Why Is Sunak Resisting The Covid Inquiry's Demands?

Things will have been said and done during the pandemic that will look bad in the cold light of day, says Sean O'Grady

- Sean O'Grady

The government has asked for a judicial review to be held into whether it has to abide by the order made by Baroness Hallett, chair of the Covid-19 inquiry, to submit various unredacted documents, emails, WhatsApp messages and so on to the team carrying out the investigation.

The move by No 10, which has set Rishi Sunak against Boris Johnson and provoked dissent among government ministers, has highlighted once again the role and powers of the Covid inquiry, and raised questions about how effective it is likely to be.

What is the Covid-19 inquiry?

Since the basic structures were set up under a law passed in 1921, the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act, there have been basically two types of public inquiry – statutory and nonstatutory. The Inquiries Act of 2005 strengthened and modernised the framework.

Non-statutory inquiries have a looser framework in terms of the rules about evidence, can work more rapidly, and are generally used for more targeted investigations, albeit famous ones. These include the current Angiolini Inquiry into the failure of the Metropolitan Police to prevent the murder of Sarah Everard, among other crimes; the Denning inquiry into the Profumo affair in 1963; and the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly, which reported in 2004.