The UK’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has come under renewed and intense scrutiny following the publication of the second official Covid-19 Inquiry Report, a document running over a thousand pages and costing tens of millions of pounds. Released in November 2025, the report has unleashed a torrent of emotional responses and fierce debate across the nation, laying bare the deep divisions over what went wrong—and what, if anything, can be learned for the future.
At the heart of the inquiry’s findings is a damning assessment of government leadership during the critical early months of 2020. According to Daily Mail, the inquiry, chaired by Baroness Hallett, concluded that a “toxic and chaotic culture” at the center of government led to a response that was “too little, too late.” The report asserts that if ministers had acted more swiftly—implementing measures like contact tracing, self-isolation, and face coverings before March 16, 2020—the UK might have avoided a full national lockdown altogether. Instead, the country endured more than 200,000 Covid deaths by early 2023.
Baroness Hallett’s report, which drew on 180,000 documents and testimony from 166 witnesses, does not mince words about the consequences of delay. “Had a mandatory lockdown been imposed on or immediately after 16 March 2020, modelling shows that in England alone there would have been approximately 23,000 fewer deaths in the first wave,” she wrote. The death toll in this period “would have been reduced by 48 percent.” The inquiry also criticized then-prime minister Boris Johnson for being too slow to recognize the scale of the emergency, stating he “should have appreciated sooner that this was an emergency that required prime ministerial leadership.”
Yet, as The Conservative Woman (TCW) points out, the inquiry’s central claims are not without controversy. The report’s assertion that an earlier lockdown could have halved the death toll is based on mathematical modelling rather than empirical data or retrospective cause-of-death analysis. Critics argue that this reliance on models—whose assumptions are not universally accepted—undermines the inquiry’s evidential foundation. The inquiry’s use of the Office for National Statistics’ broad category of “deaths involving Covid-19” has also been called into question. This classification includes anyone who died with a positive test or clinical suspicion, regardless of whether the virus was the direct cause of death. As TCW notes, the report “does not attempt to disentangle deaths of covid from deaths with covid,” a distinction that many believe is critical to any honest assessment of policy effectiveness.
The inquiry’s remit, according to its critics, was narrowly focused. It did not examine the possible harms of lockdowns, school closures, vaccine passports, or the broader consequences of restrictions—such as delayed cancer treatment, missed heart attacks, or the psychological effects of isolation. Instead, the report’s narrative proceeds on the assumption that the daily tallies of Covid deaths were precise and directly comparable across time and place, a premise that many analysts treat with skepticism.
Public reaction has been swift and emotional. The Independent reports that many readers recalled the confusion, mixed messaging, and rule-breaking that characterized the government’s early pandemic response. Some shared stories of limiting social contact weeks before the first official lockdown, motivated by concern for vulnerable loved ones. “It’s comforting to have someone to blame, but nobody can say that they weren’t warned about what sort of person Johnson was before 2019,” wrote one reader, reflecting a widespread sense of frustration.
Others, however, caution against the easy judgments of hindsight. “It is too easy to look back with hindsight and find what you want to find,” said one contributor. “Easy now to judge what was the right advice, but at the time there was very conflicting advice—even the scientific advisers didn’t agree.” Some argued that the focus on Johnson alone is a misdirection, noting that the civil service and scientific advisers also played crucial roles in shaping the response.
Still, the dominant view is that leadership was lacking when it mattered most. The inquiry catalogues a series of failures: not stopping large-scale events, not banning international travel, relaxing procurement procedures (which led to unfit personal protective equipment), and the much-criticized Eat Out To Help Out scheme. Years of austerity and underfunding, many believe, left the UK dangerously exposed. “All spare capacity in public services had already been cut, leaving no slack to cope with a crisis,” one reader lamented, pointing to decisions made long before the pandemic struck.
The report also highlights the uneven enforcement of lockdowns. According to The Independent, pubs remained open through hatches, roads were busy, and while some people followed the rules, “Boris and his mates didn’t.” Johnson himself caught Covid-19, was treated by the NHS, and then held parties at Downing Street after his recovery—an episode that many saw as emblematic of a government out of touch with its own guidelines.
Beyond the UK, the inquiry’s findings are placed in an international context. Daily Mail analysis of excess deaths—considered the most consistent way to measure pandemic impact—found that the UK ranked 65th worst out of 237 countries, with 346 extra deaths per 100,000 people between January 2020 and May 2023. By comparison, the US fared worse, while countries like Australia and New Zealand managed to keep excess deaths to a minimum. Sweden, which famously eschewed lockdowns, recorded 185 excess deaths per 100,000, ranking 139th.
Baroness Hallett’s report also criticized misleading assurances from senior civil servants and ministers about the country’s preparedness. Sir Christopher Wormald, then in charge of the health department, was singled out for presiding over “misleading assurances” and failing to correct “overenthusiastic” promises from Health Secretary Matt Hancock. The report further noted that while the vast majority of children were not at risk of serious harm from Covid, they “suffered greatly from the closure of schools and requirement to stay at home.” The government, it found, was unprepared for the sudden and enormous task of educating children at home.
For many, the inquiry’s price tag—estimated at £200 million—adds insult to injury. Some argue that the money would have been better spent on a national memorial for those bereaved by the pandemic. Others, like the commentators in The Conservative Woman, see the entire exercise as a “bureaucratic exoneration” designed to shield the government from true accountability while advocating for even more restrictive policies in future crises.
As the dust settles on the inquiry’s publication, one thing is clear: the wounds left by the pandemic and the government’s response remain raw. Whether the lessons of the past five years will be heeded in the next crisis is, for now, an open question—one that will surely shape the UK’s political landscape for years to come.
