20 October 2025

(10.30 am)

Lady Hallett: Ms Dobbin.

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, may I please call

Professor Sir Chris Whitty.

Lady Hallett: Welcome back, Professor, for the last time.

The Witness: Thank you.

Professor Sir KCb

PROFESSOR SIR CHRIS WHITTY KCB (sworn).

Questions From Lead Counsel to the Inquiry for Module 8

Ms Dobbin: May I ask you to give the Inquiry your full name, please.

Professor Sir KCb: Christopher Whitty.

Lead 8: Professor Whitty, I think you ought to have before you two witness statements which will come up. I think the first bears the number INQ000588046.

Professor Sir KCb: I’m just waiting for that now. Thank you.

Lead 8: And are you content that that witness statement is true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Professor Sir KCb: I am.

Lead 8: And you ought to then have a second witness statement in Module 8, which is in fact your tenth witness statement in this Inquiry, INQ000588220. Yes?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: And are you content that that statement is true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Professor Sir KCb: I am.

Lead 8: Thank you.

Professor Whitty, I was going to begin your evidence at the start of the chronology, if I may, and ask you some questions about the outset of the pandemic. And specifically, if you can explain why SAGE first contemplated the closure of schools on 4 February 2020?

Professor Sir KCb: Thank you. So, in the pandemic, and based on the information we initially had from colleagues in China, and then subsequently from other countries, notably Italy, we were confident that this was a respiratory pandemic, or at least a respiratory epidemic that had the potential to turn into a pandemic at the earlier stages.

Secondly, we had reasonable evidence, not convincing evidence overwhelmingly, but convincing evidence, that children were relatively unaffected in terms of severity. We didn’t have any evidence about – really, that was convincing on whether there was any reduction in transmission, and we thought there was a possibility that it was transmitting quite extensively through children but with no or very few symptoms. So that was a possibility.

In the context of respiratory epidemics and pandemics – and the best evidence for this is for

influenza, which is a very different pandemic in some

ways but has some similarities, particularly the route

of transmission – we know that the closure of schools

has been associated with reductions of transmissions,

significant reduction of transmission in the case of

influenza. And the reason for that is that children

tend to mix together quite a lot. And in the case of

influenza, and this was an important difference which we

recognised from the beginning, because there’s often some residual cross-reactivity from previous flu pandemics, there’s often a disproportionate amount of transmission in influenza in children during pandemics like the ones we saw in the 1950s and 1960s, for example.

We didn’t think that would be true in Covid, and there were a number of other technical differences between the early evidence, but our view was that, from an early stage, the closure of schools is one of the tools that has been used in previous pandemics effectively, and therefore had to be considered in this one.

Lead 8: I think I’m probably going to pre-empt something which you might be asked in a moment, which is maybe just if you could slow down slightly.

Professor Sir KCb: I apologise.

Lead 8: Maybe it would help, then, to look at the influenza strategy to understand the background to this.

And we have that at INQ000022708. And I think if we look at page 39 of that, please. And paragraph 4.23.

That sets out, in that first paragraph, that there were benefits in the context of an influenza pandemic of school closures; is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: That is correct.

Lead 8: And it sets out that in order to be effective, that such closures would need to be prolonged; is that also –

Professor Sir KCb: That is also correct. It differentiates between closures of individual schools for outbreaks and what are called mass closures across a large area, to try to control the epidemic. But in the second context, they would have to be prolonged to have their effect, and even more prolonged in the case of Covid.

Lead 8: That’s just what I was just going to ask you, looking at paragraph 4.24 I think, where it says:

“… under some circumstances head teachers (and their Boards of Governors …) may take the decision to close individual establishments …”

That’s reflecting that, the potential closure of individual schools within a pandemic; is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: That is right. I think important to highlight – because the differences and similarities between influenza and Covid are quite important in these early weeks, as we were trying to work out what to do – that, in contrast to Covid, in influenza, a lot of the risk is to children, so therefore there is a logic to closing individual schools which have an outbreak for the protection of children in a way that is less true, was less true, for Covid, as far as we could see at this point.

I also should say, in, I think, Module 1 or 2, we discussed this document and did make the point that actually, in our view, this was written by people who’d just been through a very mild pandemic, and I think there are a number of weaknesses in this document as a whole. So I don’t want to say this was our playbook –

Lead 8: Yes.

Professor Sir KCb: – but certainly schools were considered from really quite early on.

Lead 8: And just looking over the page, if we can, I can see it’s there, it sets out:

“Once the virus is more established in the country, the general policy would be that schools should not close – unless there are local … continuity reasons (… or particularly vulnerable children). This policy will be reviewed in light of information about how the pandemic is unfolding at the time.”

