10 December 2023 , 17:23
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Families who lost loved ones to Coronavirus warned Rishi Sunak he has “extremely serious questions to answer" when he appears at the Covid inquiry on Monday.
The Prime Minister is expected to face tough scrutiny over his Eat Out To Help Out policy, after he was accused of defying scientific advice to push ahead with the plan. Scientists told the inquiry they had been alarmed by the £850million scheme, which saw the public offered discounts to eat at restaurants during Summer 2020.
Professor Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, was said to have nicknamed it “Eat Out To Help The Virus”. And Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance said it would have been “very obvious to anyone” that the plan would lead to an increase in transmission. But in a witness statement ahead of his appearance, Mr Sunak insisted he did not “recall any concerns about the scheme being expressed during ministerial discussions.”
Barbara Herbert, a spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said: “The public had a right to believe that if the Government was telling them it was safe to go to pubs and restaurants then it was. How many people would have 'eaten out' if they had known Chris Whitty was calling the scheme 'eat out to help out the virus'?”
Under questioning at the inquiry, Sir Patrick accepted it was “highly likely” that the scheme increased the number of transmissions and deaths after its introduction in August 2020. Research by the CAGE research centre at the University of Warwick found evidence the policy had accelerated the pandemic’s second wave, meaning it hit its peak at the height of winter, when the NHS was most vulnerable.
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Ms Herbert added: “By January over a thousand people were dying each day and we had to go into months of lockdown to salvage the situation, meaning in the long run the scheme actually did a huge amount of damage to the economy as well as causing so many unnecessary deaths.
“Knowing that we were misled by Sunak at a terrible cost during the last pandemic, how can we trust him to get it right in the event of another one?” Later in the pandemic, Mr Sunak argued that ministers should let Covid "rip a bit”, according to a damning extract from Sir Patrick’s diary revealed to the inquiry.
The extract from 13 May 2021: "PM meeting. Cx [Chancellor] suddenly pipes up on incentives already in place. Argues that we should let this rip a bit". The meeting was just several days before the easing of the third nationwide lockdown where people were able to meet indoors in groups of just six for the first time in four months.
Mr Sunak is also likely to face a grilling over what he knew about Partygate rulebreaking in Number 10, and the “toxic” atmosphere at the top of government under Boris Johnson. And there are also likely to be questions about his failure to provide the inquiry with WhatsApp messages from his time as Chancellor
Mr Sunak blamed Treasury officials for failing to back up his messages when he changed his phone “several times” between January 2020 and the end of February 2022. The missing messages cover his entire time in charge of the Treasury, and could include discussions about Eat Out To Help Out, the furlough scheme and bounce back loans.
In his witness statement, Mr Sunak is reported to have said: “Having changed my phone a number of times over the last three years, I do not have access to the WhatsApp messages that I sent or received during the relevant time, and neither were the messages backed up.
“My expectation would be that if the officials on those groups had considered that any information being communicated by WhatsApp message needed to be preserved to form part of the official HMT record, then those officials would have taken steps to ensure that happened.”
Boris Johnson, who appeared at the inquiry last week also failed to hand over months of his WhatsApp messages, from the key months of January to June 2020. He told the inquiry: “I don’t know the exact reason, but it looks as though it’s something to do with the app going down and then coming up again, but somehow automatically erasing all the things between that date when it went down and the moment when it was last backed up.” Mr Sunak will be the final witness in phase two of the Covid inquiry and will give evidence all day on Monday.