Your report (Johnson announces terms of reference for Covid inquiry, 10 March) says that Lady Hallett, its chair, “will not be asked to apportion blame for any failures she identifies”. This means systemic failure is built into the inquiry.
The principal role of the government is to design, maintain, implement and adapt systems. When those systems fail, it can be because of genuinely unforeseeable events. That was not the case with Covid; it was because the systems were badly designed or weren’t implemented. Blame is perhaps an ugly word, but preventing its identification also means that accountability is excluded, and without accountability, what sort of a joke of a democracy do we have?
As the head of policy at the Royal Statistical Society wrote in your pages, “We shouldn’t blame mutant maths for poor policy outcomes” (From A-levels to pensions, algorithms make easy targets – but they aren’t to blame, 17 August 2021).
Ascribing system failures to the systems themselves is just another way of evading responsibility for incompetence. Somebody chose that system, or chose to neglect it. Constructing the system for the inquiry to exclude accountability is building failure into its design.
Dr Tony Brauer
Jordans, Buckinghamshire
• It is incredibly disrespectful to the families of the tens of thousands of people who died at home during the pandemic for their experiences to be omitted from the terms of reference for the Covid-19 inquiry.
People are dying without the vital support they need. Since the start of the pandemic, Hospice UK estimates that almost 67,000 people are likely to have missed out on specialist palliative care such as adequate pain relief. The inquiry presents an opportunity to bring this issue to light and to make sure that people are able to get the care they need. Without urgent action to find out what happened to the people dying behind closed doors, we won’t know what they experienced and thousands more could still miss out on the expert care that they deserve.
Vital lessons need to be learned from the experiences of people dying at home to uncover crucial information so that people can be better supported at the end of life.
Dominic Carter
Head of policy and research, Hospice UK
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