So, again, one presumes, in relation to flu, that point that – that once there has been a mass outbreak of flu, school closures become less important; is that essentially what this guidance is saying?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes. And this is the bit which I think I would – I would actually question, and that’s because – and this goes back to the point I’ve just made – the people writing this had just been through a flu pandemic which actually had lower mortality than seasonal flu in an average year. If we’d had a flu pandemic like the 1918-19 one, or even the ones we had in the 1950s, 1957 and the ’60s, 1968, I don’t think this necessarily would have been true, because at that point we’d have had quite significant mortality among children, and I think that would not have been good advice.

But – so I think this really reflected the time it was written and the experiences of the people who wrote it.

Lead 8: I’m grateful, and just looking at paragraph 4.25, it goes on to set out that:

“The impact of the closure of schools and similar settings on all sectors would have substantial economic and social consequences, and disproportionately large effects on health and social care …”

And presumably, that’s just reflecting that if you close schools, many parents won’t be able to work and may not be able to work in the health sector; is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: That is right, and I think that clearly is true in a sense whenever you close schools, and as we’ll probably come on to, the very strong view of both the scientists and public health people like myself and the policymakers was that closing schools had really negative effects for multiple reasons, particularly on children, but also more widely. So nobody wanted to do that except under absolute necessity.

Lead 8: But I think nonetheless, at paragraph 4.25, it goes on to recognise that:

“Such a step would therefore only be taken in an influenza pandemic with a very high impact and so, although school closures cannot be ruled out, it should not be the primary focus of schools’ planning.”

So even this plan wasn’t saying you can rule out school closures; is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: Yeah.

Lead 8: And if we look at that policy, is it accurate to summarise it as saying that in the context of a flu pandemic, the general policy is that schools should not close but in a flu of high impact, a different approach might have to be taken?

Professor Sir KCb: That is exactly right, yeah.

Lead 8: Did SAGE ever advise that this guidance on school closures specific to influenza could be read across to Covid-19?

Professor Sir KCb: Not specifically. So although – and I think it’s clear, in a sense, if you read many of the SAGE minutes, although there’s often a comment about using influenza assumptions, those are about numbers of deaths and a number of those kinds of metrics, they weren’t about the policies to be used across the two pandemics. But in this particular case, and the case of schooling, certainly it was one of the measures that we would consider in any respiratory infection but the key word there is “consider” rather than necessarily do, because everybody doesn’t want to do them if we can avoid it.

Lead 8: And can we just maybe look at one of the examples of SAGE advice to see that distinction between applying some of the presumptions around the figures as opposed to the presumption that the policy applied, and that’s INQ000106109. And I think we see this is the advice of 13 February.

If we go over, please, yes, thank you. And if we – oh, if I could just ask you, before we turn, please, at paragraph 5 of that advice of 13 February it set out that:

“SAGE and wider [government] should continue to work on the assumption that China will be unable to contain the epidemic.”

By this stage, how long had that assumption been in effect for?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, in practice, and this was explored in quite some detail in Module 2 in particular, but in practice, I think most of the scientific community considered by now this was very unlikely to be contained, not impossible, but very unlikely at this point, and therefore planning should always be on the, in a sense, worst-case rather than the hoped-for scenario and therefore the planning assumption should be it would not be contained, and then if we got a pleasant surprise, fine, but that was looking increasingly unlikely.

Lead 8: All right, we’ll come back and look at that in the context of school closures. But just looking if we can, please, at page 2 at the bottom, it picks up the thread of school closures. And it asks, or its sets out that consideration should be given to what the objective was of school closures, and sets out that they potentially could delay the first wave of an epidemic or the peak; is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: That’s right.

Lead 8: And then it goes on, if we go over the page, please, sets out at 13:

“In an influenza pandemic, schoolchildren are critical to transmission because they have less immunity … and because of their social mixing patterns.”

But goes on to explain at 14 that the impact of Covid-19 wasn’t well understood at this stage; is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: That is correct. But the second – the point on 15 is an important one.

Lead 8: Yes, that’s what I was coming to.

Professor Sir KCb: – (overspeaking) – yeah.

Lead 8: So yes, setting out that it wasn’t known but that it was known that the serial interval for Covid-19 was longer; yes?

Professor Sir KCb: That’s correct, and as the other thing which was known at this point was that we would not have any residual immunity in adults, and therefore the differential between adults and children you might see in influenza would be much less likely.

Lead 8: And then looking – yes. So – and I think the critical point then in respect of the serial interval, as well, was that closures would have to last longer –

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: – than they might do in an influenza pandemic; is that –

Professor Sir KCb: To have the same effect, that’s true, yes.

