2. Statement by Lead Counsel to the Inquiry

Mr Keith: My Lady, thank you very much.

I don’t propose to reintroduce the core participants or their legal representatives in the interests of time, but there remain 39 core participants in Module 2 and all bar three are legally represented. We’ve received 14 sets of written submissions for today’s hearing, and I believe that you’ll be hearing from 13 separate legal representatives.

We are of course very grateful to all the core participants who provided written submissions for having given us their observations and their insights.

My Lady, may I start with the issue of panelists.

On 27 April 2023, the Prime Minister announced in a written statement to Parliament that he had decided that the Inquiry would be more efficiently and swiftly conducted if you were not to sit with a panel. The Prime Minister referred to a number of matters that he had taken into consideration. He observed that it was in the public interest that the Inquiry be thorough, rigorous and comprehensive, but also that it delivers its report without excessive delay. My Lady, I know that you’ll recall that he referred to the fact that you have a number of mechanisms at your disposal to enable your Inquiry to gather the breadth of evidence and experiences needed to deliver its work, both effectively and efficiently, and also to enable you to make findings and recommendations as quickly as you reasonably can.

Those mechanisms include your ability to appoint scientific, economic and other experts to prepare reports, those reports would obviously be published, they allow you to call those experts to give evidence publicly and to guide you in your endeavour. They also include the gathering of views from the public through Every Story Matters.

That decision, my Lady, was one entirely for the Prime Minister to decide, because he is the sponsoring minister for this Inquiry. It was not one for you, and so the advancing by myself of submissions on this issue would not appear to serve much purpose.

The Prime Minister did, however, consult you. He did so because he was obliged to do so under section 4(3) – section 4, subsection 3 – of the Inquiries Act 2005. However, it would not be right, and nor is it necessary, for the Inquiry to disclose the contents of that consultation, and so I will say no more about that issue.

I then turn to the issue of the list of issues for consideration in this module, Module 2. In August 2022, the Inquiry published its provisional scope for Module 2. Since that date, your legal team has been conducting an investigation within the remit of that published document. You directed at the last preliminary hearing that the Inquiry circulate to core participants a more detailed list of issues. That list was issued on 27 April, and we received back the core participants’ comments on it on 11 May. We’re very grateful to them for their insightful and constructive comments.

My Lady, there were a very great number of comments, however, and so we are still working through them all, but all the points are being considered and I want to give that assurance.

An additional important factor in this module is the need to ensure, in addition, an appropriate degree of consistency with the issues being ventilated in Modules 2A, 2B and 2C, and that also includes being sighted on the observations that the core participants may wish to make in those modules. Observations are due from the core participants to Module 2C by 13 June, and so allowing for time to consider both those observations and also to debate them between the module teams, we don’t believe that the list of issues for this module can be published before middle or late July.

Given the very large number of points which have been raised in the submissions from the core participants, I don’t propose to address all of them, but may I confine myself to just four or five of them, which appear to us to be of the greatest importance.

We acknowledge a specific request concerning the specificity to be given to the consideration of vulnerable and at-risk groups in the process of core political and administrative decision-making, including the consideration of the needs of deaf and disabled people, those with pre-existing health inequalities and those otherwise vulnerable to Covid-19 and long Covid. We are giving careful thought to how those matters can be expressed, perhaps better expressed, in the written list of issues. But I want to assure all the core participants that those matters are very much at the forefront of our minds and are already under consideration.

Secondly, a number of the core participants have raised the issue of so-called austerity policies and the way in which the Inquiry intends to address those policies and their impact on the core political and governmental decision-making that is the heart of Module 2.

Our provisional view, my Lady, is that such matters go more naturally to the question of resilience and preparedness, which, as you’ve said, is a matter being addressed in Module 1, but we intend to reflect further on that and we will report back to the core participants in due course.

Thirdly, in relation to Northern Ireland, we’ve asked in a number of Rule 9 requests in Module 2 about the role that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and the British-Irish Council has played in facilitating intergovernmental relations during the pandemic and also about the co-ordination of the governmental response to Covid across the four nations.

Module 2C will be exploring those matters in the context of the response to Covid in Northern Ireland, of course, and as well it will be looking at issues relating to the north/south relationship. So matters which directly impact upon Northern Ireland are better considered in the rubric of Module 2C.

Fourthly, a point has been made by a number of core participants that we have afforded a disproportionate amount of attention to the United Kingdom Government and its affairs in Module 2 and that there is a bias towards focusing on Westminster.

My Lady, Module 2 will be concerned with the United Kingdom Westminster matters, including of course the Westminster end of communications with the devolved administrations. So there is bound to be a concentration of attention on the United Kingdom by contrast to Module 2A, 2B and 2C, which are the analogous modules for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Nevertheless, we have issued Rule 9 requests to all the first ministers and Northern Ireland’s former Deputy First Minister, asking them to address their engagement with Whitehall in their responses and to provide all key supporting materials. We expect those statements to be thorough and to provide you with all the relevant supporting materials that you would need.

