2. Ms Kemi Badenoch

MS KEMI BADENOCH (sworn).

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Mr Keating: Do sit down, please. Thank you.

The Witness: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: I hope we haven’t kept you waiting for too long.

The Witness: That’s fine.

Mr Keating: Could you give us your full name, please.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Kemi Badenoch.

Counsel Inquiry: Ms Badenoch, thank you so much for attending today. Thank you for assisting the Inquiry with its investigations. You have provided a statement dated 26 June of this year to the Inquiry, and it runs to over 38 pages, and you have had the opportunity to check that, you’ve signed it, and it’s true to the best of your knowledge and belief, and you’ve also provided, as we can see in the top right-hand corner, 87 exhibits. Thank you so much in relation to that.

Before going into your evidence, let’s briefly set out your professional background. You’re here really in your capacity at the time as Minister for Equalities, which you held that post between February 2020 and February 2022, which is the time – forgive me.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: With – it’s not quite. July 2022.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, which is after February 2022.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Oh, I see, yes, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Let me run through the timetable with you, and it’s my fault if I am confusing.

So you are elected as Member of Parliament for Saffron Walden since June 2017?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: You were Parliamentary Undersecretary of State (Minister for Children and Families) July 2019 to February 2020, and from February 2020 to September 2021 you were Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury and Minister for Equalities?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And you were on maternity leave for a short period at the beginning of that time period, so it’s from February 2020 to April 2020 –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – you were on maternity leave, which is relevant because that’s at the outset of the Inquiry.

Later on, in 2021, you became minister of state at the Department for Levelling Up, and you held that role until July 2022, and you currently – outside the Inquiry’s time periods, but you currently are Secretary of State for International Trade and president of the Board of Trade, and also in October 2022 you were appointed as Minister for Women and Equalities?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, business and trade, not international trade.

Counsel Inquiry: Business and trade?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: More has been added to the role, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

So thank you so much for attending. And in terms of the role of Minister for Equalities, and that’s what we’re dealing with, so back during the pandemic, how would you describe the responsibilities for the Minister for Equalities?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: So I would say that until I took on the role, returning in April 2020 and I’d say in particular June 2020, the role for a Minister for Equalities was actually quite different. It was very much limited to looking at LGBT-related issues and women’s issues, in particular around women’s economic issues, gender pay gap and so on.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay, so your previous responsibilities changed significantly, and you set out what those workstreams are in your statement at paragraph 9. And as an overview of the work you did, we can see that at paragraph 9 of your statement, one of the main areas was quarterly reports on progress to address Covid-19 health inequalities?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And we will go through those reports, not each report in detail, but we’ll touch upon key features of those.

You refer to ad hoc attendance at Covid-O meetings in your capacity as Minister for Equalities, and that was often discussing disproportionately impacted groups, that would have been a specific phrase term?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Public health communications, a key feature also. And lastly, one of the significant features, it appears from your evidence, written evidence, is increasing vaccine uptake within ethnic minority groups.

In relation to that, there is a module later on in this Inquiry which is going to deal with vaccines.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Right.

Counsel Inquiry: So we will touch upon your work but perhaps not in the detail that would be done otherwise.

In terms of the ministry, in terms of the Minister for Equalities, at that stage would it be fair to describe it as a junior ministerial role?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: My role was.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: It is not – strictly speaking, it’s an odd department because it’s not really a department, it’s a directorate, currently within the Cabinet Office, but it would move with the department of whoever the Secretary of State, who was also Minister for Women and Equalities.

Counsel Inquiry: Which was Liz Truss at that time?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: At the time, yes. So strictly speaking we were in DIT, as it was, the Department for International Trade, but there were recommendations made by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities that the unit should stay in the Cabinet Office for consistency and continuity.

Counsel Inquiry: So the Equality Hub was formed later in 2020, that was based in the Cabinet Office, we’ve heard about that, and in terms of the senior minister in this directorate, to use your phrase, that would have been Liz Truss, who was the Secretary of State at that time?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: The quarterly reports on inequalities and how that work was brought about, just a little bit of context. In terms of when you returned – when you were appointed as minister in February 2020, joining effectively in April 2020, it was around the time of the Marmot Review. Is that something that – The Marmot Review 10 Years On, was that a review that you had been aware of in your capacity as Minister for Equalities?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Not initially. I did become aware of it later on in 2020, but I think it’s probably worthwhile giving some context as to why that would be the case. The Equality Hub operates a hub and spoke model, even before it was the Equality Hub, it became a bit more broad based, but every department is responsible for managing its own equality work. So we would do perhaps first principles research primarily in the LGBT and women’s space. We did not cover equality across the board. What we looked at was the Equality Act specifications, which is around protected characteristics, and preventing discrimination, rather than inequality that might arise from other areas.

So this – this work that we started to do was basically expanding what we would normally do in order to provide support to departments like DHSC who were completely swamped at the time. So the Marmot report is not something that would naturally have come to me anyway, but I did become aware of it, at some point, I can’t remember exactly when.

Counsel Inquiry: The last bit, just by way of context, so The Marmot Review 10 Years On, the message around February 2020 was that life expectancy in England had stalled since 2010, and this had not happened since at least the 1900s, and there was concern regarding the health of the nation, and that was one of the features which was touched upon in that review, Ten Years On.

Let’s move on to the next report which is of relevance, direct relevance, to your involvement. So as you were about to take up your post, you became aware that there had been requests made of the Secretary of State, Matt Hancock, in relation to a review into factors affecting the health outcomes for ethnic minority groups, especially those who were working on the frontline?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And they commissioned a report of Public Health England –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – PHE on 4 May 2020, and you set that out in your statement, and that report was published on 2 June 2020 –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: – the PHE report, which we’ve touched upon already, Disparities in the risk and outcomes of Covid-19?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Published June 2020. There was an update in relation to that in August 2020 and some updated or corrected data, which perhaps we don’t need to worry about too much at the moment.

In relation to the concerns that you note in your statement about that report, if we look at paragraph 17, so we just have the context of how you express it, I just want to seek your clarification. So paragraph 17 of your statement, please, thank you.

The first line:

“The PHE report highlights some apparently significant disparities in both risk and outcomes from COVID-19.”

Can you assist me just with the first part, the word “apparently”, which on one basis may be seen as – may be a caveat. What did you mean by that?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: What do I mean by “apparently”?

Counsel Inquiry: In that context.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: It was – this was something that had not been known or verified, and there was anecdotal information, which was the reason why DHSC commissioned the report. But whether the disparities were real or not we didn’t know, what was causing them we certainly didn’t know, and that first PHE report did not explain why, but also it’s about the significance of the disparities, that you can have disparities and they’re not significant, so the “apparently” is referring to both the fact that there were disparities not just – but that they were significant, and it wasn’t just in outcomes but in risk as well.

So the outcome you might be aware of, but also the fact that it was a risk situation was something that became apparent because of the PHE report.

Counsel Inquiry: As a result of the report, you were tasked by the Prime Minister at the time to investigate this, and carry out work which we’ll touch upon.

Let’s perhaps just briefly touch upon the report itself, the PHE report, and that’s at INQ000089740. We see that’s the front page. Page 4, please, thank you, paragraph 1. Thank you.

The third line down, it says:

“It confirms that the impact of COVID-19 has replicated existing health inequalities and, in some cases, has increased them. These results [which were carried out by the report] improve our understanding of the pandemic and will help in formulating the future public health response to it.”

Again, just in the context, if we go to page 6, please, thank you, the first paragraph, deprivation is a feature which is touched upon, an important feature, and it says:

“People who live in deprived areas have higher diagnosis rates and death rates than those living in less deprived areas. The mortality rates from COVID-19 in the most deprived areas were more than double the least deprived areas, for both males and females. This is greater than the inequality seen in mortality rates in previous years …”

Perhaps we could go back to page 4, please, and paragraph 2, then we can move on from this report.

I’m going to summarise, if I may. It talks about the different disparities. Age being one. Significantly, the older one is the greater the likelihood, sadly, of mortality. It talks about gender, male higher risk than female. And it talks about those in – to use their terminology – black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups, having a higher risk than those in white ethnic groups.

It’s really – this also touches upon those who are in a range of caring occupations, which is later on in this document, those who drive passengers and road vehicles, and security guards, and so forth.

So from your perspective, this report had been – had highlighted significant concerns regarding a disproportionate impact –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – particularly in relation to ethnic groups?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: I’ve emphasised groups as in plural. Shall we deal with terminology now because it’s a feature of your work, your concern regarding the terminology?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: What was the feedback that you gleaned from your work over report 1 and report 2 about the use of the term “BAME” to – as an umbrella term for ethnic groups?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: It’s – using the term “BAME” masked what was actually happening within different ethnicities. By lumping people who are black with people who are Asian, very, very different – very, very different groups of people, it was – it made it harder to actually look at the underlying factors. So what the PHE report did was tell us what was – what we’re seeing, it didn’t tell us why, and lumping people into one group completely obscures different bits of information, which we were then able to single out once we started splitting – once we started splitting groups apart.

What BAME basically does is summarise anyone who is not white from a health perspective or even just from any sort of analysis perspective. That’s not particularly helpful. It is a phrase that is used if you’re starting from the perspective of there is some discrimination taking place, and that is not the perspective that I wanted us to start from if we were to understand exactly what was going on.

Counsel Inquiry: So we recognise the terminology and it being inappropriate in that context, and that is a feature of your work. I think we will see the “BAME” term being used throughout.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: With that context very much in mind, I want to deal with one other matter regarding this publication, this report. Within a couple of days it was announced in Parliament that you were going to lead this review. Were you also aware that there was concerns expressed by a number of organisations, including FEHMO and British Medical Association, regarding features of the PHE report which were missing, such as recommendations and also the input from a number of groups who had exchanged and discussed their experiences?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, very much so, because I also experienced quite a lot of personal abuse around the non-publication of that, despite – despite people not understanding exactly why there was a slight delay in publishing. And the reason for that was because there were actually two reports written, and participants assumed that there was only one. One of them was the report which we commissioned, which we published, and the second was a sort of stakeholder report, which was less what is happening but how people feel. And because we hadn’t commissioned that, we didn’t publish it straightaway, it was something that went into the system for a review understanding what was going on. And the assumption from people who didn’t know that there were two separate reports was that the government was hiding something, which was very unfortunate, because it immediately created some distrust, which should not have been the case, because the assumption was that this was being hidden from people for deliberate reasons rather than additional information which we hadn’t commissioned which we were taking longer to respond to.