Lead 8: So again, is that an example of the distinction being drawn between the approach or the assumptions that might be correct of influenza but not necessarily correct of Covid-19?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, that’s right, and I think with the exception of the severity of the pandemic at a population level, most of these implied that if anything, it was less likely to be useful in the context of Covid than in influenza.

Lead 8: Thank you. That can come down.

Professor Whitty, I wasn’t going to take you through all of the advice that was given by SAGE from 4 February onwards that relates to school closures; I was just going to ask you about some headlines and to confirm when that advice was given, but if at any stage you want me to take you to that advice, please do.

Obviously we’ve seen that from 4 February onwards the closure of schools was contemplated; correct?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: From 10 February it was being advised that the serial interval was longer, the point that we’ve just made – we’ve just seen, meaning that schools would potentially have to be closed for longer –

Professor Sir KCb: Yeah.

Lead 8: – if it were to have the same effect.

I think from 11 February it was advised that the severity of disease in children might be less than that seen in adults.

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: Is that correct? We’ve seen some of the advice given in respect of 13 February. From 19 February it was being advised that larger impacts would see more closures take place earlier in the pandemic.

Professor Sir KCb: That is right in the context of trying to delay a wave. It wouldn’t be right, necessarily, in terms of trying to reduce the size of a peak, and I think that was made at other points along the SAGE sequence.

Lead 8: Just thinking about it in terms of school closures, though, does that distinction necessarily matter at this point?

Professor Sir KCb: I think it does matter, because if what we were trying to do, and you’ll recall that we had the four stages: contain, delay, research and mitigate, where, to be clear, those weren’t sequential, those could happen in parallel, which is a point which I think sometimes gets missed, but there was no intention at any point in terms of the technical advice from SAGE to suggest that actually we should be closing schools to delay the wave. And the reason for that is that would have required schools to be one of the first things to close, and given all the negative downsides to that for children, for their welfare and, indeed, for the wider society and economy, the decision was that that was not a sensible thing to be looking at, technically.

So the way in which school closures were considered was for the different aim to try and reduce the peak, and for that, you don’t need to do it at the earliest possible opportunity.

Lead 8: I see. Maybe we can – I’ll come back and ask you about that, just when we’ve finished this section, if I may, of what the advice was demonstrating.

On 20 February, and in fact this was seen on 13 February, as well, there was advice that SPI-M-O should consider selective school closures and that there should be modelling in respect of that. Do you know if that modelling happened, and if there was a separate thread of work, as it were, that was considering selective school closures?

Professor Sir KCb: That became much better understood as the pandemic went on, but at this stage the view was that we had so little information, that being able to do that with any degree of reliability really wasn’t possible. So although we were able to make some really very broad comments like a small number of people being in school probably didn’t significantly reduce the impact of school closures later on, we weren’t in a position to be able to give proper scientific advice to policymakers that said what the impacts of different forms of selective closure would be.

Lead 8: So does that mean that at this point in time, so if we’re looking at 13 February and 20 February, that there just wasn’t sufficient data to feed in to the modelling in order to provide that, sort of, more granular advice?

Professor Sir KCb: Although some of the more self-confident modellers might have felt they were able to, I think the view of SAGE was that we did not have sufficient data and confidence to be able to give information to policymakers they would find useful about differential effects of different models – sorry, different models of school closure, to be clear, rather than different mathematical models.

Lead 8: All right. So, in terms of what it was possible to advise on, then, at around this stage, would it have been a fairly blunt, “We can allow a certain number of children potentially or a certain percentage of the population of schoolchildren to attend school”? Is it that broad sort of calculation that would have been possible at this point in time?

Professor Sir KCb: I mean, at this point, we were probably at the limits of what we could do with any reliability even just to say total school closure or not, because the amount of data was not sufficient for us to be able to make a really useful answer that policymakers could use.

As we got closer to the actual school closure, we were able to ask the question two different ways, about could a restricted group of people still be able to go to school? And the first group – the first set of questions were mathematical: would this have a major impact on – the effect of school closures – on the epidemic? And our view was: yes, but pretty marginal.

And the second was a social science approach to it, asking the question: would this be perceived by the population as equitable? So, someone else’s children going to school, mine not going to school.

And the view there was, provided there was a logic to it, like, for example, with essential workers, like, importantly, children with particular needs that needed to be met, that the general public would support that.

So, those two elements were there, but that was really – as I say, we were quite near the limits of what you could say with any degree of reliability, given the relatively limited data and the very rapidly moving situation.