Lastly, by way of this introductory review, one core participant has advanced submissions concerning the extent to which Module 2 will cover the closure of schools. Of course there will be exploration through the high level political decision-makers of the broad reasons why school-related decisions were taken as they were, but the detailed examination of the merits of that process and of the operational impact of decisions to shut schools can only take place in the later education module.

Finally, in relation to long Covid, a group of core participants have asked us to address the extent to which long Covid was considered by decision-makers at the time. That will be considered in the course of Module 2, because of course it goes to the merits of that decision-making. But the detailed consideration of long Covid and its medical aspects is reserved to Module 3, the healthcare module.

My Lady, may I then turn to the issue of the Rule 9 requests which have been issued by the Inquiry. An enormous amount has been done since we last met. The Inquiry has worked extremely hard to ensure that it and the core participants can be ready for the public hearing scheduled under this most demanding of timetables. Tens of thousands of documents and exhibits have been received from document providers so far, although not all of them, of course, are relevant and disclosable.

My Lady, may I commend the legal team in Module 2 for their diligence and hard work in scoping, drafting and issuing so many Rule 9s and in dealing with the array of documentation that has been received. As of yesterday, almost 350 formal requests for evidence under Rule 9 have been sent out relating to entities, persons and organisations in Module 2 alone. Almost 100 more have been sent out to entities and persons where the issues raised in those Rule 9s spanned not just Module 2, but Modules 2A, 2B and 2C also.

To give a sense of the breadth and width of your Inquiry’s reach, the Rule 9 requests include 38 requests to government departments, government bodies, arm’s length bodies and a variety of associations, 11 to regional mayors, 12 to ministers, including the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson MP, Dominic Raab MP, Penny Mordaunt MP, Matt Hancock MP, Liz Truss MP, Kemi Badenoch MP and Michael Gove MP.

We have issued requests for witness statements from the former First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, the former First Ministers of Northern Ireland, Baroness Foster and Paul Givan, former Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill, and the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford.

Rule 9 requests have gone to chief medical officers, their deputies and their predecessors, and we’ve requested witness statements from persons who held positions in the Cabinet Office and Number 10.

They include, my Lady, former and current Cabinet secretaries, senior civil servants, chiefs of staff, private secretaries, advisers and other civil servants.

In September of 2022, Module 2 also issued 200 Rule 9 questionnaires to participants of SAGE and its sub-groups and 17 Rule 9 questionnaires to members of Independent SAGE. We have issued 19 more detailed Rule 9 letters to a number of those individuals as well as to a number of other scientists.

We have also sent a very significant number of impact questionnaires to bodies and organisations representing individuals who might be considered to have been at greater risk or vulnerable. My Lady, that includes groups representing the bereaved, women, children and young people, ethnic groups, those suffering from health inequalities, including long Covid and mental health issues, older people, those with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, workers’ groups and health professionals.

The issue of inequalities, since this has been raised by the core participants, has been included in practically every Rule 9 request issued by Module 2, including to persons involved in the decision-making and their advisers. We’ve also sent Rule 9 requests to the Cabinet Office, Equality Hub, Liz Truss, former Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch MP, as I’ve said, Justin Tomlinson MP, the former Minister for Disabled People, and a number of other organisations concerned with equalities and human rights.

We have also sent a number of requests with a focus on long Covid, the government’s understanding of that condition and the impact that that might have had on their decision-making.

My Lady, the number of Rule 9 requests and the wide range of organisations, entities and people who have received such requests, although highlighting the scale of your task, provides ample reassurance that we have cast our investigative net sufficiently widely.

In addition, we have accepted additional suggestions from core participants as to who should receive a Rule 9 request and we have acted upon those suggestions.

We are very grateful to all those who have engaged with the requests and who have provided statements.

A significant proportion of those requests, as I’ve said, have been made to government departments. In the case of the majority of those departments, my Lady, it’s right to say that the government departments concerned have responded under demanding timescales, and having contributed a considerable amount of work.

Those government departments and their legal teams have worked very hard to respond to the requests, and we’re very grateful to them for that co-operation.

But I must raise with you today some aspects of the disclosure exercise that has been conducted by a limited number of government departments.

The principal position, and it’s the position that we have applied in relation to every government department recipient, is that each and every document which is called for in response to a Rule 9 request must be provided to your team in clean, unredacted form. The document or part thereof is then reviewed by the Inquiry and irrelevant information, including to a very large extent personal data, is redacted by the Inquiry team.

The process does allow for the provider of the documents to review those redactions and make a claim for further redactions to be applied. The Inquiry legal team then considers all the additional requests and either makes the additional redactions or rejects them with reasons. All this is done in accordance with the published redaction protocol made available by the Inquiry, and that protocol has been on the website since October last year.

I must make plain that each redaction which the Inquiry, as opposed to the material provider, makes is provisional and therefore it is subject also to change as a result of any further scrutiny of the evidence by the Inquiry legal team and any matters raised by the core participants following the disclosure to them in the first instance of the documents.

