Sir Keir Starmer has called on Boris Johnson to apologise to bereaved families after a critical report on the government’s Covid response was released.
The Labour leader said the report was a “damning indictment” of the Government and thinks that the public Covid inquiry should begin earlier than the planned date of Spring 2022.
The report said mistakes at the start of the Covid pandemic cost lives and the government’s initial policy “one of the most important public health failures” ever in the UK.
The joint inquiry by the Science and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee said the UK’s preparation for a pandemic was far too focused on flu and ministers waited too long to push through lockdown measures in early 2020.
Stephen Barclay, the Cabinet Office minister, refused to apologise and insisted the government “did take decisions to move quickly” in the wake of the report’s publication.