Lead 8: All right. So, moving on, then, I think by 20 February, SAGE was advising that children were now being seen to test positive for Covid-19, and that that reflected the role of children as carriers of the virus. Was that a significant moment, or was it already taken as a given that children were carriers of the disease?

Professor Sir KCb: That was an important – it was an important point. We didn’t have a feel for what the incidence and prevalence was of this, but until then, one of the possibilities was that the reason we weren’t seeing severe cases in children was simply because children didn’t get infected.

Now, if children don’t get infected, then interventions with children are going to have no effect. Once we knew that children could get infected, interventions with children, of which obviously school closures is the most important, remain in scope.

Lead 8: All right.

And then I think by the time we move on to 25 February, there is modelling of different interventions in conjunction with each other, and specifically I think the modelling of university and school closures, home isolation, household quarantine and social distancing; is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: That is right. And I think, importantly, in this, what this demonstrated was, firstly, that school closures alone would have insufficient impact on the epidemic, but unfortunately that was true for multiple other individual components of the interventions. And it was only when you started to add them together that you had the effect on the pandemic that was sufficient to pull the R below 1, according to the data we had at that stage and the modelling we had at that stage.

Lead 8: I’m going to come back to that, because that’s obviously an incredibly important point when it comes to school closures, and when we look at some of the advice that was being given a little bit later, but I think what you’re flagging up is it’s the additive effect of different measures taken in conjunction with each other that might make the difference; is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: That’s right. But also specifically on schools, I think we were confident from a fairly early stage that simply closing schools and doing nothing else would be insufficient. So that was never really seriously considered as a viable option.

Lead 8: So if we take – and I’m going to move on, then, really to ask you about what then changed at around the point of mid-March, but if I can ask you the question of: prior to that point, in your view, were senior decision makers within government – and I mean both politicians and officials in that regard – provided with adequate warning as to the prospect that mass school closures might have to be used as a response to the pandemic?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes. I’m very confident of that. And I’ll, if I may, just expand on that, because I think it was important to some of your previous discussions.

I mean, firstly, it had already, of course, as you pointed out, been in the plan for the pandemic we had, albeit with important caveats. It was repeatedly raised in SAGE, at which representatives of all the relevant departments, including the Department for Education, tend to be present, and often the chief scientific advisers or their deputies. But then, additional to that, it was raised by me and many other people in press conferences, it was quite widely discussed in the media and I realise you can’t go into this in detail, but when at the beginning of March I was in front of the Select Committee in the House of Commons, I was asked multiple questions, and Dame Jenny Harries was as well, about school closures by MPs, and of course, possibly the most important of these, multiple other countries were closing schools.

So, for example, the Republic of Ireland closed schools on 12 March. Italy and China had before. So I don’t – I think – I’m reasonably confident that even if people didn’t read all SAGE minutes, and that’s entirely understandable, I think there were multiple other reasons people should have been aware of this. And certainly very good people from the Department for Education were involved in these discussions.

Lead 8: What you say, I don’t think I need to bring you to this, and this is at paragraph 3.8 of your ninth statement, you say:

“I consider that it was made sufficiently clear to Ministers, in February 2020, that … schools might have to close in order to reduce transmission.”

Professor Sir KCb: Yeah, that is definitely my view. I think it is important to say that our view in February and, indeed, for some of the beginning of March was that it was “might” not “will” and there were certainly some of the modelling groups who thought it was possible by a combination of other measures that we might be able to spare school closures, which everybody thought was the thing which we should do last, in a sense, short of an absolute full lockdown, which was a very late thing indeed. But certainly the possibility, of it, the distinct possibility of it, was known from an early stage.

Lead 8: I think – that’s what I was about to ask you. I think your use of the word “distinct” might answer it, but obviously there is advice about things that are a remote possibility and there are – there’s advice about things that are a realistic possibility. So if I can ask you about the latter and when you think it was clear to senior decision makers that it was a realistic possibility that schools might have to close?

Professor Sir KCb: I think anyone attending SAGE meetings or reading SAGE minutes would have realised it was a realistic possibility from February.

Lead 8: And when you say “from February”, do you mean from the advice that was given from 4 February onwards or from a later point?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, that is from 4 February onwards.

Lead 8: You go on, in your statement, to say – and this is page 19 and perhaps it would help to bring this up – page 19, paragraph 3.38:

“I think it was clear to senior decision makers … that there was a strong possibility that schools may have to close. It may have happened sooner than was anticipated … but … was discussed in detail for some time in advance of it actually happening.”

Again, in terms of locating that strong possibility at a moment in time, is that from 4 February onwards or is that, do you think, at a slightly later point in the chronology?