Given the relatively short period of time before the start of the substantive hearings, delays in that difficult and burdensome process had the potential to disrupt the Inquiry’s process unless such problems are swiftly resolved, and it’s therefore appropriate that I tell the core participants something more about the problems that we’ve encountered.

First, a considerable number of the draft statements submitted have either contained insufficient detail or did not address all the matters raised in the Inquiry’s Rule 9 request, so the Inquiry – as with Module 1 – has asked many of the witnesses by way of response to expand upon the matters raised in their draft statements. The work required to consider those draft statements and to send requests back for further detail has an obvious impact upon the workload of the Inquiry and upon the process of disclosure.

We do consider, however, that overall the timetable will not be significantly impacted, and we are confident that the vast majority of the final signed statements and exhibits will be disclosed to core participants before the end of July 2023, this July.

Second, in respect of a number of entities, there has been a failure to respond in good time to the Rule 9 requests, necessitating repeated extensions to deadlines. We are on top of the issue, but witness statements from a number of key government witnesses are due to be provided to the Inquiry in the coming days and weeks on the expiry of many of those deadlines. So I wish to emphasise the absolute need on the part of those government departments to comply with these final deadlines given the diminishing time before the substantive hearing.

Further requests for extensions are unlikely to be granted.

I would then like to draw your attention to five specific matters concerning disclosure, in the majority matters which the Cabinet Office, which is represented today, is invited to respond to you upon.

The first issue concerns the WhatsApp process. The Inquiry has made requests for potentially relevant communications sent via WhatsApp from almost 30 Cabinet Office witnesses. The vast majority of those requests were made in December 2022 and January 2023. Whilst it’s understood that a number of those witnesses do not currently hold such materials, and of course we’re seeking explanation from them as to why that is so, there is a lack of certainty about what potentially relevant content is in fact held by the Cabinet Office and which will therefore be provided to the Inquiry in due course.

We have received WhatsApp material from Mr Johnson and from two other individuals, and all that material has had redactions applied to some of the content. But we do not know how many more individuals are in a position to give us WhatsApp material relating to their communications, which material may be in the possession of the Cabinet Office.

In addition, we have very recently identified that the Cabinet Office is not alone in this position. The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office has supplied to the Inquiry potentially relevant WhatsApps from two of their special advisers, many with extensive redactions made to that material on the basis of relevance. This was identified too late to invite the Foreign Office, who are core participants, to attend today to explain their position to you, but of course on the basis that they’re following your proceedings, my Lady, may we make clear that we expect them to provide unredacted WhatsApp material without delay. If of course the judicial review claim, to which I’ll come in a moment, is dismissed.

It may be worth pointing out that the Department of Health and Social Care, by contrast, has to date provided much fuller disclosure, including Mr Hancock’s WhatsApp messages without any redactions at all for relevance being applied to that material, and so we would of course invite the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office to pay close regard to the position adopted by the DHSC.

The Cabinet Office is required to remedy immediately all overdue disclosure of potentially relevant WhatsApp materials both relating to group messages and one-to-one threads with other key individuals.

The Cabinet Office has also been asked for but is yet to provide an updated schedule of all the potentially relevant WhatsApp materials held by all of its witnesses. So, my Lady, no doubt you’ll be hearing from Mr Chapman on behalf of the Cabinet Office in due course on that issue.

The second issue concerning the Cabinet Office relates to Google Spaces. The Cabinet Office drew to the attention of the Inquiry in January the existence of Google Spaces as a forum for key individuals to have communicated during the response to the pandemic. We agreed that this was potentially a relevant source of evidence, and we requested that the Cabinet Office identify potentially relevant Spaces. We made it clear that we wished to assist the Cabinet Office in this task by helping them to prioritise it within the disclosure. A significant number of calls for formal updates have been made, and deadlines have passed unanswered.

Last week, the Cabinet Office provided a schedule of potentially relevant Google Spaces along with a list of membership of each group, the time period during which the groups were active, and an indication of volume.

Whilst it’s regrettable that so much time has elapsed before reaching this point, we are nevertheless grateful for that schedule, but we’ve identified a number of groups which need to be prioritised for extraction and disclosure.

My Lady, in relation to the material on Google Spaces, the same issue of course arises as it arises in relation to the WhatsApps, the diaries and the notebooks relating to Mr Johnson. For obvious reasons, we maintain that that material, the Google Spaces material, must be provided to the Inquiry without redactions, without a relevancy review being undertaken by the Cabinet Office.

Our position, as you know, and it is your position, that any relevancy review and redaction is wrong in principle, as well as slowing down the process of provision of material to the core participants. But of course the resolution of that issue must await the outcome of the High Court’s decision in the judicial review relating to Mr Johnson’s material.

The third matter concerns communications and material relating to agendas, briefings and minutes of calls between the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales and the first and deputy First Ministers of Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom Government.

