Boris Johnson asked if £37bn NHS Test and Trace was ‘achieving anything’

“Is NHS Test and Trace actually achieving anything?” Boris Johnson wrote in autumn 2020.

The former prime minister made the comment in handwritten notes on a report from the Cabinet Office’s Covid taskforce on 28 October 2020, which were today shown to the Covid inquiry.

Witness Edward Udny-Lister also claimed Johnson did make the infamous comment that he’d rather “let the bodies pile high” than enforce another lockdown. Dominic Cummings first alleged the then-PM had said this in 2021, but Johnson denied it.

Udny-Lister wrote that the remark was made during a meeting in September 2020 when the ‘R number’ was rising and a ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown was proposed. Udny-Lister wrote “the opposition to any form of lockdown was intense”.

The controversial Test and Trace project was launched in May 2020 as the UK ended its first national lockdown. It was led by Conservative peer Dido Harding, who was appointed by former health secretary Matt Hancock with the aim of cutting transmissions and reducing infections.

It came under heavy scrutiny throughout the pandemic, and in October 2021, the Commons spending watchdog warned the system had failed in its “main objective” of cutting infection levels despite having a budget of £37bn of taxpayer’s cash – a reported 20% of the NHS’s budget at the time.

In other comments on the document, Johnson wrote: “What happened to mass testing? What about the moonshot?”

The October 2020 update from the Covid taskforce said the situation in the UK “continues to deteriorate” and the approach to tiered restrictions at the time would be insufficient to bring the ‘R number’ below 1 – one of the government’s five tests for relaxing restrictions at the time.

The three-tier system of localised Covid restrictions was introduced in England from 14 October 2020 onwards. National restrictions were then reintroduced a month later.

The taskforce update references ramping up the government’s response before Christmas 2020 with “stronger regional interventions, applied to larger parts of the country” and possibly stronger national restrictions. In an annotation on the main body of the document, Johnson writes: “Why not put everyone at level 3?”

Johnson also asked for evidence of the long-term cost to health and well-being of lockdowns and how this compares to loss of life from Covid. In a separate point, he asks: “What do we really achieve by smashing up the economy if we have no idea how many times we are going to have to do it?”

Domestic violence not considered before lockdown

Giving evidence to the inquiry in the afternoon, Udny-Lister, a senior adviser to Johnson during the first year of the pandemic, echoed evidence heard last week saying the impact of Covid restrictions on domestic violence was not considered before the first national lockdown in March 2020.

“Lockdown was a very blunt instrument which was being used to try and stop the spread of Covid,” he said. “Yes, we should have thought much more about domestic abuse. It wasn’t discussed in my hearing until after we’d imposed lockdown.”

Consequences for care homes

In the morning evidence session, chief counsel for the inquiry Hugo Keith KC asked Simon Ridley, former head of the Cabinet Office’s Covid-19 taskforce and part of the healthcare ministerial implementation group (HMIG) set up at the beginning of the pandemic, if the “imperative of freeing up space in the NHS” took primacy over the care sector in the early stages of the pandemic in the UK.

openDemocracy revealed in June that the UK government had known as early as September 2020 that its desire to free up hospital beds in March and April 2020 had been “to the detriment” of care homes.

“It wasn’t a balance, was it?” asked Keith. “The primary obligation was to free up space [in NHS hospitals] and that was done, but without, because of the exigencies of time and capacity, a full understanding of what the impact would be on the care sector.”

There was no policy of testing and no practical means of ensuring testing across care homes and discharged patients, he suggested.

“We were using the HMIG discussions to flush out those issues,” Ridley responded.

In March 2020, NHS England ordered a mass discharge of hospital patients into care homes without testing. Between 20 March 2020 and January 2022, there were 45,632 registered deaths of care home residents in England and Wales involving Covid – 16.7% of all deaths of care home residents.

“There was concern about the implications, but I think everyone agreed that we needed to discharge people from the NHS given the fast-rising Covid infections and hospitalisations and the need to have space and capacity,” said Ridley.

Ridley said that, during this period, concerns about the impact of the policy on the care sector were repeatedly raised by members of HMIG

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