PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Covid-19 Inquiry - 22 June 2023 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

We remain committed to providing all relevant material to the inquiry, and will continue to comply with requests so that we can learn the lessons from the pandemic. To date, the Cabinet Office alone has submitted 55,000 documents to the inquiry.

I thank the Minister for that answer, but far from co-operating the Cabinet Office is taking the inquiry to court to block access to information, and the Government are set to spend in excess of £50 million of taxpayers’ money on solicitors to protect current and former Ministers. What do they have to hide?

The Government are committed to getting to the truth on covid. There will be a lot of lessons to learn. We are following a process, and it is incredibly important for the country and the future Governments of the UK that we learn the lessons. We have nothing to hide from the inquiry, but there is one specific technical difference between us and the inquiry and it is right that those things are sorted out in the law courts, as is normal in such circumstances. We want to provide all relevant material to the covid inquiry; we continue to do so and we support its work.

I call the shadow Minister.

We must learn the lessons from the covid inquiry. It was “ludicrous in retrospect”, a “relatively small part” of the brief, “wildly under-resilient” and a “disaster for the country”—not my words but those used by the former Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster at the covid inquiry this week to describe the Government’s approach to resilience and preparedness for the past 13 years. He also said it was a huge error not to have a senior Minister solely devoted to resilience. Will the Secretary of State finally listen to Labour and appoint a dedicated Minister for resilience?

There is a resilience Minister in the sense that the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster maintains oversight of resilience. That is one of a number of responsibilities shared with the devolved Administrations—resilience is important in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. I look forward to meeting my colleagues from those Administrations next week in Edinburgh to discuss these issues. We take resilience extraordinarily seriously. We undertake exercises to ensure that we understand the pressures that may come to bear. We always take resilience seriously and we will look at the lessons coming out of the inquiry about how to do better as a country.

We will keep asking. I am glad that the Paymaster General mentioned emergency response exercises, which are essential for learning the lessons from covid and for being ready for whatever disaster comes next. As the senior Minister for resilience, among many other things, will the Paymaster General tell us how many exercises have been carried out locally and nationally in the last year? Is he ensuring that lessons are learned, changes are made and good practice is shared to make all our communities safe?

Exercises take place locally and nationally. The exercise involving the use of the emergency alert system for the first time ever, to ensure that we have that important pillar in our response, illustrates how seriously we take these issues. We will continue to undertake exercises to ensure that we are as prepared as anyone ever can be for the circumstances that we can plan for and try to project. But clearly, we never know the disaster that might hit us. That is why we take these things seriously.