It’s been made clear, we have made it clear to the core participants and to material providers, that communications with the devolved administrations is a vital part of Module 2 and that the records of key communications between government ministers and the devolved administrations must be provided. We have made repeated requests for an update on the delivery of such material, and on 25 May, just 12 days or so ago, the Cabinet Office wrote to the Inquiry to explain that, as a result of machinery of government change, these materials were now legally under the responsibility of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, DLUHC, and we were asked to liaise further with DLUHC.

Naturally we have pointed out that that is an unacceptable position and we have asked the Cabinet Office in the strongest terms to address this issue.

Mr Chapman has addressed this issue in his written submissions for today, though those are, of course, in the bundle before you, and I’m sure you will be inviting him to further elaborate upon them.

They did indicate, I’m pleased to say, eventually, that the materials would be provided, and I’m pleased to confirm that they were today. But they now require to be reviewed, they need to be looked at without delay, and we obviously need to progress them for disclosure to the core participants.

I raise it for completeness because it’s a matter that the core participants have raised, or rather it’s a matter which needs to be raised with the core participants, because they’ve shown concern about the nature of the Cabinet Office’s approach to this material.

The fourth issue concerns the matter of Cabinet collective responsibility. My Lady, the Cabinet Office indicated in correspondence that it would seek to withhold from core participants, although not from the Inquiry, a certain amount of material, disclosure of which was said in its view to be likely to damage the public interest, national security. They argued that this material which is in their possession would, if it was disclosed, breach the principle of Cabinet collective responsibility.

The Cabinet Office provided a selection of materials, around 13 documents in all, consisting of Cabinet and Cabinet Committee minutes. They said that they were potentially representative of a larger number of documents in relation to which the government would wish to prevent onward disclosure and apply for an appropriate application under section 19 of the Inquiries Act for what is known as a restriction order.

My Lady, this morning we’ve been informed that the government may no longer wish to rely upon the principle of Cabinet collective responsibility for the purposes of seeking restriction orders and therefore withholding the disclosure of that material from the core participants.

You may wish to invite Mr Chapman to confirm the position today, and to provide you with more detail as to what the Cabinet Office’s principled basis for its position is.

It’s obvious that whilst the issue of these 13 documents may now be resolved, there is the potential for the principle to be applied at a later date to other material and we would welcome confirmation that the government will not take a position on Cabinet collective responsibility in relation to any material. If it does wish to do so, we would want them to make a formal application for restriction order by perhaps 20 June, in order that this issue doesn’t rumble on.

My Lady, given the indication today that such material may be received without a claim to Cabinet collective responsibility being made, I don’t think I need to address you in relation to the process that might be applied were a restriction order application to be made. Some of the core participants have advanced a number of submissions to the effect that they would wish to be heard in principle on the open issues reflective of the restriction order applications, and of course you would be, I’m sure, prepared to hear them. But may we defer to another day what procedure we put in place for the receipt of those submissions?

Fifthly, in relation to the Cabinet Office again, there is the well-publicised issue of Mr Johnson’s official diaries, his notebooks and potentially relevant WhatsApp messages, both from him and from one of his advisers.

My Lady, all that material dates from the period of government decision-making that is the subject of scrutiny by the Inquiry, and as you said on 28 April, a notice under section 21 of the Inquiries Act was sent to the Cabinet Office requiring those documents to be produced, because you considered them to be potentially relevant, and because they had been provided or understood would be provided only in redacted form so far, and so that there is no doubt, you’ve required them to be received in unredacted form so that you could determine the relevancy of their contents.

My Lady, the position maintained by the Cabinet Office is not likely, of course, to be limited to those particular materials. Almost inevitably, this issue will have application to the very wide range of documents, emails, WhatsApps and text messages that the Cabinet Office and other government departments will and may hold on behalf of persons who engaged in such communication. I have already addressed you in relation to the impact upon Google Spaces material.

So there is a principle of very considerable importance to be resolved.

My Lady, as you mentioned on Thursday last week, the Cabinet Office served its application for judicial review challenging your ruling of 22 May, which was a ruling, of course, that had the result that the section 21 notice still stood. Time is pressing. We have therefore requested, and the High Court has now ordered, that the application for judicial review be heard by way of a rolled-up hearing, and that’s a process, as you know, in which the court considers the application for permission and then, if it grants permission, it goes on to consider the full application.

That application, the rolled-up application, is likely to be heard on 30 June or very shortly thereafter.

Given that the issue is now on its way to the High Court, it’s probably not particularly profitable for me to say more about the judicial review itself. However, on 1 and 2 June the Cabinet Office supplied the Inquiry with copies of Mr Johnson’s potentially relevant WhatsApps and of his diary. Both sets of material were still redacted. They’ve also supplied us, again redacted, with copies of the notebooks, and copies of his 25 notebooks are said to have been transferred to us yesterday, although I don’t believe that they’ve reached the Relativity system.

Nevertheless, as has been well publicised, Mr Johnson has offered to provide the Inquiry with assistance directly. We’re grateful to him for his co-operation, and the Inquiry team has been liaising with his legal team to arrange for the inspection of the unredacted WhatsApps that he had provided to the Cabinet Office but which he has had returned to him. We expect to begin that inspection this week.