Counsel Inquiry: So in relation to the messaging, using the sort of political terminology, perhaps, the messaging of the two reports, is it fair to say that the PHE report doesn’t message that there’s going to be another document which is going to run –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: No.

Counsel Inquiry: – thereafter?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: No, it did not.

Counsel Inquiry: Was it the case that the second report, which we’re going to touch upon in a moment, the Beyond the Data report –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – was that something which was really disclosed thereafter because of this outcry regarding –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: No, no, that’s not true. First of all, this was a report that was written by an independent body, so, irrespective of whether we published it or not, it could always have been published. So it wasn’t because of an outcry. It was more the fact that it was being presented as missing data when actually stakeholder analysis and responses, especially the way that those responses had been captured, I felt was not how it should have been done.

If you go out and ask people who are unhappy “Why are you unhappy?” you can get a totally skewed view, rather than asking everyone how they feel. And as I read that report I could see that the people who already believed that the system was set against them were the ones that were more likely to reply. I recognised many tropes in the documents and in the responses which were coming from a place – not from a clinical or medical analysis, but more general social commentary, probably even more political, and I felt that we needed to make sure that we separated the two things.

I’m very keen that we have as much rigour as possible when we analyse data, and we should separate quantitative from qualitative, and the way that it had been published meant that it wasn’t easy to do so. Publishing them in stages meant that we could look at what was happening and deal with that and then talk about the stakeholder responses after.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you for that answer.

Let’s look at the report very briefly, and I’m just going to follow up on your answer in a moment. So if we could turn to INQ000176354, and that’s Beyond the data: Understanding the impact of COVID-19 on BAME groups, and that was published on 16 June, two weeks after the first report.

Perhaps if we could go to page 6, please, I’m just going to do two passages in relation to this. The second paragraph. Stakeholders – there was a significant amount of input in relation to this, which – under the umbrella of stakeholders. It states this:

“Stakeholders acknowledged that while actions are already being undertaken, the results of the PHE review and other studies should be used to strengthen and accelerate efforts moving forward. Clear, visible and tangible actions, provided at scale were called for now with a commitment to address the underlying factors.”

Lastly in relation to this report, if we could go to page 9, please, and the final paragraph, halfway down we see:

“The engagement sessions highlighted the BAME groups deep concern and anxiety that if lessons are not learnt from this initial phase of the epidemic, future waves of the disease could again have severe and disproportionate impacts. All were united in the commitment that urgent, collaborative and decisive action is required to avoid a repeat of this in the future.”

I have extracted two parts to it, not controversial, you would agree –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Well, I don’t disagree with some of the explanations and assessments, and certainly in terms of what stakeholder groups would have been feeling. That’s something that I very much recognise.

Counsel Inquiry: Were you listening to these concerns which were being expressed about how certain groups felt that they were being treated and felt that they were exposed to Covid-19?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Absolutely. So if you – if we go back to the first clip, I think you said it was page 6 or paragraph 6, I can’t remember.

Counsel Inquiry: That’s correct, it was, I believe –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Many of the recommendations in that report were what informed our decision to publish the four quarterly reports. It was quite clear to me that the recommendations were things that would be needed in order to provide assurance the government was taking this seriously. But one of the reasons why I was quite keen to do the work – so I wasn’t just asked to do it, I did speak to other ministers and let it be known that I would be happy to take on some of this work to help with capacity, because these were concerns that I was having as well. I am a black woman. I was reading that this was something that was impacting black people. That’s my family, that’s my friends, and so on. And I felt that having that personal interest would mean that I would be not just focused, but also be able to provide reassurance to many of those groups who feel that people who don’t look like them can never represent them, that they were having a minister who was black, who was of the community, if you’re speaking strictly on race, looking at this work and leading on it.

And I was also quite keen that Professor Kevin Fenton, who at the time – also a black man – head of PHE in London, worked closely and certainly was involved in how we were pulling together the terms of reference for the report and how we ended up making sure that we could communicate it in a way that would provide reassurance to people who, for whatever reason, had genuine concerns which I felt needed to be addressed.

Counsel Inquiry: So with that in mind, that you were listening, you were personally invested in this, you touched upon the terms of reference we can see these in your statements at paragraph 18(a) to (g), if we could bring that up in a moment, please. A number of terms of reference but the first point I suppose is the terms of reference there are important to scope the work that you’re dealing with?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And that there was accountability; is that fair?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: We see, I’m not going to read them all, there was a number of terms of reference, eight in total, the first one, to:

“Review the effectiveness and impact of current actions being undertaken by relevant government departments and their agencies to directly lessen disparities in infection and death rates of COVID-19. Factors to be considered – but aren’t limited to – should include age and sex, occupation … “

And so forth, and includes ethnicity at the end.

So in terms of the first term of reference, a wide term of reference?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Summarising the rest of them, it’s to consider whether there’s going to be modifications to new policy. Data key feature, at terms of reference 3, to “commission further data” and to examine the collection of existing data and its quality. And engagement with other departmental ministers, further stakeholder engagement, and to improve public communications, at the bottom of the page.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And at that stage, so we’re June 2020, we’re in the stage that we’re still in lockdown number 1?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Very much so.

Counsel Inquiry: In your view, it was an area that still required work to improve public communications?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes. And in coming up with these terms of reference I was very keen – this is probably my engineering, project management, et cetera, background – that we don’t try to duplicate work that other people are already doing, that we provide support and assistance, we don’t – we are ambitious but not so ambitious that it is not feasible for us to deliver, and look for where there are gaps that we can add – we can add value.

And by the time this report – pardon me, this terms of reference was being drafted, I could already see the comments about people not understanding – if you remember, we had those sort of daily 5 pm announcements and who could shield and who didn’t need to, and so on, and I knew that communications was an area where there was lot of talk about people not necessarily understanding or not watching the same channels. And making sure that we were able to be as inclusive as possible, I wanted to review how we were communicating, not just what we were doing on the BBC, and that’s why I added 7 to it. What I did not want to do was try and be the Department of Health. That’s not what the Equality Hub does.

Counsel Inquiry: No. At paragraph 76 of your statement, you touch upon that your work on Covid-19 disparities was “primarily limited to England only”, and you referenced that, as we know, health is a devolved matter in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: It’s a question I have been asked to clarify, is the use of the word “primarily”. Was any of your work not exclusive to England, in other words that it would have involved the devolved administrations?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Well, the – if you think about the agencies that we work with, it’s NHS England, at that time it’s Public Health England, that’s – that was where we had levers. What we did was communicate to the devolved administrations, “Here’s what we’re doing if you would like to replicate”.

As much as I would have liked to get into every corner, actually there is often resistance to that from devolved administrations, they don’t want UK Government telling them exactly what to do or sticking their fingers into every pie. So it was about providing the transparency and, where we could get data from devolved administrations, doing so and sharing, sharing the information.

Counsel Inquiry: You used the word “communication” and “sharing information”. The statement paragraph, which is open, suggests that was really having material which was available online, transparency as you describe it. Was there any more active communication with the devolved administrations?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Certainly when reports were published we informed them. But given – I think certainly given capacity there would not have been anything to do beyond letting them know what we were doing.

Communication is two-way, it’s what lessons are being learned, it’s how were things going. A lot of that we knew already, so that wasn’t any need to provide additional activity in that space. We were at capacity. So I’m not sure what more we could have done with devolved administrations, given that they were also quite overwhelmed dealing with the pandemic in the various nations.

Counsel Inquiry: And one has to be realistic. You say you were at capacity twice in that answer, and it was during the heart of the pandemic. In hindsight, was this not an area, especially something like public communications, where there would have been synergies between the work you were doing and perhaps the work the devolved administrations were doing?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, but I don’t think that – I don’t think that this was work that was being done in isolation. A lot of the government communications work was spread out, it was shared, they were attending the Covid-Os, they were getting updates at the same time. And I think that those fora were probably sufficient for the kind of thing that we were doing.

Counsel Inquiry: Still on scope, we’ve dealt with devolved administrations, we’ve dealt with your terms of reference, two important groups, children, number one. How did work on children, how was that weaved into the work on disparities over those four quarterly reports?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: So if we take a step back and look at the framework of the Equality Act, it’s in terms of protected characteristics, age is one of them. But our purpose is primarily to prevent discrimination and, in some cases, disproportionate impact if we think we have a lever into that.

The disproportionate impact was very much on the elderly, not on children. That’s something that came across very quickly and very early. So there was limited – there was a limited need to look at how the disease itself was impacting children. There would have been indirect impacts such as schooling, for example, and later on, as we discovered, children living in multigenerational households we knew were actually passing the disease on to their elderly relatives, and as we discovered that sort of information we made sure that it was taken into account whether in risk assessments, in communication that we were passing on. We tried to get into channels looked at by young people, letting them know that they might be at risk or they might be creating a risk for their family members. But beyond that I would not have expected – unless you have some examples – I would not have expected children to be much further in scope for the work that I was doing.

Counsel Inquiry: Well, it’s your answer. The focus, for the reasons you set out, were on other groups, and when one considers age, the focus was on those who were older, rather than children.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: That’s your evidence.

Disabled is the second group I wanted to ask you about, and really what part, if any, your remit included consideration of the impact on those who would fall into the category of disabled persons, disabled people?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: It was limited because there was already a minister of, Minister for Disabled People, Justin Tomlinson, who I believe has already given evidence.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: As I said earlier, making sure that we weren’t duplicating efforts was quite important, and he already covered that part of the brief quite well. Where I did look into disability was where disability interacts more on the health – much more on the health side. So where we discovered that diabetes, for example, was a significant risk factor in terms of whether people died from the disease or not, those sorts of things we looked at. But disability generally, across the board, no, that would not have been within my remit.