Professor Sir KCb: I think it would be difficult to put an exact date on it, but if you read the SAGE minutes, which are very telegraphic and short, but they do make clear that school closures were discussed and were not discounted. So – and since they’ve been used in other respiratory pandemics, that was part of the pandemic plan for influenza, and multiple other reasons, which I’ve already gone through, I think it was very much a possibility.

To be clear, there was a possibility we would not need to, or not until a very late stage. So both, in a sense, were held open, but I don’t think anyone who looked at this was in any doubt that this was a possibility, a distinct possibility.

Lead 8: Thank you. And again, just to be clear, from 4 February –

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I’m saying from mid February, for the sake of argument – it might have been earlier, but certainly from mid February.

Lead 8: I’m grateful, Professor Whitty.

So I think what you had highlighted in this statement that we just looked at was that school closures may have happened sooner than was predicted; is that correct?

Professor Sir KCb: That is correct.

Lead 8: And is the pivotal point, or is the, I suppose, the point of inflection in relation to that, those days around the middle of March? So from 16, 17, 18 March, is that the critical period where things speeded up?

Professor Sir KCb: That is. And the – up to 15 March, my advice, based on SAGE advice – as all my advice was based on SAGE advice – was actually we might well get through, assuming we did have to close schools, which wasn’t completely certain, until the Easter holidays, and in reality – in the two days after that, so after – on the 16th and 17th, the modelling demonstrated we were much further along or significantly further along the pandemic path and on a steeper path than we had anticipated by that stage, so everything got shunted forward rather quickly, and this was obviously gone into in some detail in Module 2, why that happened, and it was largely to do with the lack of data is the principal reason.

But the practical reality of that was we moved from a situation of: we’ll probably have to, or certainly, high possibility of having to close schools, it’s the last thing we want to do, therefore let’s try and see if we can hold it until the February – sorry, until the Easter break, to, having to do that earlier”. And the difference was a two-week difference, in reality.

Lead 8: All right. And Professor Whitty, I’m not, by asking you these questions, trying to retread all of the ground in Module 2, I’m just going to focus on school closures and perhaps look at the advice that was provided on 16 March, just to explore that a little further, and that’s INQ000546578.

If we look, Professor Whitty, at paragraph 1, I think that sums up the position that had been reached.

Professor Sir KCb: That is a good summary, yes.

Lead 8: And that the point – the concern was NHS critical care capacity, and that what had changed was the speed of implementation; is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: That is right.

Lead 8: And again, we won’t go through all of this, but I think we can pick up at paragraph 7 the concern, although there was uncertainty around it, about the number of cases that there might be in the UK each day – yes?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: And then if we drop down, we can see at paragraph 17, the advice that was being given in respect of school closures. And perhaps if I just read out the first few lines of this:

“While SAGE’s view remains that school closures constitutes one of the less effective single measure to reduce the epidemic peak, it may nevertheless become necessary to introduce school closures in order to push demand for critical care below NHS capacity.”

So can I just ask you again, is the important word there “less effective single measure”?

Professor Sir KCb: That is exactly right.

Lead 8: And I think we see, if we go over the page, please, and we look at – thank you, it’s not – it doesn’t have numbers but it’s the second paragraph down:

“SPI-M to coordinate further rapid modelling of school closures taking account of key closures and at risk groups”.

And then below that:

“Action: DfE to work with DHSC and PHE on specific guidance for schools and universities, including personal hygiene measures …”

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: “… and methods to apply social distancing … based on what has been done elsewhere …”

Can I ask you about that. That seems quite late in the day for that advice to be given, and specifically about the impact that social distancing might have. Do you know why this was being raised at this stage, but not beforehand?

Professor Sir KCb: I mean, I think it – well, I mean, my view was that DfE had already been doing work along these lines beforehand so it is not the first time this side was considered. I think the bit that, in a sense, happened at this point was really the discussions around school closures being crystallised. But what was important on this, I think, was relooking at what other countries – and we use the example of Singapore, which was seen to be a country that had had a very innovative approach to quite a lot of the pandemic – to just check that we had learnt all the lessons from other countries, but I don’t think that this was the first point that public – that personal hygiene measures and so on were being talked about. The Prime Minister had been talking about this from an earlier stage, actually, already, as had I and many other people. So this was certainly not novel at this stage.

Lead 8: I think we’d seen that there’d been the advice around children washing their hands and wiping down surfaces, that sort of advice at quite an early stage. But it doesn’t seem to have developed into asking schools, for example, to consider social distancing at an earlier stage than –

Professor Sir KCb: Well, you’d need to talk to head teachers, but my strong impression was that those kinds of things were happening already in the way that schools were addressing this. So I don’t think they needed scientific advice to try to work out ways of reducing infections in their schools.