The inspection, my Lady, will allow your team to make its own assessment of the redactions applied by the Cabinet Office and to satisfy ourselves and ultimately you of their appropriateness or otherwise.

The Cabinet Office also holds the notebooks. We have proposed that they be returned to Mr Johnson by 12 June, after which we will make arrangements to inspect the unredacted copies of those notebooks for ourselves, and compare them to the redacted copies already provided by the Cabinet Office.

We are awaiting confirmation from the Cabinet Office about the possession and control of Mr Johnson’s diaries, and again we will seek to inspect a clean copy with the assistance of Mr Johnson if that proves to be possible.

My Lady, you know that Mr Johnson also holds an old phone which was turned off in 2021 for security reasons. Neither Mr Johnson nor the Inquiry have the technical expertise to ensure that the contents of the phone can be downloaded safely and properly, particularly bearing in mind the overarching need to ensure that no damage is done to national security. We have therefore agreed that this phone should be provided to the appropriate personnel in government for its contents to be downloaded. We have asked the Cabinet Office, in liaison with Mr Johnson and those government personnel, to obtain the phone without delay, to confirm in writing the process by which it will be examined, and to give confirmation that it, like the dairies and the notebooks and the WhatsApps, will be accessed fully. That is to say, that there will be no redactions made to the contents, other than in relation to national security, before we may view it.

My Lady, may I make one further observation on this topic. Some may have seen a report in the press to the effect that the Cabinet Office had written to Mr Johnson at the end of last week to say that payment of his legal costs was conditional, amongst a number of conditions, on him not giving the Inquiry any documents without its “pre-approval and redaction”.

The Inquiry Secretary, Mr Connah, wrote to the Cabinet Office on Sunday to seek confirmation of what we suspected to be the case, which is that the Cabinet Office was only seeking to ensure that national security protected material was not going to be disclosed by Mr Johnson. It is our understanding that the Cabinet Office was not seeking to prevent Mr Johnson from disclosing material which it, the Cabinet Office, believes, to use its phrase, is unambiguously irrelevant.

So, my Lady, the concluding point is we will shortly gain access to all the material on an unredacted basis.

Turning back to the submissions from the core participants, requests have been made by some of them for disclosure of correspondence with material providers, including the Cabinet Office, with whom the Inquiry has been engaging over this time concerning perceived non-compliance.

My Lady, where it’s necessary, the core participants will be informed of issues of non-compliance, but may we suggest that it’s not necessary or appropriate to disclose to the core participants the detail of the discussions or the correspondence with material providers.

It may be thought that the Inquiry has proved itself quite capable of dealing with issues of non-compliance.

Finally, in relation to the material from material providers, there are two other matters to which I would like to draw your attention, and they concern the DHSC, the Department of Health and Social Care, and the United Kingdom Health Security Authority(sic), the UKHSA.

My Lady, in relation to the DHSC, the initial Rule 9 request was issued on 20 September 2022. Whilst we have received and disclosed a first corporate statement from DHSC, and we’re grateful to it for that, there are two other further statements outstanding covering the period from August 2020 to February 2022 and a number of supplemental statements dealing with topics such as legislation, equalities, adult social care, international co-operation and devolution.

The deadlines for disclosure of those documents have been extended but are now overdue. They have been missed. May we invite, please, the DHSC to clarify the position in relation to those documents.

Secondly, in relation to the UKHSA, it received a Rule 9 request in October, deadlines for its draft statement have passed and, despite further extensions, only two parts of the statement have been provided. A significant majority, therefore, remains outstanding.

The Inquiry received on Friday a further application for more time. The Inquiry agreed to a modest further extension, but we do need to know what the UKHSA’s position is in relation to that, and whether or not we will receive that material forthwith.

My Lady, may I then turn to the issue of the request made in some of the written submissions from the core participants to the effect that the Inquiry disclose to core participants the Rule 9 requests that you have directed be made in Module 2. As I’ve said, they amount to many hundreds of Rule 9 requests.

My Lady, you will recall that in the confines of the preliminary hearings in Module 1, and in fact also Module 2, you had considered but ultimately went on to refuse this request. We’d respectfully suggest that there is no proper basis for revisiting your ruling.

Disclosure to the core participants of the Rule 9 requests themselves, as opposed to the relevant documents and materials which are generated by them, is neither required by the rules nor generally established by past practice.

In any event, of course, the core participants are starting to receive the Rule 9 statements and documents that are the fruit of this process.

We will, however, draw up a comprehensive list of every person or body that has been sent a Rule 9, and I believe that list is under preparation and will be provided in the next day or two.

Turning, then, my Lady, to the issue of the general state of disclosure of documents to the core participants. Seven Rule 9 statements and – corporate statements and two individual Rule 9 statements have been disclosed. We’ve received and we are considering or providing observations on a large number of Rule 9s which will be disclosed over the coming weeks. The remainder of the Rule 9 responses, those which we’ve either not received and disclosed or which we’re currently considering, are expected to be received in draft form over the next two months.