Counsel Inquiry: What sort of interaction would you have with Justin Tomlinson, the Minister for Disabled Persons around that time?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Update meetings and we had Equalities ministers meetings where we gave updates on our work across the board. The senior Minister for Women and Equalities as well as myself, Minister for Women, and the Minister for Disabled People would have been present in those meetings.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: And at official level all of that information of course would have been shared.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, and in relation to those meetings which were – were they regular or irregular, these meetings, Equality Ministry meetings?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I think we had regular meetings and then anything else that was needed in between would have been often enough. But also I was quite keen that we didn’t have meetings for the sake of them. If we didn’t have anything to say, we wouldn’t have the meeting just because it was in the diary, and – this is me trying to recollect.

I know that when we did speak there was an agenda item that needed communication between us, but quite often a lot of that would have been done at official level as well. I’m also very conscious of other ministers’ time and it’s not that easy to schedule things into the diary, so as and when necessary.

Counsel Inquiry: So there’s no mystery, you have been asked to obtain that information, you’ve kindly agreed that your team will go away and obtain the documentation in relation to the agendas for those meetings –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – any read-outs?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: But I would like to stress the frequency of meetings does not necessarily indicate the level of action that’s taking place. You can have lots of meetings and nothing happens.

Mr Keating: Well, actions is something we’re going to talk about, but that may be a suitable moment, my Lady. I’m about to move on to a large topic.

Lady Hallett: Certainly, of course, I was just thinking about the comment about how meetings don’t necessarily prove productive.

I shall return at 1.50.

Mr Keating: Thank you, my Lady.

(12.57 pm)

(The short adjournment)

(1.50 pm)

Lady Hallett: Mr Keating.

Mr Keating: Thank you, my Lady.

Welcome back. We were, before luncheon, dealing with the PHE reports, the terms of reference for the work you were doing investigating the apparent – to use your phrase – inequalities in relation to certain groups, and we’d dealt with the terms of reference and the scope of your work, which was from June 2020 onwards.

So the next part of our timeline really moves on to September 2020, and it’s a Covid-O meeting which you were present at – and I’m very grateful, it’s right in front of us there – chaired by Michael Gove, and we see Justin Tomlinson, who is the Minister of State for Disabled People, and overleaf, top of page 2, you’re there in your capacity as Minister for Equalities.

But if we could go to page 5, please. In terms of context at page 5 of this document, we see that the first and second paragraphs, it’s discussing that the first wave of the pandemic, BAME communities had seen higher case rates than their white counterparts. This was being repeated in the second wave of the Covid pandemic. There’s reference to data being perhaps skewed as a result of testing, but reference still that a BAME person – that’s their terminology – was still more likely to die from coronavirus, even once the socioeconomic factors had been removed, with black men twice as likely to die as their white counterparts. It talks about:

“The increased death rate of BAME communities was linked to the fact that these ethnicities were over-represented in eight of the twelve most high-risk coronavirus occupations.”

If we could just scroll out, please, and look at the third paragraph.

So against that context, this Covid-O meeting then refers to disabled persons, and it says this:

“… 60 per cent of those who had died from coronavirus identified as disabled and, even once accounting for other risk factors, disabled people were 1.6 times more likely to die from coronavirus.”

And that spikes considerably when one considers age, and it talks about the difference in relation to gender.

So, Ms Badenoch, just ploughing on from your work in terms of looking at the disproportionate impact on ethnic minority groups and disabled people, that huge group as well, was this not an opportunity for your work to align with the work which was going on in relation to disabled persons, bearing in mind the high death rate which has just been highlighted there?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I don’t think so. I mean, if I understand your question, what you’re asking – correct me if I’m wrong – is that given that there were bad statistics on the disabled side as well as on the equalities side, why didn’t we encapsulate it all together.

Counsel Inquiry: Correct.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: There was no need to. They were doing work, certainly from my perspective, that would just have been a duplication. Simply adding it to our workstream would not have provided any additional insights. They were still part of the broader equalities directorate, and they were focusing on a particular area, and given that the work that my – by which time the quarterly reports that I was doing were focusing on comorbidities and multivariant analysis, it was taking into account other things like age, like sex, like geography, for instance. So we were looking at this in its entirety. Whether or not it was in a particular workstream or another I don’t think would have made much of a difference.

Counsel Inquiry: What would you say to the concern that the interests of disabled people was actually secondary and wasn’t given sufficient prominence at that stage in September 2020?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I would disagree with that. I think just because you’re looking at things separately doesn’t mean that there is a hierarchy of need. The evidence showed that disabled people were more impacted, and we were keen to ensure that it was the people who were most impacted that got the most attention, and that was roughly in order of priority: the elderly, and then disabled people. This was something that was a factor, and in terms of interventions being made, those would have been considerations that DHSC would have taken into account.

Counsel Inquiry: It’s an obvious point, but of course disabled persons will fall within ethnic minority groups as well.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes. Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Let’s move on to your first quarterly report, which is dated 22 October 2020, and that’s INQ000089742 – thank you, right in front of us.

So published on 22 October, and you touch upon in your statement how you wrote a letter to the Prime Minister setting out the work you were doing.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: What we’re going to do is we’re going to draw out some aspects of this. It’s a significant report in terms of length.

Perhaps if we could turn to page 5, please. That’s the introduction there, and the third paragraph sets out the work which was ongoing, and:

“Given the stark findings in relation to ethnicity, the RDU …”

Perhaps you could explain to everybody what that is.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: It’s the Race Disparity Unit.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, thank you:

“… main focus has been to consider why this virus has had such a disproportionate impact on people from ethnic minority groups, and in particular men from within those groups.”

It talks about a separate strand of work when government is considering other disproportionately impacted groups, that being disabled persons.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: The report makes 13 recommendations. If we could see those at page 6. We see the first two at page 6, and perhaps we could just focus on some of those, not them all. But we see there the recommendations which you made to the Prime Minister at the time, which had been accepted in full.

The first two – and I’m going to summarise them, if I may – is that:

“NHS England must ensure that Trusts implement plans for the next stage of the pandemic, and that these plans continue to reflect the latest evidence about ethnic disparities and risk factors.”

And recommendation 2:

“Departments must put in place arrangements for the effective monitoring of the impacts [of] their policies …”

So October 2020, these are quite broad recommendations, would you agree, in terms of: you must have plans and you must be monitoring the impact of your policies?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, they are broad, but I don’t think we should assume that they would have been done if it hadn’t been explicitly set out. But also, what these recommendations are doing are letting it be known that there is someone else marking the homework. It’s very easy for people to say, “Oh, don’t worry, we’ve got some plans in place”, but by formalising these recommendations, they were things which we were going to be going back to check up on later, and it’s almost that evidence-checking process that is being validated with recommendations.

Counsel Inquiry: So you describe this as an evidence-checking process, because one would expect that these are matters which would be in place in any event.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Or should be in place in any event.

Let’s turn overleaf, please, and look at recommendation 4:

“Departments should continue to work at pace to develop new policy interventions to mitigate COVID-19 disparities, informed by the latest evidence.”

You touch upon that in your statement, that this was – paraphrasing – a personal issue to you, and your view – and perhaps you could paraphrase it or say it yourself – was that you considered more needed to be done; is that correct?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, certainly so.

Counsel Inquiry: So in relation to work to mitigate Covid-19 disparities, as of October 2020, your view was that more needed to be done and government needed to work at pace?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, and I think that what’s also – it may not be obvious, but what’s also being emphasised there is that departments should continue to work at pace, and I think that sometimes in government there is an assumption that, “Well, somebody else is looking after this, so we don’t need to”, and it was reinforcing that principle that equalities work is done by every department, not just the Equality Hub.

Counsel Inquiry: And it may be civil service or political phraseology, but “work at pace”, what does that mean?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Quickly.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, that’s pretty much common usage.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: In terms of metrics and using your project management background, if we look – was there metrics to measure these recommendations? Was there something in place to make sure that, as you say, the homework was being marked?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, the actual process of the quarterly reports was the metric checking, effectively. That was how we were measuring. So, routinely, my team within the Race Disparity Unit would ask departments to report back: “What have you done? We made these recommendations. Can you send us a list of actions that show how you are meeting this”, which is all part of the homework marking.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I would say part of the process.

Counsel Inquiry: Let’s go to page 10, please, in relation to this theme as to metrics and monitoring. We see at paragraph 8:

“For some policies [this being October 2020, as we’re in the tier system], departments have yet to establish effective metrics and monitoring arrangements. While this is understandable with more recent initiatives, this must be a priority for departments over the coming months. This will enable the [Race Disparity Unit] to monitor and assess short and longer term impacts and to assess which interventions are most effective.”

So the work you had done had revealed that there was an absence in certain quarters of effective metrics and monitoring; is that correct?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes. We – and – but this was part of what we were looking to identify. Where there were gaps, where some departments weren’t doing as well as they could or should we wanted to highlight that. And I imagine the way we write these documents might seem odd, but there is a lot of reading between the lines. We don’t want to demoralise or overcriticise the people that we’re working with, but effectively what this paragraph is saying is that some people haven’t yet done what they should be doing, and in the context of everything that was going on at the time – many departments overwhelmed, lots of officials being pulled from their day-to-day work to support in the pandemic – I don’t think it was surprising, which is why we said: well, this is understandable. But there was more that we wanted to see and we knew that people weren’t moving as quickly as we would have liked.

Counsel Inquiry: That last part of your sentence, “We knew that people weren’t moving as quickly as we would have liked”, just keeping that in mind for a moment, because the question was going to be this: bearing in mind the concerns regarding certain groups being disproportionately impacted, May 2020, it raised – and a report ordered by the Department of Health and Social Care, PHE reporting back in June 2020, we’re in October 2020, in the grip of a moving second wave, and you’re concerned here that people weren’t doing – moving as quickly as we would have liked.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, there would have been more detail – I can’t recall off the top of my head, but there would have been more detail in the report about what specifically – there would have been specifics. So this – I can’t remember, I’d need to read the report again to remember exactly, but we commissioned this in June. I think we took about a month just to get everything together, get the right people into the RDU to carry out the work, put the terms of reference, so first report comes out in October. This is after there has been a lull. If you remember, we had a summer where there was a lull in terms of infections and there was some easing generally.

So this was just the assessment that was being made in terms of: if there’s a new spike, have we got everybody ready, I think perhaps to do risk assessments and so on. And departments need to answer for themselves specifically why that was the case, but we had looked at what they were doing and we felt that, by the metrics we were measuring, not everything was being met.