What changed here, I think, was that we were trying to make sure we learnt all the lessons from other countries, which are less easily available to others.

Lead 8: And that, the use of social distancing, for example, as seen in Singapore, was that reflecting that in Singapore they had introduced social distancing in schools as an alternative to closing them?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes. And this is – well, what you really – what we wanted to do was to try to assemble all the measures, and I think this is a repeated point we’ll probably come to later, which could leave schools open for the longest possible time, and in due course allow us to open them at the earliest possible time, to shorten the period of – in which they were closed. But I don’t think we came across anything in this that would have made a material difference to whether we would or would not have been able to keep schools open.

Lead 8: I see. So, it’s really because, again, if we come back to the idea this is a sort of inflection point in the pandemic, that if you were going to look at social distancing in schools, and I mean social distancing in a strict sense and, you know, the – I suppose the things that might be really difficult, like, you know, halving the number of children in a classroom, for example, that that would have needed to have been trialled at an earlier point than this?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes. And I think – I think, actually, at the time, but also subsequently, none of these measures would have been sufficient, I think, given the speed of the upswing we were seeing and the dangers of overtopping the NHS, with all the impacts of excess deaths that that would have led to. But certainly it was sensible to be asking the question: are there any things we could do, short of closure, that would pull the R down? And I think that was really the point of this discussion at this stage in time.

Lead 8: Is it clear – and I’m asking this as a question in retrospect – whether or not, in fact, other countries had managed to introduce social distancing measures or any other measures within schools so as to enable them to remain open to larger numbers of children –

Professor Sir KCb: Some –

Lead 8: – and whether any of those strategies worked? Sorry.

Professor Sir KCb: Some – well, different countries tried very different things on this. And in a few countries where the incidence was relatively low, and the risks to their health service were lower, people managed to get away with slightly less in terms of school closure.

But I think it’s important to remember that I think over – from memory, over 100 countries did close schools at this stage, including almost all of our European neighbours. So this was something which I don’t think there was any comparable country to the UK, the very possible exception is Sweden, but there’s a lot of caveats to that, and it’s – the differences are exaggerated I think sometimes, nevertheless, that’s the one exception where people did try a slightly different approach, but almost every other relevant country decided – and certainly, faced with the scale of the upswing which we were seeing in the UK, which was more than – for this wave, was more than many other countries in different waves, that wasn’t true. I think we really didn’t have any margin for error and I think that was really the reason that we had to take the approaches we did.

Lead 8: Thank you. We’ll probably see that reflected in the advice that was given over the next couple of days. But just to see on page 3 the point that you made about Easter holidays. So I think we see:

“ACTION: SAGE to discuss at its next meeting how school closures could affect NHS critical compare capacity …”

And I think then we see at (b):

“effects of closing schools before Easter holidays vs not reopening schools after the Easter holidays …”

So that was still a live debate?

Professor Sir KCb: It was. And we very much recognised the practicality that – saying to head teachers and teachers and other school staff “Carry on until the Easter holidays, you won’t reopen afterwards” was a much easier thing to plan for than trying to close at short notice. So there was a very big difference between those in practical terms, although the difference in chronological terms is two weeks.

Lead 8: Yes, okay.

If we go over, please, to the advice that was given on 17 March.

This is INQ000074903. And I think again, if we look at 4, it says:

“The impact of school closures, as a stand-alone policy, on Covid-19 would be expected to be smaller than for influenza, because …”

And then it sets out the reasons for that.

Correct?

Professor Sir KCb: Correct.

Lead 8: So, again, that important point, it’s as a standalone measure?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: And then if we go to paragraph 8. Thank you.

Is this really – when you describe there being no margin of error, is this really the core of that, and why that was the position?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes. And I think here there are probably three things it’s worth putting out. I think they’re all obvious but it’s still worth, probably, putting them out.

The first of which is, if we managed to achieve a reduction in the R but it was still above 1, the pandemic would still be doubling. It’d be doubling at a slower rate but it would still be doubling up. And very clearly, on the trajectory we were on, it would be doubling up from a very high level, almost irrespective.

The second point is that between – we were already in a situation where we’d realised that we’d got into trouble because we didn’t have full data and we were delayed in the data we had. And the risk is we wouldn’t see that we weren’t having enough of an effect from what the Prime Minister had announced on the 16th until it was too late, and by the time we’d actually realised, three or four weeks later, that we hadn’t had a sufficient impact on R, we’d be in a situation where it would then take quite a long time for even school closures to have an effect.