We have disclosed some 17,500 documents to the core participants, including those Rule 9 statements, and around about 273 questionnaires and supporting documents. We’ve disclosed thousands of documents from the Department of Health and Social Security, narratives from the Cabinet Office which set out a chronology of meetings and of communications, minutes detailing the events of COBR meetings, Cabinet meetings and meetings of the ministerial implementation groups. We have disclosed corporate statements from a number of government bodies and, over the next few days, will be providing corporate witness statements and exhibits from the Treasury, the Equality Hub in the Cabinet Office, witness statements from Cabinet Office witnesses, and witness statements on behalf of a number of regional mayors.

My Lady, there are tens of thousands of documents in the process. Around about 9,000 are already with material providers awaiting a final review and confirmation that they can be disclosed to the core participants at our direction. Around about 24,000 are in the review process, which you’ll recall from previous hearings is the process whereby there is a first and then a second-level review by the Inquiry team on relevance.

We’ve received material from around about 70 organisations, and that material in the main will be disclosed, as I’ve said, by the end of July.

The pace at which the Inquiry paralegals and lawyers have conducted that first and second level review has gone up dramatically since we last met, due to the considerable further resources made available, and their massive hard work.

Save for the materials which it knows to be outstanding, and anything which results from further requests for disclosure which we may issue, the Inquiry expects that it has now received the vast majority of the disclosure relevant to Module 2. It will, as I say, be swiftly reviewed and I’m very grateful to the material providers who have provided it all.

We are confident the vast majority will be disclosed by the end of July, that’s to say the Rule 9 statements, and that the vast majority of the documents which accompany them, around about 40 to 50% of what we’ve received, because of course not everything is relevant, will be received by the core participants by the end of August.

By then, around 35,000 documents are likely to have been disclosed, and, my Lady, that is a remarkable feat, given that the first tranche was only made, by way of disclosure to core participants, in December.

My Lady, on the subject of disclosure, a number of requests have been made, specific requests have been made by the core participants. One core participant has asked about cross-module disclosure. We have that very much in mind, and we will be making arrangements for materials which are disclosed in Module 2 to be made available in Modules 2A to 2C as appropriate, and of course documents disclosed in Module 1 and 2 – Module 1 commencing next week – will be available on Relativity for use in subsequent modules.

The Welsh Government have raised a query in relation to the Inquiry’s disclosure of meetings and emails and material relating to the Westminster, the United Kingdom Government’s communications with the Welsh Government over the decision-making from February and March 2020.

I can say that the disclosure that we’ve already made includes narratives prepared by the Cabinet Office in respect of key meetings with the Welsh Government, and so the Welsh Government should already have access to that material. We’re also seeking further materials from the Cabinet Office and DLUHC, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, concerning Whitehall’s engagement with the devolved administrations. When received, they’ll also be disclosed.

Another core participant had asked for a detailed chronology of events, with references to underlying disclosure or possibly chronological accounts of key evidence themes. We have asked the Cabinet Office, the UKHSA and the DHSC for chronologies of key events and meetings, and they will all be disclosed in due course.

Finally, one core participant has asked that the witness statements be disclosed on a rolling basis. They are being disclosed on a rolling basis, other than where we consider that the core participants would be better assisted by making sure that the statement is disclosed alongside its accompanying exhibits.

My Lady, may I then address you briefly on the issue of timing, because I want to say something about the very considerable progress that the Inquiry’s already made, and about the timing of the public hearing in the autumn.

We’ve proceeded at a remarkable pace. There is simply no justification for any complaint that the Inquiry has been slow or dilatory. No Inquiry with so wide a scope has ever proceeded with such speed. But the Inquiry process is simply not designed to assemble every single document and person relevant to the preparation, for the response to, or the impact of the Covid pandemic. That would be an impossible task, and no sensible Inquiry could ever contemplate it.

What we’ve done is to seek the witnesses and documents that you have considered are most relevant to the issues that you’ve decided that you want to explore. This is especially so in Module 2, because it’s concerned with the high level political and administrative decision-making. It is not a module enquiring into every aspect of every decision on Covid. It’s an inquiry into only such parts of the decision-making process that appear to you to really matter.

Even then, my Lady, we need to put the core participants on guard that it is impossible to call every witness who can give evidence of every issue covered in every paragraph of the list of issues for Module 2 that you have directed be produced. We have neither the time nor the resources for this and I daresay the core participants and the general public would not wish it to be so. So choices will have to be made as to which witnesses will be called at the public hearing.

But, my Lady, there can be no doubt that by the time of that hearing, sufficient material will have been secured and disclosed and given to the core participants to enable you to be satisfied you can conduct an absolutely full and fair Inquiry.

Documents will necessarily continue to be received right up to the date of the hearing, but the core participants undoubtedly have the determination and drive and their legal teams the skill and experience to make it work.