Counsel Inquiry: Was there, in your view, sufficient capacity to deal with these matters during summer 2020 so that we were prepared for the second wave?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I don’t think so. I think that – it’s – a pandemic like that, and the amount that we were doing, I’m not sure there would ever have been enough capacity. Because on the one hand, government is doing everything it can to support those who were dealing with the disease. But even we, whether it’s the officials, the civil servants, we’re also being impacted ourselves. Within the cohort of people working in the civil service were people who were shielding or who had family members who were dying and so on.

So I don’t think that this was a case of people slacking off or people not doing as much as they could do. Sometimes it would be people just not having in themselves their own personal capacity, literally no other person to join or perhaps those with the right skillset. And you can’t skill up quickly for a pandemic and you can’t have pandemic-sized response capacity just sitting there waiting all the time.

Counsel Inquiry: I won’t repeat the chronology points again, but the last point on metrics is that one of the recommendations – we don’t need to look at it – recommendation 10, was that you were going to work with other departmental colleagues to establish metrics going forward.

We’re going to move on to one last point, which is recommendation 3. So if we could go back, please, to page 5, or page 6 it’s probably on, so you have it in front of you. And overleaf, thank you.

“There should be a rapid, light-touch review of action taken by local authorities and Directors of Public Health to support people from ethnic minority backgrounds, in order to understand what works at a local level.”

If we fast forward to page 9, please, just to help you, because I’m conscious these are long documents which you have seen recently, but some of them are more in the past.

Page 9, please, thank you. The last paragraph. Thank you.

This relates to this point, is that:

“There is a significant amount of work being carried out at the local authority level and by Directors of Public Health which is not currently being captured centrally. Capturing this will be a focus in the coming months.”

So, again, drawing that together, your work revealed that there was a lack of visibility in central government about what local government colleagues were doing in relation to these areas?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I’m not sure whether that was about the central government visibility. I think it might have been the RDU’s visibility into – being a separate department, into what was going on. I suspect that DHSC would have known what directors of local – local directors of public health were doing, and probably in MHCLG, as it was at the time, there would have been some insight. But making sure that we had that information and we were able to capture that in our work I suspect is part of what we were looking at.

I can’t remember exactly, but that – reading that now, I think that that is what we were saying. I don’t think what we were saying was that nobody knows what anyone is doing.

Counsel Inquiry: We’ll read in context, but you don’t like duplicating other people’s work, but one of your recommendations is: we need to do a review, we need to know more.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Dealing with the last themes very briefly, but they’re important points, data, data remained an issue, which –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: And – sorry to interrupt – if I was to refer to – that’s point 5. If I was to refer to point 3 on that page, we document what we did, asking for a set of returns, and it could also have been that departments sent us some but not all of what they had, and making sure that we’re reviewing what information they had as opposed to what they were sending was also part of it. Sometimes they just didn’t send us everything. They might have thought it wasn’t relevant. Sometimes a particular team may not even know what another department – what another part of the department has. Government is very big, and the bigger it is, the harder it is to find information.

Counsel Inquiry: That goes back to the question before lunch about your role as Minister for Equalities and whether that had a sufficient seniority and importance to get a response from other departments. Was that an issue?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I think that was not an issue because this was a report commissioned by the Prime Minister, so it had his authority behind it, and remember I was not the only Equalities Minister; there was a more senior Equalities Minister as well.

I never felt that they did not take this work seriously, but I did feel that they were very much at capacity.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay.

Data, and I’m going to summarise. Data was a real issue. There was:

“… no single dataset [which held] all the variables needed to gain a full understanding, different organisations have been linking datasets over the last 4 months …”

We don’t need to turn to that, it’s page 14.

It says later on at page 20:

“… the emerging picture points to areas of general concern about data quality …”

So a real feature was: we don’t have one dataset, we’re merging a number of datasets; secondly is that there’s issues regarding data quality, data collection, and the need for harmonisation of data standards.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Absolutely.

Counsel Inquiry: And that’s a feature of the work through the quarterly reports thereafter; is that right?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, I remember that.

Counsel Inquiry: Communications. We discussed it already, it was in your terms of reference. Another one of your recommendations for this first quarterly report was to continue to improve public communications. It was an ongoing issue. Is that fair?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And risk. Perhaps we could turn to look at this. Page 16, please, second paragraph, thank you, risk factors, and how some occupations carry a higher risk of getting infected. We touched upon this when looking at the Covid-O report:

“… as the job cannot be undertaken at home; people still need to commute to work in order to provide essential services for the community.”

These figures are significant:

“1.4 million key workers were from ethnic minorities, making up to 14% of all key workers (5% of the total workforce) and 20% of those in high risk occupations compared to their 11% involvement in the total workforce.”

So there is a recognition there of risk, risk being a factor, and risk being a factor linked to the occupations where certain ethnic groups were more prevalent in; is that correct?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: We touched upon already that the 13 recommendations in this first quarterly report in October 2020 were accepted in full by the Prime Minister, and that this formed the framework going forward for your work, is how you said in your statement.

I want to fast forward now to the second quarterly report –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Right.

Counsel Inquiry: – which is in February 2021, so we’re now in the third lockdown in terms of the narrative, and if we could open up, please, INQ000089744. We have it there, thank you so much.

This was published on 26 February and, as you summarise in your statements, looked at causes of higher infection and mortality rates for ethnic minority groups in greater detail, and the work undertaken to mitigate risks. You explain that the impact on ethnic groups had changed between the first and second waves.

Did you want to, rather than me summarising everything, explain your assessment at that stage? That was quite a significant part of your work.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes. I don’t have the exact page in front of me, but I do recall that there had been a change between what we saw for black males and – or at least the black cohort and whites, there was an equalisation in terms of risk, whereas on the side of Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups, I think – I can’t remember whether it stayed the same or it had got worse, but suddenly black African and white British men, there was no disparity, but it continued within the Asian groups.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes. That’s a fair summary. We have it in front of us there.

Perhaps, in fact, if we pull out for a moment, I think page 6, paragraph 3 is probably a better reference. I may be wrong. Okay. Let’s go with this reference.

It says overall the direct impacts of Covid-19 improved for ethnic minorities as a whole during the early second wave, and it describes the difference in the first wave, and how in the early part of the second wave the risk of death was the same for black African and white British men, what you’ve just said to us.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: To underline the second part:

“At the same time, however, the second wave has had a much greater impact on some South Asian groups. Work is underway to consider why the second wave to date has had such a disproportionate impact on Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups. Relevant considerations include regional patterns in first and second waves … household occupancy and multigenerational households, deprivation, and occupational exposure.”

It says later on in the report, at page 23, that the continued higher rate of mortality in people from Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds was alarming and required focused public health campaigns and policy response. Can you help us in relation to that?

So we see an increase in mortality in relation to the British Pakistani/British Bangladeshi groups. What was done to require focused public health campaigns?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: The – if we go back to what the information was telling us, up until really that second quarterly report, the why of – why people were disproportionately impacted was not clear, and if you look at the PHE report, especially the stakeholder analysis, much of the belief was that this was due to prejudice, discrimination, racism. What we were finding there was that something different is going on because we’re seeing improvements in some groups and worsening in other groups.

So a lot of focus was around compliance with social distancing, whether people understood a lot of the advice that government was giving, and at that point we were spotting the correlation, which we think was quite a huge causation, about multigenerational families. The big difference between those two racial groups which were previously roughly equally impacted was how many of them had grandparents effectively living with the family and exposure to young children.

So we put out lots of communication around – to diaspora communities, by this point the community champions programme is starting where we know that clearly with some of these groups, not all of them are going to be going to gov.uk to read through all the long bits of advice –

Counsel Inquiry: Just pausing there, we have a remote stenographer, so I’m just –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Oh, sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: No, not at all, just to give a pause to your answer.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: You were dealing with communication –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – and community champions, which is one of the topics I was going to deal with.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Okay.

Counsel Inquiry: Explain to those who are listening what community champions were and how that was brought about.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Right. So if I take a step back and provide some more context.

At this point we can see that there are multigenerational households who were particularly impacted, we can see certain areas in the country having a higher rate of incidence, and we decided to target the problem and be as focused as possible. Given the terms of reference that I had, a lot of that was to do with communications.

The community champions programme was one which identified that, even with the best will in the world, government can’t get everywhere. There are some places that you need other people to do the communicating. So the community champions programme was to find people who were trusted in their communities who could help seed information around looking after yourself and, in particular, your family.

Counsel Inquiry: So in relation to that –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – the community champions was something which was an important part of your work. You mentioned in your reports that funding was granted in January 2021, so just at the beginning of the third lockdown.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: This is your report in February 2021. Community champions and that trusted voice for different communities, was that something which perhaps should have been done at an earlier stage?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I don’t see how we would have done that. If you remember, the Equality Hub doesn’t have delivery levers. It’s almost, effectively, a research ad policy recommendation unit. So community champions was delivered by the communities department. Finding out which communities are impacted – this is by the second report – looking for who the right community champions will be, they’re not just waiting – you know, it’s not a set of people waiting, getting people to do the work, making sure there’s the data on where to go, where the incidence is, looking at places where there’s high morbidity data, high incidence of death, low levels of English speaking, all of that needs to be captured as well.

So you can’t just press go and start a project. The departmental co-ordination needs to be there, Treasury funding needs to – you need to go through the right process. Treasury needs to look at the proposal. You can’t –

Counsel Inquiry: Just to pause there, because I’m just going to follow up, if that’s all right.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, fine, okay.

Counsel Inquiry: I understand the mechanics –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – that these things – to use your phrase, “pressing go”.

What would you say to the challenge to that, which would be: we’re a country rich in diversity, and there always would be a need to have different communication channels to reach different parts and different communities, and that should be something which should be in place already?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I think it is something that should always be considered, but I don’t think that even government can create a system that would be in place already to deal with that.

If I give you an example, I – and this is where my own personal experience was feeding into this, and I know this was something that was very common. I’m in a family WhatsApp group with family members across the world, from Africa to the US, all of us experiencing the pandemic, different bits of information being shared, clips of people saying, “This isn’t real, it’s a government – this is a government agenda”, lots of conspiracy theory, having to rebut very well educated people who are bringing in arguments that they’re seeing on the internet.

The government can’t get into my family WhatsApp group. It’s just – there are some channels which you cannot break into in the information age that we live in. What we can do is try and make sure that as many people as possible have access to the right amount of information ad hopefully that eventually transmits, but there are some things that you cannot rebut.

