Tory government failed to protect disabled people in early months of pandemic, inquiry concludes

The Conservative government repeatedly failed to take action to protect disabled people in the early months of the pandemic, even though their risk of dying was twice as high as non-disabled people, according to a key Covid inquiry report.

The report highlights the failure to include the disability minister in key ministerial meetings, and the decision to sideline the Disability Unit from work on the UK government’s initial strategy in the early months of the pandemic.

It also says that Boris Johnson’s government failed to address gaps in data and analysis relating to the impact of the virus on disabled people.

The second report of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, which focuses on “core decision-making and political governance”, says the “fact that disabled people would be exposed to a range of different and higher risks should have been obvious”.

In England and Wales, the risk of death involving COVID-19 in March to July 2020 was twice as high for men who reported being limited a lot by their disability than men who reported no disability, while for women, the risk was 2.4 times higher.

In Scotland, from March 2020 to January 2021, the risk was three times higher for men, and 3.2 times higher for women.

For people with learning difficulties, the risks were even higher – in the early months of 2020, a person with learning difficulties aged between 18 and 34 was 30 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than the general population in England.

The inquiry report repeatedly highlights how the impact on disabled people was ignored in the early months of the pandemic.

It says that neither the Disability Unit nor the disability minister had played “any part in the discussions about whether to implement a lockdown, how that decision might be mitigated or the policy on the discharge of hospital patients into care homes”.

An inter-ministerial group set up on 16 March to consider the impact of the pandemic on public services did not even consider the position of disabled people until 21 May, while the disability minister was never a permanent member of the group.

A report on “different outcomes from Covid-19”, commissioned from Public Health England, and published on 2 June 2020, included no analysis of the risks to disabled people.

And it was not until 12 November 2020 that Public Health England published a report that considered the disproportionate number of people with learning difficulties who were dying from COVID-19.

The inquiry report concludes: “The gaps in data meant that there was insufficient information to inform Covid-19 policy-making for disabled people, and communications to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on disabled people were being hampered.”

On the same day, 12 November, the government’s Disability Unit told the work and pensions secretary that data and analysis on the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on disabled people had “significant gaps”.

There were also failures in the devolved nations, with the inquiry revealing that there was no data on the number of disabled people who died due to COVID-19 in Scotland until 24 March 2021 and in Northern Ireland until late 2021.

The report also reveals that, in June 2020, having Down’s syndrome was identified as high risk in relation to COVID-19, but people with Down’s syndrome were not added to the shielded patient list for those who were clinically extremely vulnerable until September 2020.

Even then, it took more than a month for shielding letters to be sent out to people with Down’s syndrome.

And the result of a request in October 2020 for UK government departments to improve the collection of information about disabled people “did not identify sufficient steps to fill those data gaps about disabled people”, with several departments failing to respond to the request.

By 30 March 2021, the Disability Unit remained concerned about the lack of disability data.

The report concludes: “These gaps in knowledge (together with any advice to decision-makers that rely on such knowledge), about the direct and indirect impacts that the pandemic was having on disabled people, were replicated across the UK.

“This incomplete knowledge contributed to the failure of the UK government to act sufficiently speedily to mitigate some risks to disabled people.”

In one of the report’s key recommendations, the inquiry calls on each of the four governments to draw up a framework to identify those who would be most at risk of becoming infected by, and dying from, a disease “and those who are most likely to be negatively impacted by any steps taken to respond to a future pandemic”.

These frameworks, which should include equality impact assessments, “should set out the specific steps that could be taken to mitigate the risks to these people”.

And they should be “embedded into emergency decision-making”, the report says.

The report also calls for each government to include a minister with responsibility for representing the interests of “vulnerable groups” in the decision-making groups that will manage future pandemics.

And it highlights the “devastating” impact of the virus on those living in care homes.

In England and Wales, there were 35,206 deaths of care home residents involving COVID-19 between 13 March 2020 and 25 February 2022, about a fifth of all deaths involving the virus.

In Northern Ireland, the proportion was even higher: between 18 March 2020 and 25 March 2022, 1,250 deaths of care home residents involved Covid-19, which was 28.2 per cent of all COVID-19-related deaths.

The report also points out that, while the identification of people who were clinically extremely vulnerable and needed to shield was likely to have saved lives, it also caused considerable mental distress among those affected, which appears to have “persisted over the course of the pandemic”.

It says: “Many lived in fear of becoming infected by Covid-19, lost support networks available to them, and felt forgotten.”

The second report of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, delivered by its chair, Baroness Hallett, concludes that all four governments failed to “appreciate the scale of the threat” posed by the pandemic in early 2020 or the “urgency of response it demanded”.

It highlights misleading assurances from the Department of Health and Social Care that the UK was well prepared to deal with a pandemic, while health and social care secretary Matt Hancock “gained a reputation among senior officials and advisers at 10 Downing Street for overpromising and underdelivering”.

The report from the inquiry’s second module focuses on “core decision-making and political governance” and concludes that although the various lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 saved lives, they only became “inevitable” because of the “acts and omissions” of the UK and devolved governments.

Without the lockdown on 23 March 2020, the growth in transmission of the virus would have led to an unacceptable loss of life, the inquiry found, but it says that governments’ failure to act promptly and effectively had put them in this position.

Had the lockdown been imposed a week earlier, it concludes, about 23,000 fewer people would have died in England up until 1 July 2020.

The inquiry’s public hearings will end by March 2026, with the final report scheduled to be published no later than summer 2027.

Picture: Boris Johnson

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