Lastly, I must emphasise that although the law does not give the core participants the right or the ability to decide themselves what witnesses should be called to be examined, you have asked the Inquiry to ask all the core participants to tell us what issues should be explored, which witnesses should be called, what should be put to them, and what documents should be aired. That is the sole purpose of the Inquiry having sent out the provisional list of witnesses – or, in due course, the provisional list of witnesses, but already the provisional list of issues, the proposed evidence proposals in due course, and also the proposed questions.

All the core participants have been given the chance to help decide what evidence should be publicly ventilated and tested.

Few countries, my Lady, have established formal legal inquiries investigating the many aspects of the pandemic, but of those that have, the United Kingdom Covid-19 Inquiry is the first to have reached public hearings, because of course it commences Module 1 next week.

A number of countries have held independent commissions led by epidemiologists and public health economic experts, and many of those commissions have indeed concluded. But, my Lady, they were not legal processes. They did not have the force of law behind them. They did not have powers of production. They couldn’t compel witnesses to attend. They couldn’t compel the production of material, as you have done already in this Inquiry. And, therefore, they could not provide the core participants or the public with anything like a meaningful participation. They did not, of course, address these issues with anything like the same degree of scope and width.

My Lady, the next issue on the agenda concerns expert witnesses.

We have set out in our note the position in relation to the instruction of a number of experts, Professor Ailsa Henderson, Professor Thomas Hale, Alex Thomas from the Institute for Government, and Gavin Freeguard, former programme director and head of data and transparency at the Institute for Government.

The core participants are aware of the areas on which all those experts are due to opine. The draft report from Professor Hale has been circulated. We were provided with a voluminous number of observations in reply, and we’ve obviously been through those observations and comments, and had to decide which of them required a response from Professor Hale. He is in the process of considering those comments and our observations on his draft report, and I believe his final report is due by the end of June.

A draft report from Professor Henderson has been circulated, we’re considering the core participants’ responses, and I believe that a further draft will be provided in due course, once Professor Henderson has had a chance to consider those comments.

The reports from Alex Thomas and Gavin Freeguard will be shared with the core participants for their observations in the next two weeks.

My Lady, one core participant has asked that where experts have referred to publications, the Inquiry be provided with the articles, and that those are in turn disclosed to the core participants. We have asked the experts to provide the documents to which they refer, quite naturally, or to include full references or hyperlinks, and all that material will be made available.

Importantly, at the previous preliminary hearing, you directed that further experts be instructed to deal with the issue of pre-existing structural racism, but also other areas of pre-existing structural inequality, intersectionality and discrimination. The Inquiry team sought the views of core participants on who might be best placed to assist it, to assist the Inquiry, and we’ve considered the recommendations which they’ve kindly made. We’re in the process of instructing, finalising the instructions to those experts, and they include Professors James Nazroo, Tom Shakespeare, Nick Watson and Clare Wenham, the leading experts on discrimination relating to race and ethnicity, ageing, disability and sex. So, my Lady, that task is well in hand.

The Inquiry has also identified and is in the process of instructing additional experts to consider the position of children and people from the LGBTQ+ community with regard to discrimination and inequalities. The CPs will be updated very shortly with a copy of the confirmation that instructions have been sent to those experts.

Lastly, we’ve decided that the report prepared by Professor Clare Bambra and Sir Michael Marmot in Module 1 should be disclosed to the core participants in Module 2, and it was so disclosed on 31 May. But together, that report together with all the additional material that you have ordered be obtained from experts, will ensure that inequalities are placed at the fore of the Inquiry, and therefore will run through the entirety of Module 2, as with the later modules.

On the subject of the list of witnesses, to better ensure the timetabling of witnesses come August and September, the Inquiry will begin this week writing to certain core witnesses, through their legal representatives, putting them on notice formally of the hearing dates and to seek any dates to avoid.

My Lady, may I emphasise that those provisional witnesses of course are, by necessity, provisional only. We are awaiting further statements. Not all of them, moreover, who are given notice will necessarily be called, and some additional witnesses will have to be written to later, once, of course, we’ve received observations from the core participants as to whom we should call.

The Inquiry team thereafter proposes to send out, likely at the end of June, a provisional list of those witnesses who may be called to give oral evidence at the public hearing, and the core participants will be invited to make observations.

My Lady, because it’s quite possible that we will receive draft Rule 9 statements from further witnesses after that date, the date upon which the core participants will have given us their views as to whom we should call, I can reassure them that we will remain open to considering later requests for further witnesses after that additional material has been received.

My Lady, the next point on the agenda, the next issue to be addressed concerns the call from Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice United Kingdom for the Inquiry to receive oral evidence from its members in the course of the Module 2 public hearing.

May I say that we do intend to call a range of witnesses from across the bereaved groups and other minority, vulnerable and marginalised groups who are represented in this Inquiry. We’re also likely to formally introduce into evidence a number of the responses to the impact questionnaires that we had sent out.

But, my Lady, may I explain briefly why, in our submission, it is simply not possible to call everyone that the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Group UK and other groups would wish us to call.