Community champions was a way of reaching those people, perhaps, who might not be – might be digitally excluded, might have low levels of English, hopefully are slightly distanced from a lot of the conspiracy theory spread and misinformation spread, but who would perhaps go to a church or a mosque or a religious institution, perhaps a clinic, people who were coming face-to-face with those who might be suspicious of intervention from government.

And remember, within ethnic minority populations, there is a very high level of first generation immigrants who come from countries where people don’t trust the government, and there is no reason to assume that just because the government is saying something, that they will take it as verifiable information that they have to act on, especially with the backdrop of conspiracy theory.

Counsel Inquiry: The lack of trust and the need for trust is something you have mentioned a number of times.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And it’s a feature of your work how this community engagement, community champions, was one vehicle to address that.

I’m going to move on, if I may.

In terms of areas in which positive measures were implemented as a result of the second quarterly report, we mentioned community champions, community testing, which was taking place, piloted at places of worship in ethnically diverse areas, and trying to enable more identification of higher numbers of cases.

I want to turn to page 11, if I may, of this report. I’ve highlighted the progress which has been made and the efforts which were being implemented, and we see at paragraph 7 – thank you again for the references, which are correct – it says this:

“While good progress has been made to address COVID-19 disparities, government departments must redouble their efforts, taking account of the latest available data and evidence. In particular, departments must consider measures that will benefit those most affected by the second wave of the virus, and in particular those from the Bangladeshi and Pakistani ethnic groups.”

So, again, this report recognises and identifies that more needs to be done; is that right?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: We talked about metrics, and one of those, if you fast forward to page 49, was your recommendation 10 from the first report. There was an update in relation to recommendation 10 which you wrote to colleagues in December 2020, encouraging departments to establish metrics for assessing the impact of their policies, accompanied by a technical annex, and you also met the minister for Covid-19 vaccinations.

There isn’t anything exciting, I don’t believe, overleaf. Yes, as I recollected, nothing really more to add in relation to that.

Where were we with metrics? You sent the information out. Were metrics established to gauge what different departments were doing to address these issues?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I believe they were, although I can’t recall exactly what they would have been, certainly not off the top of my head. By this point, metrics – a lot of intra-departmental metrics were not necessarily things that we would have been looking at, it was making sure that they were monitoring and checking that what they were doing would have been effective, and a lot of what we were focused on by this point was: what is the data telling us about who is impacted? What can we do in order to make sure that they’re protecting themselves?

I seem to recall by this point we were heading into periods where religious festivals were taking place. We knew that large gatherings of people were occurring, especially in certain minority communities; how to make sure that people protected themselves and did not – you know, did not end up in a situation where large non-compliance activities were taking place.

But in terms of metrics, not off the top of my head, no. I’m sure they are there, but I can’t recall at the moment.

Counsel Inquiry: Let’s hope that confidence is borne out, but in relation to the time period where we are, we are in lockdown 3, it’s February 2021, and next steps – I can outline them rather than invite you to turn to it – was: more recommendations on data and evidence, more recommendations on engagement , more recommendations on tailored communications.

Let’s move to the third quarterly report. It’s 25 May 2021. We’re into summer 2021. Things are improving relatively, INQ – it’s right in front of us, thank you so much. Page 3, please.

We see there in the last paragraph:

“This report summarises work across government and through national and local partnerships, to improve vaccine uptake among ethnic minorities.”

It describes:

“A data-informed approach, targeted communications and engagement and flexible deployment models are the cornerstones of vaccine equalities delivery.”

It refers to supporting it during Ramadan, extending the use of places of worship, and out of completeness, at the bottom of the paragraph, refers to further funding, £4.2 million:

“… to local sustainability and transformation partnerships to enable targeted engagement in areas with health inequalities and with communities …”

By this stage, your work – is this a fair summary – in May 2021, the huge focus of it was in enabling vaccine uptake?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Why was that?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Because many of the non-pharmaceutical interventions – I think that’s what NPI stood for.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, it does.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes. Many of the NPIs were things that we were trying to do to help prevent, but in terms of efficacy, we couldn’t control a lot of it. You can’t control how people behave. In some cases, it’s impossible for them to shield, depending on their living circumstances.

Vaccines, on the other hand, were proven, and looking at some of the things that I felt would have been contributing to ethnic minority disproportionate impact, fear – not participating in clinical trials would mean that: what if people were getting the vaccine and then it wasn’t working because of genetics or something else? So increasing vaccine uptake, but also encouraging people to understand what vaccines are about, that they’re safe, taking part in clinical trials was really important to me. I took part in clinical trials myself. I trialled – I went on the Novavax vaccine trial, publicised that, to let people know that this wasn’t something that they should be afraid of.

There was a lot of fear by this point that the government wants to – or the – how can I put this? There was a fear that a lot of the communication about disproportionate impact was actually a secret conspiracy to scare ethnic minorities into taking vaccines, which was a way of the government culling the population. So even the things which we are doing in order to identify risk were being manipulated into conspiracy theories to deter people from doing what would have helped them mitigate that risk, and that was something that I was particularly concerned about.

Counsel Inquiry: You recognised that there was mistrust in the communities, not one community, and there were efforts which are set out in this report to address that and improve communication and improve vaccine uptake.

What do you say to the question regarding whether the balance was right? Was too much of the effort at this stage into addressing ethnic minority disproportionate impacts on vaccines? Should more have been also done in relation to other areas, such as financial support, for instance?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I disagree, and I think that we would need to be very careful in this – at this point about stigmatisation, which is something that I had very much at the back of my mind.

Vaccines worked. This was a fact, this was proven, and to spend time away from what we knew worked to do things which were less viable, less effective, in order to deal with the emotional feelings of people who didn’t – either didn’t like vaccines or wanted other levels of support I think would have been wrong.

But I also think that – I remember reading lots of recommendations and lots of reports at the time. What people were suggesting was racial segregation: let’s treat black people differently because they’re disproportionately impacted, let’s give them the vaccine first – something that we didn’t do, for example – or let’s target support packages for ethnic minority communities, and I think that a lot of this – it goes back to the point I was making about use of the word “BAME”. Ethnic minorities don’t just exist as communities of segregated people. We are part and parcel of this country. We are related to people who don’t come from our ethnic background. My husband is white, my children are mixed race; there are families like ours all across the country. Targeting ethnic minorities in this way rather than targeting households and families would have been completely the wrong thing to do, and that applies to both the clinical interventions, as well as things like economic packages and so on.

Counsel Inquiry: Let’s pause there for a second, because it’s just – we’re on points.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, okay.

Counsel Inquiry: And you’re talking about support packages for ethnic minority groups.

One of the features from your work is that recognition of the higher rate of mortality in relation to –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – British Pakistani, British Bangladeshi, and in the type of occupations they work more in, and we talked about key workers as well.

So, against that background, was it not the case that earlier in the pandemic, perhaps before vaccines, there should have been greater financial support to help people in areas, such as in the north of England?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: So I would say no, and I say this – at the time I was a Treasury minister as well as an equalities minister, so it was quite a useful intersection, and I would say one of the advantages of having equalities ministers sit in other departments. What the evidence has shown is that being an ethnic minority was not the cause of being disproportionately impacted; it correlated with what the causes were, the comorbidities. So you have to tackle the actual cause, not the thing that comes in common with it. If you provided support packages to particular minority groups, you would have left quite a lot of people out who desperately needed similar support, rather than targeting the people who were most affected.

So, for instance, you could argue that: let’s give extra money to all Pakistani men, they’re disproportionately impacted. I think that would have been a terrible waste of money. There would have been a lot of –

Counsel Inquiry: I don’t think that was the suggestion, in fairness.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I’m giving examples, I’m not saying that’s what you are suggesting.

You could have said: let’s give money to the taxi drivers, who are particularly exposed, who are from that background. But they are no more exposed than taxi drivers of another background. You could say: well, let’s give extra money to all taxi drivers. But then there are other groups of people, not least of all health workers, who are also similarly exposed. There is no perfect way of finding a particular group to give extra cash to, and extra cash in and of itself would not have solved the problem which we were trying to resolve of making sure people were protected and away from the virus.

Counsel Inquiry: Just –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: If I may, there is one extra point. What this highlights is the trade-off, that is the trade-off that we, as government ministers, have to balance.

Deprivation is one of the reasons why people say that there is inequality. Making sure that people can stay economically active – it’s not just about the earning of the money but also the things that come with it. If you reduce that, you also create factors that can lead to inequalities later. So we have to look at all of those things in the round and find the right balance and –

Counsel Inquiry: Can I ask you a question in relation to this, because I’m conscious that there was a long answer and I don’t want to lose it all.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Right.

Counsel Inquiry: So one of the areas which is an alternative was whether there should have been more financial support in relation to those occupations, or people generally – putting ethnicity to one side – who may have been self-employed or working in low paid areas which, if they were sick, they would get sufficient financial support so they could self-isolate. That’s the vehicle for this sort of support, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. Was that not something that your work should have included or at least explored?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: That was work that was taking place in the Treasury. I wasn’t the minister responsible for that, but that was looked at in the Treasury. I’m afraid I only have the Equality Hub notes for this module, but that definitely was done, and I remember standing at the despatch box and explaining how we came to devise the packages which we did. There always has to be a cut-off, and there is a cost to everything.

So the package – the furlough and a lot of the quantitative easing and money printing which we did then is directly related to some of the issues that we’re seeing now with high interest rates, with inflation. So more interventions are not without cost or consequences, and there needs to be at some point a line that was drawn.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Even where we drew the line, people asked that it should have been for people earning slightly more. They felt that the £50,000 cut-off which we had was too low. There’s always – no matter where you draw the boundary, there will always be people who feel that they’re on the wrong side of the boundary and should be included, and if you take that to its logical conclusion, we should do it for everybody.

Counsel Inquiry: Well, let’s draw a metaphorical line under this for the moment. We’re still on your third report, and I want to move on to page 5, if I may, which is the third line, and just draw out what we’re discussing. We’re discussing British Pakistani/British Bangladeshi and what the data was showing here, and by this stage – I think it’s the third line:

“This third report summarises the data for deaths in the second wave up to 31 January … which was not available … The latest data confirms the finding from the second report that people from South Asian ethnic groups, particularly the Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups, were at the greatest risk of death from COVID-19 during the second wave.”

