million people on zero-hour contracts, and that has made it difficult for people to appropriate the rights to make the right decisions for public health.
“People have to make the decision to feed their families or maintain the safety of their community by isolating themselves, and we all pay the price if for some reason people are not in a position to take the necessary steps to contain the disease. spread of the virus “.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been pushing for more generous payments to self-isolating workers, but has been rebuffed by the Treasury, which believes that financial incentives are not the main reason many people fail. they stay home when requested.
When the death toll from the virus surpassed 100,000 earlier this year, the prime minister said his government “did everything possible” in “a very, very difficult stage, and a very, very difficult crisis for our country.” .
But Reeves said the government learned no lessons from the early phases of the pandemic.
“We already believe that opportunities have been lost to overcome this and make things better,” he said.
The government has consistently refused to be told when an investigation should start and who should lead it.
On Wednesday, Commerce Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said it would be “premature” to launch an investigation, arguing instead that reopening the economy was the top priority.
“Once the economy reopens, once we’ve gotten through the worst of the pandemic, and it’s still with us, we can have a discussion and I’m sure there will be plenty of room for an investigation.”