You have already ruled in principle on whether evidence should be called from individual bereaved families, and in your ruling of October following the first preliminary hearing you said, in line with the terms of reference which bind you, that evidence of circumstances of death should only be admitted in this and later modules if it is relevant to possible systemic failings.

My Lady, the evidence of single deaths, however awful, compelling and terrible, simply cannot demonstrate of itself whether there were system failings, as opposed to there having been a failure to prevent that particular death. And you made clear you needed no persuading that bereaved family members may well have relevant evidence to give on particular areas of systemic failings, for example the widespread use of Do Not Resuscitate notices, but if so that evidence can be called in the later modules where those issues are under consideration.

Evidence of how loved ones died, coupled with the views, hugely moving views, of the makers of the statements as to why they died and why they believe that the deaths were contributed to [by] failings on the part of the systems, does not go to Module 2. Module 2 is concerned with the high level response of the government in terms of its political and administrative decision-making. What consequences in terms of the individual circumstances of harm and injury, loss and death which may have resulted cannot assist you in examining the merits of those decisions at the point that they were taken. But, as I say, my Lady, we are nevertheless going to call a range of evidence where we possibly can in Module 2 in order to meet that perfectly understandable request.

My Lady, finally, in relation to some of the practicalities relating to the hearing in October, the Module 2 public hearing will begin, as will the Module 1 public hearing next week, with a film showing the recorded views of some of those who have suffered so much. The public hearing in Module 2 is scheduled to last eight weeks, from 3 October to 7 December, with, at present, two one-week breaks in the middle.

My Lord, it has been suggested that there be a further preliminary hearing in late July or in September, and that is under consideration.

My Lady, although not directly relevant to Module 2, may I also just say something very briefly about Every Story Matters, because it’s found reflection in many of the written submissions filed by the core participants.

My Lady, following a direction that you gave at an earlier preliminary hearing, the Inquiry published in April, on 27 April, a detailed document setting out in a single place all the progress that had been made with the listening exercise, Every Story Matters, together with an open letter from Mr Connah, Secretary to the Inquiry.

It has been made plain that a new and improved online Every Story Matters web form would be launched, and it was launched on 23 May, and it incorporates a number of changes following feedback from organisations and individuals, including from the bereaved groups, who took part in user testing.

There is a new paper version of the web form, a large print version and an easy read version, and all of that will be made available for the launch on 13 June.

There is also a British Sign Language video explainer, explaining how to take part. That will be available, and we’re exploring options for receiving Every Story Matters responses in British Sign Language also.

My Lady, a public information campaign to encourage participation in Every Story Matters will also begin next week, including radio advertising, print advertising, print and digital billboards, adverts and the like. So, my Lady, that launch is imminent.

The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice United Kingdom and Covid-19 Northern Ireland groups have requested that they be provided with commercial tender documents relating to the prospective hiring of the communications company that will necessarily be assisting the Inquiry with Every Story Matters.

My Lady, it’s simply not standard practice for any public body to share documents whilst a procurement process is under way, to protect obviously the commercial process. Once contracts are awarded, information about the contracts will be published on Contracts Finder within 30 days of the contract being signed.

The communications contract is likely to be signed in late June, but I can say that 23red, with which the Inquiry worked at one part of the first phase of developing Every Story Matters, is no longer working with the Inquiry and will not be doing so.

My Lady, one group of core participants have raised access to Every Story Matters by disabled people as an issue. The evidence, my Lady, shows that most people want to share their experiences online in their own time and in their own way, and I can assure that group of core participants that the online form has been designed for and tested with disabled people in mind, and it can work with a variety of assistive technologies.

My Lady, turning to the submissions made by the Save the Children United Kingdom group and their affiliated bodies. The Inquiry has decided that the open web form is not an appropriate avenue through which to collect the experiences of those currently under the age of 18, due to obvious safeguarding risks, but we are developing plans to ensure we understand the experience of such people, and we will bring those shortly to your attention for your consideration.

I should also add that the Inquiry has created an ethical advisory group to provide an independent ethical review of the research design and the approach to Every Story Matters and, as you know, that group is chaired by Professor David Archard of Queen’s University Belfast.

At least three panels of the commemorative tapestry will be ready by the commencement of the Module 1 public hearing next week and digital access will be provided later in the summer.

My Lady, I mentioned earlier the impact film which is to be shown at the start of the Module 1 hearing. A different film will of course be played at the start of Module 2.

My Lady, the filming sessions are taking place across the United Kingdom and further filming dates will be announced in due course for Module 2. We would ask interested core participants to submit volunteer interviewees and they can do that by emailing the Inquiry’s engagement email address, which will be provided with the filming dates.

My Lady, that concludes my opening submissions in relation to the majority of the matters raised in the written submissions and in relation to the practicalities of this module.

May I lastly just seek permission from you, please, to publish the core participants’ submissions and the CTI note.

My Lady, that may be a suitable place for a break for the stenographer .

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much. You have the permission to publish the submissions and the CTI note. And I shall return at 11.55. Thank you.

(11.38 am)

(A short break)

(11.55 am)

Lady Hallett: Right. Ms Maragh.