Earlier lockdown could have saved lives of 30,000, Hancock tells Covid inquiry

Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved if Britain had gone into lockdown three weeks earlier, Matt Hancock told the Covid Inquiry, describing the operation in Boris Johnson’s Downing Street as undermined by a ‘culture of fear’.

The former health secretary said his staff were abused by Dominic Cummings and that Johnson’s then chief adviser tried to exclude ministers and even Johnson himself from key decisions at the start of the pandemic, hampering the government’s response.

“It has instilled a culture of fear, when what we needed was a culture where everyone was brought to the table and given the opportunity to do their best in a once-in-a-generation crisis,” said Hancock. “The way to lead in a crisis like this is to give people the confidence to do what they think needs to be done. And it caused the opposite.”

Hancock argued that in retrospect the ideal date for a first lockdown would have been three weeks earlier than the final date of March 23, 2020, and said this could have prevented around 90% of the death toll during the first Covid wave, or more than 30,000 lives. .

“In retrospect, the earliest we could have realistically cracked was March 2,” he said. “That’s when we should have done it, and it would have saved a lot of lives.”

Although he was repeatedly critical of Cummings, calling him “an evil actor” spreading misinformation, Hancock did not blame the dysfunction in Number 10 for the delay. He said the progress of the virus was unclear at the time, while the consequences of the lockdown were “well known and enormous”.

Hancock nevertheless painted a vivid picture of personality conflicts and what he called “a power grab” by Cummings, and also said he had not been told about then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s flagship “Eat out to help out” scheme to provide restaurant meals in the summer of 2020 to subsidize. the day it was announced.

The investigation showed messages between Hancock and Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, later that summer, in which Hancock said the scheme should not be extended. It caused, he wrote, “problems in our intervention areas – I kept it out of the news, but it is serious.”

Hancock was also questioned intensively and at times difficultly by Hugo Keith KC, the inquiry’s lead lawyer, who challenged him to provide evidence to support his claim that he urged Johnson to order a lockdown on March 13, 2020, and extracted a confession that the claim of a “protective ring” around care homes had been misleading.

Describing the build-up to the pandemic, Mr Hancock said Cummings upended the usual emergency meeting system in February 2020 by organizing a daily meeting in his own office involving “a section of people”.

Mr Hancock said: “He has not invited any ministers. He did not regard ministers as having a valuable contribution to any decision-making, as far as I could see during the crisis, or indeed at any other time.” Cummings, he added, advised at the time that decisions “don’t have to go to the Prime Minister”. This structure was actively hampering the response to the virus at the time, Hancock said.

In other evidence to the inquiry, Hancock pushed back against criticism that the health department he led in 2020 was chaotic and tended to overpromise, saying it often only did work that other parts of the government had neglected .

“From mid-January 2020 we sought to effectively raise the alarm and make Whitehall aware of the scale of the problem,” he said. “It was incredibly difficult and took enormous effort to get the machine up and running at the center of government.”

“We have run into this deep unpleasantness downtown,” Hancock added. “It didn’t help to assume that if something was difficult or a challenge, there was somehow blame and guilt.”

Keith challenged Hancock over his comment at a Covid press conference in mid-May 2020 that ministers had placed “a protective ring” around care homes from the start of the pandemic, which in retrospect the former health secretary was misleading. “I was simply trying to summarize that we had taken action,” Hancock said. “I completely understand why people have strong opinions about this.”