In terms of those numbers, I would summarise it, at page 22, is that compared to white British men and women, Bangladeshi men and women were 6.1 and 6.3 times more likely to die from Covid, Pakistani men and women were 4.4 and 3.8 times as likely to die from Covid, and that they adjusted – they reduce, but not significantly, for other factors as well.

In relation to one other feature which arises in this report for the first time – and it’s an interest to groups which are core participants – is at page 29, Long Covid. That’s something which is raised for the first time in this third report. I’m just going to touch upon it briefly, if I may, and ask you what work, if any, was done.

It describes Long Covid as “an emerging phenomenon that is not yet fully understood”, and describes the impact of that, which I can summarise. The prevalence rates for self-reported Long Covid were highest for (a) people with a pre-existing activity-limiting health condition and (b) health and social care workers, and we see that in the middle of the page. In very simple terms, those in the white ethnic groups had the highest prevalence rates of Long Covid compared to the Asian ethnic groups.

Quick question on an important topic, but in relation to your work – this was the third report – was there any work done to explore Long Covid in terms of its impacts on ethnic minority groups?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: No, I think for several reasons. One, it would have been outside our immediate terms of reference. This is very much health work, and by that I would say sort of frontline research analysis, whereas the analysis that’s done within my unit is more statistical. But it was something that we thought was worth highlighting, especially – certainly in my personal opinion, the health and social care workers was emphasising that this is something to do with exposure, you know, being exposed is likely to – or the frequency of exposure is likely to trigger Long Covid. But we would not have been the right place for that kind of work to have taken place, but it was something that we thought was worth referencing in this report.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

We fast forward to the final report, which is the fourth quarterly report, which is dated 3 December 2021. So just as we are – Omicron is around at that time, December 2021. This was a long report, even for the report you undertook on our behalf, 133 pages.

We see, if we could turn to page 5, please, the understanding is much clearer, in your view, and the work that was undertaken on your behalf.

“The main factors behind the higher risk of COVID-19 infection for ethnic minority groups include occupation, (particularly for those in frontline roles, such as NHS workers), living with children in multigenerational households, and living in densely-populated urban areas with poor air quality and higher levels of deprivation.”

So occupation, deprivation, and household make-up, significant factors:

“Once a person is infected, factors such as older age, male sex, having a disability …”

And we touched a lot on disability:

“… or a pre-existing health condition (such as diabetes) …”

And you’ve touched upon that:

“… are likely to increase the risk of dying from COVID-19.”

And in relation to the work you’ve done, your summary was, in the statement, that vaccination was the most significant measure, in your view, to protect ethnic minorities.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: (Witness nods).

Counsel Inquiry: Was that the position?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Sorry, vaccination was taken in a sufficient enough …?

Counsel Inquiry: No, I’ll say it again, it’s my fault if it’s lost.

What you say in your statement is that vaccination was the most significant measure to protect ethnic minorities.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And your point, if we perhaps could turn to page 6, please, is that the conclusions in this report really form your recommendations going forward.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And you describe how there’s a number of wider public health lessons to be learned in relation to ethnic minorities, including: talking about vaccination deployments in other public health programmes – in other words, the lessons we’ve learned in relation to Covid vaccinations can be used for other work – reference to using community champions or respected local voices to build trust and tackle misinformation; a point you’ve made, and we recognise at the outset: not to treat ethnic minority groups as a homogeneous group, and there is not a one-size-fits-all approach.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Not controversial.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: No. I hope not.

Counsel Inquiry: No, not that aspect. Recognising that there is more than one community.

In relation to – thank you for turning overleaf – avoiding stigmatising ethnic minority groups by singling them out for special treatment.

We’ve mentioned it a couple of times. Perhaps this is the opportunity to deal with that and stigmatisation. What were the concerns regarding stigmatisation during your work in relation to the impact on ethnic minority groups?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: So one of my duties as the guardian of the Equality Act is looking at social cohesion, and it is important that we don’t let the good intentions take us to – down a path that’s actually counterproductive to what we’re trying to do. And quite often very well meaning people think, “We need to do this for this group so that they can see that we care”.

But that often has other unintended consequences, and one of them, I remember, was – for a certain period, there was a large belief – or a significant number of people believing that it was ethnic minorities who were spreading the virus. Because they were talked about so much, they’re the ones catching it, and if they’re disproportionately impacted, they must be disproportionately spreading it as well.

Anything that looks like certain groups are being treated better than others does not work because it goes against the principle of equality before the law, and everyone being treated regardless of their ethnicity. And the Equality Act states very explicitly that positive discrimination is illegal.

And many people don’t understand that lots of these ideas, well intentioned as they are, are positive discrimination and they don’t help in the long run. And certainly, given the way that we were lumping together lots of groups, they didn’t help in the short run as well. When you mixed all the different ethnicities you lost the insight about multigenerational households and you ended up spending time looking at problems like who was being racist or if there was a racist that was causing those problems. We would not have fixed the problem by focusing on the wrong issue.

So stigmatising is something that I am very concerned about. I believe that it is my job to make sure that people treat ethnic minorities in a colour blind way, you look at the individual, you look at their circumstances, not start off with their skin colour and start to make deductions based on that.

Counsel Inquiry: And a final point here is in relation to a feature which is about data, improving the quality of health ethnicity data so that patterns and trends can be spotted quicker in the future.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, and one of the recommendations – I think that would have come in an earlier report – was even about recording ethnicity on death certificates, which was something that we discovered was not being done, and was a big issue. So –

Counsel Inquiry: Just in relation to that, because that’s one matter that I would like your assistance on –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: All right.

Counsel Inquiry: – because this was something which was around – just to help you in timings, it was one of your recommendations in the first quarterly report.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, I think so, first or second, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: I believe it was the first, but we can –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Okay.

Counsel Inquiry: If we’re wrong, it’s my fault but it’s the first quarterly report. Why was that something which you were of the view needed to be recognised and ethnicity would be noted on death certificates?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Because I felt that if we had had that – and I don’t know why it wasn’t recorded, I don’t know if there was ever a reason, it was just something that wasn’t recorded – if we had had that, we might, not certainly, but we might have been able to spot the disproportionate impact a little bit earlier. But this – this was certainly speculation, reasonable speculation on that basis for that problem. But it seemed an odd place to not capture it, given that we capture it in all sorts of datasets.

Counsel Inquiry: Two final questions. First one, your view of the greatest success of the work that your team achieved in relation to this area?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, I think we had a – I think we had a lot of successes actually. I’m very proud of the work that my team – my team did. I think under a lot of pressure and with very high expectations, I think that they delivered. I think the work that they did was rigorous, it was very carefully done, it was very sensitive. They won an award, in fact. They won an ONS award in research excellence for the analysis that they did, and that was in competition – the other shortlisted people were universities, so the quality of the work they produced was very high.

And it was – and it was a very painful process because I went through all of these reports line by line making sure that they were written in a way that people would understand. You quite often get a lot of documents in what I call officialese, where the information is obscured, and I hope that that has been helpful, actually, to the Inquiry, the way that the documents were presented.

I think we saw things like greater vaccine uptake because of the work that we did, and some of the recommendations we made, family jabbing, for example, so that people felt more comfortable doing this because they had – taking the vaccine because they had people who they cared about and who they trusted going along with them. Things like increased participation in clinical trials by ethnic minorities which I think is important if you’re going to get vaccines that work and pick up the right data on health issues.

So I think there are a lot of successes.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

And the other side of the coin, with the view to learning lessons, what do you think is the greatest lesson we can learn to improve going forward in relation to this area?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Where does one start? I think for me I am still very, very concerned about the issue of misinformation and just how – and I say this even as a constituency MP, the number of people who come up to me in the street and tell me that I am part of a grand conspiracy to infect them and so-and-so died because of the material that we were putting out is very disturbing. I don’t think government’s got a handle on dealing with misinformation. I don’t think that we have adapted to this age of social media carrying – you know, where information travels at lightning speed across the world. I don’t know how we solve it. But in terms of gaps, I think that that is – there was a lesson in the pandemic that this is an area that needs more addressing. And I hear of a lot of work being done in departments, whether it’s Cabinet Office or DSIT I’m not sure, but I don’t see – I don’t see it. So maybe there is lots of being work being done and it’s covert, but it’s hard, if that is the case, to know what is being done. So I think that’s an area.

I think another area that we should have done more on was on the economic impact. We were looking very much at the health side, and I think that we should have had an economic impact of lockdown, I think that now we are seeing many – many outcomes which are related to, you know, the missing children in schools, for example, what happened to them. No one’s quite got to the bottom of that. The economic impact of lockdown, how that might have triggered even more inequality further down even if people had furlough or a safety net immediately. I’m not sure that that work was done because we were very, very, very focused on the health side. And I think when we have these sort of grand problems, we need to have multiple lenses through which we’re looking at them.

And this is hindsight analysis, but the fact that we looked at things purely from a health perspective without the – without opportunity costs analysis or what was happening looking at it through another lens, I think we should not have done.

Counsel Inquiry: And you were a junior Treasury minister during that time as well, that was an observation you recognise.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: I said that was my last question. I will keep my promise.

My Lady, there are the questions, all I have. You have granted permission to core participants, but it may be that my Lady wants to have a short break before we move on to that.

Lady Hallett: No, I’m going to carry on. If the stenographer has to take a break, then she’ll take a break.

Mr Keating: I understand.

Lady Hallett: So if Mr Thomas is ready, I am.

Thank you.

Questions From Professor Thomas KC

Professor Thomas: Ms Badenoch, let me introduce myself, I am Leslie Thomas and I act on behalf of FEHMO, the Federation of Ethnic Minority Healthcare Organisations.

I have a small handful of questions, but can I just pick up on something you said to Counsel to the Inquiry just a moment ago, you were talking about tackling the cause as opposed to just looking at the issue, why certain groups were affected disproportionately. One of the reasons for that surely would be structural inequalities, would you agree?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I’m not sure that I do agree because it depends on what you mean by structural inequalities –

Professor Thomas KC: Poverty –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Professor Thomas KC: – for example –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, but we don’t – we don’t have a cure for poverty. If we did, we would have done it.

