The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice has launched an online tracker to assess the Government’s response to every recommendation made by the Covid-19 Inquiry.
We invited the campaign group to share with us why this tracker is needed and why it is so important.
The Covid Inquiry cannot be allowed to become another missed opportunity
The Covid Inquiry's latest report is a devastating indictment of the failure to protect care home residents during the pandemic. There was no ‘protective ring’, as Matt Hancock claimed. Instead, longstanding neglect and key decisions made in Whitehall left the social care sector dangerously exposed, contributing to more than 40,000 deaths.
But exposing these failures is not enough. Unless the Government acts on the Inquiry's recommendations, the same mistakes will be repeated. And the history of public inquiries gives us little confidence that those lessons will be learned.
Britain spends hundreds of millions of pounds investigating its biggest scandals and disasters. Yet when it comes to acting on what those investigations tell us, the record is appalling.
Over the last three decades, around 30 public inquiries into healthcare scandals have made more than 1,400 recommendations. Yet researchers could only find evidence that around 300, barely one in five, were ever implemented.
Once inquiry reports are published, the crucial task of implementing their recommendations is routinely neglected. Ministers promise to learn lessons, but political priorities move on and there is little scrutiny of whether meaningful changes follow.
“We are determined that the Covid-19 Inquiry will be different.”
Bereaved families fought hard to establish the Inquiry and have spent years reliving the worst moments of their lives to expose what went wrong. Allowing its recommendations to be quietly forgotten would be an insult to their sacrifices and leave the country dangerously exposed to future emergencies.
Our online tracker
That is why Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice has launched a new online tracker, the first of its kind in the UK, to independently assess the Government's response to every recommendation made by the Inquiry.
The tracker examines commitments and actions taken in response to each recommendation, identifying where progress is being made and where promises are weak, unclear or missing. It will be regularly updated as further reports are published and reforms are delivered, delayed or abandoned.
Our initial assessment
Our initial assessment is deeply concerning. Of the 36 recommendations across the first three modules, just eleven are on track, while nineteen lack full commitments or necessary action and six have been rejected altogether.
Our campaign for an independent National Oversight Mechanism
We are campaigning for an independent National Oversight Mechanism to monitor recommendations from all public inquiries. Until that exists, we will do everything we can to hold ministers accountable.
The module 6 report on the care sector is another reminder of what is at stake. Social care remains in urgent need of fundamental reform, and we cannot afford to wait for another crisis before acting.
“The true measure of the Inquiry's success will not be the reports it publishes, but whether its recommendations lead to changes that prevent future deaths. That is what our tracker is intended to achieve.”