Matt Hancock has said he is “profoundly sorry” for his part in mistakes that ensured the UK was not properly prepared for Covid, telling the public inquiry into the pandemic he had not properly challenged assurances that sufficient planning was in place.
The former health secretary, who faced tense encounters with bereaved family members before giving evidence and after he had finished, said the UK had made a “huge error” in assuming a pandemiccould not be prevented from spreading.
Hancock, who was health secretary for 18 months before the pandemic, and throughout much of its course, said he was “profoundly sorry for each death”, and that he took responsibility for mistakes in the preparations.
“I bear responsibility for all the things that happened, not only in my department, but also the agencies that reported to me as secretary of state,” he said.
While the UK had been mistaken in planning for a flu-based illness, Hancock said, the central error had been the assumption that it would not be possible to stop a pandemic.
“The doctrine of the UK was to plan for the consequences of a disaster,” Hancock said. “Can we buy enough body bags? Where are we going to bury the dead? And that was completely wrong.”
He added: “All of the other considerations are important but small compared to the colossal scale of failure in the assumption.”
Arriving at the inquiry, Hancock was faced by protesters, including Lorelei King, who showed him pictures of her husband, Vincent Marzello, who died in a care home in March 2020.
Hugo Keith KC, the lead counsel for the inquiry, asked Hancock why he did not challenge the pandemic planning assumptions, given worries he said he had over areas including vaccines and testing.
“Because I was assured that the UK planning was among the best and in some instances the best in the world,” Hancock said, citing the “reassuring” assessment of the World Health Organization that the UK’s pandemic preparedness was excellent. “Of course, with hindsight, I wish I’d spent that short period of time as health secretary before the pandemic struck changing the entire attitude to how we respond to a pandemic.”
There had been, Hancock went on, a “huge error in the doctrine” before Covid. Sounding emotional, he added: “If I may say so, I am profoundly sorry, for the impact that had, I’m profoundly sorry for each death that has occurred. And I also understand why, for some, it will be hard to take that apology from me.”
This explanation was greeted with anger by the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, which said Hancock had tried to evade other failures such as the focus on flu-based pandemics only and the diversion of resources to a no-deal Brexit.
“For the bereaved, it has been shocking to hear that the person with overall responsibility for the health of the nation was asleep at the wheel,” said the group’s lawyer Elkan Abrahamson.
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Hancock had argued that while much pandemic preparation was suspended ahead of a possible no deal, this work proved useful in areas such as securing medicine supply chains.
“The work done for a no-deal Brexit on supply chains for medicines was the difference between running out of medicines in the peak of the pandemic and not running out,” he said.
After his evidence finished, Hancock approached the public gallery, seemingly to speak to some families there, with one relative turning their back on him.
In later evidence Duncan Selbie, who was the chief executive of Public Health England from July 2012 to August 2020, said social care settings such as care homes, where more than 40,000 people died with Covid on their death certificate in England, were “just not on our radar”.
Giving evidence via video link from Saudi Arabia, where he is now the chief adviser of the kingdom’s public health authority, Selbie attacked what he called “depressing” cuts to the public health budget in the years before Covid.
He said Jeremy Hunt, when health secretary in 2015, had wanted to cut 50% from Public Health England’s budget to fund the NHS. In the event there was a 14% real terms cut in the public health grant from 2015 to 2021.
The inquiry continues.