Professor Thomas KC: I hadn’t finished.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Okay.

Professor Thomas KC: Poverty, for example, discrimination based on race, perhaps gender, perhaps other factors such as, you know, we know that some people suffer from disability suffer from discrimination, so factors such as that, that’s what I mean by structural inequalities.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Okay, so you mentioned discrimination as an example. That was not something that was found in any of the evidence that we carried out. And these are things which there are processes in place to address, but in terms of the issues around deprivation, poverty, health comorbidities, a lot of work was done to look at things that we could do to tackle that. But we can’t cure diabetes, we can’t remove poverty. So saying that structural inequalities had an impact on incidence, yes, that is true, but that doesn’t mean that there is a silver bullet to resolve them.

Professor Thomas KC: Do you remember in your evidence this morning, I think we can agree on this, you said that the label “BAME” is unhelpful because it is kind of like a one size fits all and you need to look at the situation and the impact and it’s much more nuanced. We can agree on that, yes, that “BAME” is an unhelpful term?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: That is what I said.

Professor Thomas KC: Yes. So with that in mind, and I’m referring – I’m not going to call up the documents unless you want to go to them, but I’m referring to your witness statement, and just for the record paragraphs 44, 47, 48, where you discuss disparities and they’re highlighted. My question is this: how were the intersection of ethnicity with other factors such as gender, disability, socioeconomic status, dealt with?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: So if by intersectionality you’re talking about a coincidence of protected characteristics, that would have been taken into account just by looking at the cohort of people that were being sampled.

So, for example, when we looked at the intersectionality of age and gender, we found that being male was a bigger issue than being female in terms of catching the disease and in fact dying from it. We looked at the intersectionality of things like age and disability. So that was all taken into account. We may not have called it “intersectionality”, but there were lots of multivariant analyses that took place, including things like geography which don’t always get taken into account.

Professor Thomas KC: Let me cut to the chase. If you took into account the intersections between certain factors and you’ve outlined some of them, did you have, in government, targeted strategies to address those disparities comprehensively and if not why not?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: The strategies we had would have dealt with intersectionality in and of themselves, there was no reason to believe that there was something – that there was a gap. Unless you can give me an example of a gap that you have identified. I would be quite keen to hear it.

Professor Thomas KC: I’m going to ask you this: do you accept that gathering and understanding the data was important?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Professor Thomas KC: So we can agree on that. Can we also agree that because of the importance of data, particularly data in how it related to disparities, efforts should have been made to make sure that data was accessible and transparent to the public? Can we agree on that?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Professor Thomas KC: How was this done?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Well, the reports that we published provided our assessment of the data, but we don’t hold data, data is held by public authorities by the ONS. Is there a specific data that you feel was not published that should have been published?

Professor Thomas KC: Given the heightened risks faced by certain groups, and you’ve mentioned in particular men of Pakistani origin, and because I represent healthcare workers, I’m just interested to know that some of these disparities were highlighted very early on. We know that, for example, the first ten doctors who died from the virus were doctors of colour. We know that and we’ve heard evidence.

Can you just help the Inquiry with this: if this was known fairly early on, what specific initiatives or measures were taken and implemented to prevent those demographics from that high – disproportionately high risk of exposure and mortality?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Well, the first thing we did was the report that we commissioned by PHE to check what was going on. That was one of the anecdotal pieces of information that alarmed me. But knowing that the first set of doctors who died were from an ethnic minority background doesn’t tell you why they are dying, it just tells you that that is happening. So finding out the “why” is important to address the issue. And as we’ve seen from all the research that has been carried out, if we had simply made an assumption that being an ethnic minority in itself was the risk factor – it wasn’t, this was not a disease that targeted people on that basis – then we would have carried out the wrong interventions.

Professor Thomas KC: On 4 June 2020, following the publication of the Public Health England’s review on the Covid-19 disparities, it was put to government by Gill Furniss that the report simply confirmed what was already known and failed to make any recommendations. She asked government whether government were listening to the calls for employees to risk assess black, Asian and minority ethnic workforce, and in response you said, on behalf of government, that you needed to wait to ensure that “we do not take action that is not warranted by the evidence”, “we must widely disseminate and discuss the report before deciding what needs to be done”.

Question: in the light of the substantial and severe disparities in the infection and mortality rates, which was evident from the widely publicised datasets and statistics from late March 2020 onwards, why did the government feel the need to wait before taking any action in response?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I’m sorry, I lost the thread of the question.

Professor Thomas KC: Let me break it down.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Thank you, yes.

Professor Thomas KC: All right.

So we’ve got the report in June, 4 June 2020, highlighting the disparities. It was put to the government by Gill Furniss that the report was –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Was that when it was published or at what point?

Professor Thomas KC: It was published on 4 June 2020.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: And when did Gill Furniss –

Professor Thomas KC: Shortly afterwards. I can’t give you the exact date, but shortly afterwards what Gill Furniss is putting to you and government is: well, the report is simply confirming what’s already known. Okay?

And the response was – she was suggesting it was important for the government to risk assess, to urge – call on employers to risk assess black, Asian and minority ethnic workforce. And in response you said on behalf of government that you need to wait to “ensure that we do not take action that is not warranted by the evidence”, “we must widely disseminate and discuss the report before deciding what needs to be done”.

My question is: in the light of the substantial and severe disparities in the infection and mortality rates evidenced by the publicised and stats since late March, why the need to wait?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: So we didn’t wait –

Mr Keith: I’m not at all sure that this is an area on which you have given permission in the Rule 10 process.

Lady Hallett: I was thinking the same, Mr Thomas. This wasn’t a matter that was raised in Parliament, was it? Who is Gill Furniss?

Professor Thomas: My Lady, I’m surprised at the intervention, because we were given permission to ask this question.

Lady Hallett: It may be that I have the wrong copy, Mr Thomas, it may well be.

Professor Thomas: So I’m looking at the permission and it clearly says “CP may ask this question, however please reformulate the question” –

Lady Hallett: I remember saying that.

Professor Thomas: Yes.

Lady Hallett: The only other concern was, it’s not to do with proceedings in Parliament, is it?

Professor Thomas: No.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Gill Furniss I believe is an MP, a Labour MP, am I correct?

Professor Thomas: Yeah?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Right. Okay.

So, first of all, the point of the report which she was referring to was about understanding whether what was suspected was actually the case. So her saying these were things that were already known, they were not known, they were suspected, they were assumptions, there was no data. And so the report had to be done.

In terms of the point I was making, it wasn’t specifically to risk assessments. The risk assessments – we didn’t wait to start the risk assessments, they were already in train and they went on for an extended period of time. So that was not a problem.

What I was referring to was not knowing why something is happening means that you don’t know how to fix it. And that means looking at a report and getting the data out. And as it happened, I didn’t think that the report that PHE published answered the question why, which is why we carried out our piece of work.

Professor Thomas: My Lady, those are the questions that –

Lady Hallett: I’m very – and I’m sorry to interrupt you, Mr Thomas, you know the concern about we’re not allowed to trespass –

Professor Thomas: I understand, I was just surprised at the intervention bearing in mind that it was clearly within the document.

Lady Hallett: Indeed. I apologise.

The Witness: She asked me the question in parliament, I believe. I don’t think there would have been any other place that she would have asked it.

Lady Hallett: Right, anyway, it’s done now, Mr Thomas. Anyway I apologise for interrupting if you had permission. By the sounds of it, it probably shouldn’t have been given permission, and that’s my fault.

Right, next, I think, it’s Mr Stanton.

Mr Stanton’s over there. Don’t worry, all the advocates that sit over there understand they’re going to get a back to them every so often, but can you please make sure that we still record – you still use the microphone. Thank you.

Questions From Mr Stanton

Mr Stanton: Thank you, my Lady.

Ms Badenoch, please don’t feel any need to turn to face me, if it’s slightly awkward. I think it’s more important that you’re able to speak into the microphone.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: All right.

Mr Stanton: I’d like to briefly revisit an issue that Mr Keating addressed with you earlier in your evidence in connection with the Public Health England report of 2 June, and the concerns that you made reference to, or of a number of organisations, about the possibility that information had been withheld from that report.

I’m asking questions on behalf of the British Medical Association, the BMA, and you may be aware that the BMA was one of the organisations that made representations to you. You may recall – maybe not the dates – it was on 5 and 7 June.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Mr Stanton: On 12 June, the matter was escalated to Matt Hancock in the Department of Health, and I’d just like to bring up for you that letter on screen, which is INQ000097872, and just to draw your attention to the first paragraph, which states:

“I am writing to express our serious concern at reports that 69 pages covering seven recommendations for change were removed from last week’s PHE’s report on inequalities and disparities in the impact of COVID-19 on certain groups. A clear response is needed as to why these pages and important recommendations were omitted from publication, especially when it is so critical that action is taken to save lives now and reduce race inequalities.”

Subsequently, four days after this letter, a 69-page report was indeed published, with seven recommendations.

I appreciate what you’ve had to say about the circumstances of this publication, but was it not the case that the fact that information had been removed from the original planned report had become an open secret and that forced the government’s hand to publish?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Absolutely not, and I’m actually grateful for the opportunity to set the record straight, because this was something that caused an immense amount of frustration, and when I referred to personal abuse in the earlier session, this is what it was about.

The health department commissioned a report, but two reports were received, it was not one report. However, people who were contributing were not aware of that, so they assumed that their contributions had been withheld.

What we did was we published the first report immediately, what we’d asked for, and taking away the second one, which had recommendations which were actually not that easy to understand – things like cultural competency, there’s no clear definition of what that means – meant that it took some time for us to look at what our response to it would need to be, and that was one of the reasons why, in addition to the first report being a “what is going on” rather than how we fix it. That’s one of the reasons why we carried out the second piece of work.

But I would like to state on the record that it is absolutely not the case that anything was withheld and only published because we were concerned about complaints. The fact of the matter is this report was not written by government. It could not have suppressed it anyway. PHE could have released it if it wanted to, it could have been leaked. So it would not have been a sensible thing to even have tried to suppress it in the first place.

Sometimes things don’t happen quickly. It doesn’t mean that there is a conspiracy to hide information, and that’s the response that I gave to the BMA at the time and which I would like to put on record.

Mr Stanton: Thank you.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Thank you.

