Politics and public health

Lady Hallett’s UK Covid Inquiry will not report for years. Public hearings alone do not conclude until summer 2026. So it is doubly unfortunate that the findings of a discrete but complementary investigation seem to have passed the mainstream media by. Chaired by former lord justice of appeal Sir Jack Beatson and overseen by the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, the Independent Commission on UK Public Health Emergency Powers published its final report last week. Much-maligned former health secretary Matt Hancock turned up to the launch at the Institute for Government, but there were no cameras. 

A pity. As Sir Jack noted, in reviewing the UK’s public health legislative framework and institutional arrangements, alongside government decision-making, the commission’s adopted a unique perspective focused on the rule of law and human rights.

The report (Independent Commission on UK Public Health Emergency Powers (biicl.org)) contains 44 recommendations which Lady Hallett et alia are encouraged to consider. Its tenor calls up the old joke about someone asking directions, only to be told: ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here’.

Designing and enacting legislation before a public health emergency occurs – and not ‘on the hoof’ – helps maintain principles of the rule of law and good governance, the commission opines. Sound advice. That way you are less likely to end up with high-profile enforcement errors, such as police officers preventing people from buying Easter eggs.

Indeed, ‘Legal Uncertainty’ merits a chapter in the 148-page report, accounting for 14 recommendations on its own. Some seem so self-evident you wonder why they did not happen – like an app showing what restrictions people living in different regions were obliged to comply with at any given time.

Others, however, are less suggestive of an easy solution, such as the ‘significant amount of legal confusion resulting from the differing approaches taken by the four administrations’ (at Westminster, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast).

Hancock stood up to complain that cross-border cooperation too often fell down at the ‘highest political levels’, but this was predictable. True, viruses don’t respect national boundaries; but why should ‘statist Scotland’ have done as it was told by ‘libertarian London’? And there was a real political dividend for the Welsh government in its handling of the pandemic. Such is devolution.