So, the problem we had was we were going to get very close to the margins with the NHS capacity as then modelled, and that we would have a significant delay between a decision and the impact of that decision. Because if you close schools, it’s at least three weeks before you’re going to see an impact on hospitalisation, and that’s because it’s not the children who are going to have the impact on hospitalisation; it’s the adults they infect in that situation if that happens. That was part of the debate.

Then there’s a lag of about two weeks until those adults – between infection and in ICU, so you’ve essentially got a three-week period in which you don’t know whether you’ve had an effect or not.

So, for that reason, the margin for error on this was very, very narrow and we didn’t think we had the luxury of waiting to find out.

Lead 8: Okay. Because if we look at paragraph 9, it sets out:

“It is almost certain that school closures will not make the epidemic worse, and that they would reduce both the epidemic peak and expected number of cases. Our best assessment is that they would reduce the reproduction number by between 10% and 20%.”

That doesn’t seem like very much.

Professor Sir KCb: It doesn’t seem like very much, but I think the sentence below it is very important, which is: if that was the difference between an R of above 1, where it was still doubling, and an R of below 1, where it was halving, then that is actually a very big difference, because essentially every generation time you go, you’re leading to a very big difference.

And I think the problem with the doubling times, if you think of the peak we reached in the first wave, had we just done one doubling on top of that, the impact on the NHS would have been really severe, and two doublings it would have been very difficult to manage, I think. So – it was very difficult to manage even as it was, to be clear, and as was made clear in many of the harrowing testimonies, particularly in Modules 2 and 3.

So I think that’s the point about this, is the 10-20% isn’t an arithmetic – a 20% reduction overall, it’s a 20% reduction in the R, and the R is to do with either doubling or halving.

Lead 8: Okay. So can I ask you at this point in time, was it the position – thank you, that can come down – was it the position that the models were demonstrating this, therefore that was the basis of the advice? Or was it known what it was about schools remaining open that would impact the transmission? So in other words, was it known that by allowing children to go to school, they wouldn’t potentially infect each other and bring infections home, or was it a more – was it a more data-driven, modelling-driven – I hope that makes sense – perspective?

Professor Sir KCb: It does make sense. So this was principally a modelling-driven perspective and, I mean, I signalled that when talking in public from well before this decision was made and I said there are basically two reasons you close schools, one is to protect children because it’s particularly dangerous to children and therefore they’ll get transmission, and the second is based on modelling that actually it’s going to have a big effect on the epidemic as a whole.

Fortunately, in the case of Covid, although there were, tragically, some deaths and some certainly severe and, in due course, some long-term cases, Covid affected children much less than many other pandemic diseases historically and indeed potentially in the future. So that side wasn’t there. But what we always thought was that if this is going to have an effect on the epidemic peak where it significantly reduces the number of people who are infected in the first wave, that would have an effect on the number of people going through the NHS, and then all negative effects that have been discussed in this Inquiry at length.

Lead 8: Was it possible, at this point in the pandemic, to disaggregate the impact of children being at school, distinct from the indirect effects of children being at school? So for example, the fact that their parents might be dropping them off, in other words, the things that are adjacent, if I can put it that way, to schools being open that might drive infections, or was that something about which there was only understanding later?

Professor Sir KCb: No, we were very – I mean, in a sense, conceptually, it was very clear already that a lot of the effects of schools is, as you say, indirect. It’s transport to and from; it’s parents meeting at the school gate; it’s changed behaviour by parents in a number of other ways. But in a sense, from the point of view of reducing the epidemic, the exact reasons for it are less important than the fact it happens or doesn’t happen. But in terms of the totality of the effect of a school closure, it combines all of those effects. So it’s not just the transmission within schools although that is obviously an important part of it.

Lead 8: I think we’ll return to that so that we can understand more about whether more could be done around schools being open to control transmission but I think the important point is, at this moment in time, those distinctions are niceties, almost, given the point that had been reached in the pandemic; is that – (overspeaking) –

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, and at this point in time, that is true.

Lead 8: And then if we move to 18 March, please, which is the day that the school – the closure of schools to most children was announced, and perhaps if we have a look at the advice that was given, and that’s INQ000052639.

Let me ask you, whilst that’s being brought up, Professor Whitty, can you explain, then, from your perspective, what changed for the position that was reached on 18 March?

Professor Sir KCb: I think that – two things, the first of which is that a further hardening of the data that we were in a very rapid upswing of a potentially really serious pandemic in the UK and across the – really, pretty well across the whole of the country, and the second was that the modelling groups came to a more confident view that closing schools would have a material impact on the R. Those really – those two came together.

Now, this wasn’t a one day there was no view and the second day – you know, on the 17th there was no view and on the 18th – it was more of an incremental moving forward, but certainly there was other strengthening of both of those positions between the 16th and the 18th in a series of steps.