Mr Stanton: The 69 pages deal exclusively with the issue of disproportionate impact on ethnic minority groups and, as you will know, the BMA became very concerned from an early stage, from April 2020, about this issue, particularly as early data had shown that, among the doctors who had died in the early months from Covid-19, 94% were from a BAME background.

Given the seriousness of this issue and the seriousness of the BMA’s concerns, what was it about this particular area that necessitated a separate report?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: It was qualitative analysis, not quantitative analysis, and the recommendations, as I said, were actually not very clear, although we did in the end understand, after a lot of engagement with PHE and with Professor Kevin Fenton, who was the London regional director. But when you have recommendations like having cultural competency, that could mean any number of things. Simply publishing that without a clear response or a clear idea of how to carry out those things I don’t think is a responsible thing for a government to do.

But also, the BMA was rightly concerned. They are a trade union for doctors. If doctors are dying, they should be concerned. I was concerned. My father, who was alive at the time, was a black doctor. If doctors who were black were impacted, this was something that would impact me. So I did care about this issue. But I think that there is so much suspicion now around the motivation for something being published that aspersions were cast which didn’t need to be. We took this very seriously and we worked closely with them in order to get those recommendations acted on, and they were.

Mr Stanton: One of the, perhaps, areas in which misunderstanding has been allowed to creep in is because the original terms of reference of the review included a requirement to make recommendations –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Mr Stanton: – and recommendations only appeared in the second report.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Mr Stanton: Was that part of the problem, do you think?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: No. No, and in fact I did get an apology from PHE for doing that, because they mixed the two things together. They didn’t provide – and that for me was actually highlighting the fact that they didn’t know what to do on the substance of the findings which they had. They didn’t make recommendations as we had commissioned; instead, they did a separate piece of work that was different and made recommendations there.

Mr Stanton: Thank you very much for clearing those matters up.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Thank you.

Mr Stanton: I just want to move to a separate topic, very quickly.

Recommendation 4 of the second report concerned the need to accelerate the development of culturally competent occupational risk assessments. I’d just like to ask: in the work that you undertook following the report, what progress were you able to make in this regard, particularly having regard to the impact that a risk assessment can have on safety for doctors and healthcare workers?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: So one of the things that is a limitation for me as equalities minister is that I don’t have levers, and this was not a report for me, this was a report for the Department of Health, so I would not have dealt with that recommendation. However, I do recall that areas like PPE and how they might have fitted on people of different ethnicities and, in fact, people of different sexes and so on, a lot of work was done in that space. It was then – I remember it was discovered at the time that some PPE which was just uniform was unsuitable, and this was for lots of different demographics. That’s one example.

So I do know that that work took place, but it wouldn’t have been within the remit of my department.

Mr Stanton: Thank you.

Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Mr Stanton.

Mr Friedman.

Questions From Mr Friedman KC

Mr Friedman: Thank you, madam.

Secretary of State, I act for four national disabled people’s organisations. We have listened to your evidence carefully today and you’ve explained that disability as a matter of generality was not in your remit and you not wanting to duplicate, but you’ve said that you were interested in how disabilities, in your words, interact with health outcomes, and you gave the example of diabetes.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Mr Friedman KC: My questions are about how government struck the balance between non-duplication and the important matters of interaction that, as it may be, needed joined up thinking.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Right.

Mr Friedman KC: Firstly, when Justin Tomlinson gave evidence to the Chair, we asked him what he understood the reason at the time was for why disabled people were not included in Minister Badenoch’s investigation and the published reports across 2020 and 2021, and his answer was “I don’t know”. That’s Day 20, pages 223 to 224, for the record.

So was he consulted on that matter?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I don’t remember whether he was consulted on that matter. However, the Minister for Women and Equalities, I was senior minister, who had overall responsibility for this area, would have known about it. I can’t recall. However, if we look again at the genesis of how this report came to be, and it relates to the previous question on intersectionality which was asked by the previous counsel, you need to be able to disaggregate data before you can look at them in the multivariant analysis, you can look at the way that they interact. So whether or not we took this work into account, the data – within our workstream or they looked at it separately, the data would still have been there. So if the question –

Mr Friedman KC: Well, I just – I’m going to come on to it, I’m only interrupting you just because I’ll come on to that. But I think the answer you’ve given is that you don’t know about Justin Tomlinson but you think maybe Liz Truss, in her position –

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I don’t recall whether or not Justin Tomlinson was but Liz Truss would have been.

Mr Friedman KC: Right, because I’m going to ask a second question following that, if I may, which is that we have seen none but was there a documented decision along those lines around disabled people in relation to your investigation or is it a more informal consultation that you’re recalling?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I don’t think it is either. If we look at the – one of the quarterly reports where we talk about a separate workstream –

Mr Friedman KC: It’s the final one.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes.

Mr Friedman KC: December 2021, in a footnote.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, where we talk about a separate workstream. This is a directorate that has all these units working together, but the knowledge of disability as having such a severe impact meant that it didn’t need to be in – it didn’t need to be within my bit of work.

Mr Friedman KC: Okay.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: If I may?

Mr Friedman KC: Yes.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: With the bit of work that I was doing, my workstream, we’re trying to understand why ethnicity would’ve had an impact. For disability it’s a lot more obvious. There were fewer questions to be asked about why disability is having an impact. It’s clear to see. So there was no need to mix those two workstreams together and in fact I would not – knowing what I know now, I would not recommend it.

Mr Friedman KC: Well, I understand that. How much discussion, though, did you have with Minister Tomlinson or indeed the Disability Unit about how disability or disabilities interact with health and, in your work, how the various ethnic minority groups could also be parts of disabled groups and vice versa when it comes to risk and outcomes?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I would not have needed to have those conversations because that happens anyway. If you are disabled and work is being done around disability, ethnic minorities who are disabled will be captured and vice versa. So we don’t need to have a discussion to make sure that this happens. This will simply be the case.

Mr Friedman KC: Well, we don’t need to study all your published reports, but you don’t deal with it in any way at all in your reports?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: We don’t reference it because we are speaking specifically – the report is about ethnic minorities, so we are talking specifically about that.

We didn’t – there are nine protected characteristics. Age is a huge – was the biggest factor, that is also not mentioned in the report. That didn’t mean that older people were neglected during the pandemic.

Mr Friedman KC: Then lastly this, you have been asked about intersectionality and perhaps the difference between how much it was considered in substance as opposed to definitional form, but the Oxford English Dictionary defines intersectionality as:

“The interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class and gender …”

We would add disability.

“… regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; a theoretical approach based on such a premise.”

Secretary of State, do you recognise intersectionality as a matter that all inequality related ministerial portfolios ought to have taken into account during Covid response decision-making?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: No, I would disagree with that, in fact.

Mr Friedman KC: And in the short time we have, could you say why to the Chair.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Because as – I think if we go back to the question around BAME, the sort of work that we do requires quite a lot of disaggregation. The whole purpose of multivariant analysis is that it’s looking at different – it’s looking at different incidence rates and it’s – it then looks at them in terms of how they interact.

So starting off with the intersectionality is not how you should do it. You start off with the disaggregation. You can layer the data together to come out with what intersectionality may be occurring, but if you do it the other way around you get a mixed picture, so I certainly wouldn’t recommend that. And I wouldn’t start off by using the term “intersectionality” as a way to find out exactly what the answer is.

What we are doing in government is trying to use our resources as effectively as possible. So we start out with the measures that will help the largest number of people, not the measures that will tackle the most niche groups, whose intersectionality of race, of gender, of sex, of class and so on. That is very complicated data that actually – an analysis that actually requires a lot of work. If you are dealing with a pandemic and there is a lot going on, you need to be able to manage resources effectively, and starting off with work that is the most complex means that you will help the least number of people. And that is why I would not recommend that.

Mr Friedman KC: I think you’ve taken my question as: always do it first.

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Right.

Mr Friedman KC: I think your answer is “I never recommend doing it first”, for the reasons you’ve just given, but you don’t seem to be excluding its relevance once you have done, as it were, the more disaggregated work?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, but you use the term “intersectionality”, epidemiologists would talk about multivariable analysis – multivariant analysis. They are not different things.

Mr Friedman KC: Yes, but am I right: never first, but a formula of that kind relevant to all work within the scheme of things?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I think – I think it’s probably safe to say that that is something that is routine, I don’t think it’s something that is neglected.

Mr Friedman: Thank you, madam.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Mr Friedman.

I think there was a matter that wasn’t covered by Counsel to the Inquiry’s questions and therefore, Ms Sergides, I think you’re going to ask a question.

Can you see the questioner?

The Witness: Yes.

Questions From Ms Sergides

Ms Sergides: Can you see me?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, I can.

Ms Sergides: I’m grateful, my Lady.

Secretary of State, I appear on behalf of Southall Black Sisters and Solace Women’s Aid. I only have one question for you, relating to the overall responsibility for victims of domestic abuse in government.

Can you see me?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: Yes, I can.

Ms Sergides: Your role as Women and Equalities Minister is not a Cabinet position, but looking at the wider needs of victims of domestic abuse during lockdown and their children, including for example housing, just one of many examples affecting domestic abuse victims, is it correct that these issues are spread across various departments without there being ultimate responsibility in one minister or department?

Ms Kemi Badenoch: I don’t think that is true. We have a Minister for Safeguarding who put through domestic abuse legislation, and that would – what you have described would primarily sit with that minister, but there was a Minister for Women, the ministers – and there was a Minister for Women and Equalities as well, separate to me as Minister for Equalities, so actually I think that this is something which is covered by one minister but loads of others actually provide support in that space.

Ms Sergides: I’m grateful, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed.

I think that completes the questions.

Mr Keating: It is, my Lady, thank you very much.

Lady Hallett: Secretary of State, thank you very much indeed for all your help. I’m sorry I had to ask you to come back after lunch, but …

The Witness: No, not a problem, thank you very much.

(The witness withdrew)

Lady Hallett: Very well. I think that completes the evidence for today, and we shall return on – 27 November?

Mr Keating: Sounds good.

Lady Hallett: I’m losing track of the days and months.

Mr Keating: Next Monday.

Lady Hallett: 27 November at 10.30.

Thank you, everybody.

(3.20 pm)

(The hearing adjourned until 10.30 am on Monday, 27 November 2023)