Lead 8: Thank you, and if we look over the page, please, at the summary, I think do we see that hardening in terms of the data that was available reflected in the advice at paragraph 1?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: And then also I think at 4, as well?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, and this repeats my previous point, which is that unfortunately you won’t know the effects of interventions for some weeks afterwards.

Lead 8: Then, if we go, please, to paragraph 20 on page 3, I think again, is that the hardening, as it were, of the advice that if school closures were taken in combination with the other measures, that that would help to bring the R number below 1?

Professor Sir KCb: But as it says, with uncertainty. So it wasn’t saying this definitively, but this is a harder position than we’d had previously.

Lead 8: And if we go over the page, please, to paragraph 23, I think this is where we see consideration being given to whether or not schools could remain open for smaller numbers of pupils; is that correct?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, and that built on both modelling and social science advice that had happened over the last – the previous six weeks.

Lead 8: Thank you. That can come down.

Again, can I just check whether or not it’s right that as of 18 March it’s still – or was it possible to model or to say with any further certainty whether or not, you know, whether or not there was more scope, for example, for certain years of children going to school or whether this was as much as could be said?

Professor Sir KCb: It was really as much as could be said, and as you’ll see from the way that they describe the 10-20% of pupils still being in school, it was relatively impressionistic. So it was saying this will probably not have a material effect rather than putting a numerical number on that.

Lead 8: And was there scope at this stage for considering whether or not there were alternatives to the full closure of schools to most children, so for example, whether or not children could have attended school on a rota basis or whether or not consideration could have been given to children who were doing their A levels or GCSEs still being able to come into school at this point?

Professor Sir KCb: I think had – and this is in no sense a criticism, this is just a statement of fact – had, let’s say, the Department for Education said, “We accept that schools are going to have to close but please can you see if the following group coming in would be material?”, then I think the modellers would have done their best to do that. I think they probably would have struggled, given the very limited data we had at this point in time. I think it’s difficult, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, to remember quite how small the numbers were relative to the huge numbers we had later, and modelling depends on having reliable data, so a very big caveat.

But that, I think for the modellers to have, off their own bat, tried to model a whole variety of probably impractical things, would have been very difficult, so I think that would only have worked had – and this may be important later in the discussion – had the policy people said to the modellers, “This is one group we’d like to get back; what do you think it will do?” I think that would have been a legitimate question to ask.

Lead 8: I think that depends, doesn’t it, on people with the insight into education knowing about the groups of children that they would wish to –

Professor Sir KCb: Correct.

Lead 8: – prioritise –

Professor Sir KCb: It does.

Lead 8: – and putting that forward to scientists?

Professor Sir KCb: So it would be quite wrong for me as a public health person, for example, to start speculating as to which groups are most important. The groups that were chosen were, in a sense, relatively obvious, which is children who were particularly vulnerable for a variety of reasons, mainly vulnerable in kind of the wider social sense rather than necessarily the strict clinical sense. And then the children of parents who, if the children were not at school, then the parents wouldn’t be able to go to work, on whom society was absolutely going to depend, so NHS workers, for example, essential workers of other sorts, as you know, was decided.

Lead 8: And presumably, within the modelling that was taking place, it was just – it was looking at broad percentages of children –

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: – that could possibly come into school. So within that broad margin, there may have been room for discretion as to which other children could have been prioritised; is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: It is possible, but I think it would have been very much a – or probably, at 20%, it wouldn’t make a huge difference.

I think it is worth – and this is maybe scrolling ahead a bit, but it’s just worth just saying that, in fact, the number of people who chose to take up the ability for their children to come into school was smaller than was originally anticipated. So, as it turned out, there probably would have been room for other areas, but we weren’t – there’s no way of telling that at this point in time.

And this, I think, probably one of the other reasons why, in practice, schools would have ended up closing anyway, which is – at this point in the pandemic, with so little known, parents were not confident about their children going to school, and a lot of parents were withdrawing them already.

Lead 8: Just – and I think we probably will examine these issues a bit more, particularly when it comes to the second set of school closures, but just going back to the start, obviously the virus had advanced much further in China by this stage.

Do we take it from all of your evidence thus far that there wasn’t sufficient information or data available from China that enabled these sorts of questions to be – or these sorts of propositions to be modelled in England?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes. And for basically two reasons: although our Chinese counterparts and colleagues actually were very generous with the information they gave, we had a long way from full visibility of all their data, for perfectly good practical reasons. It wasn’t because they were trying to hide it. So there was a lack of data.

But the other thing was they essentially threw the kitchen sink at this immediately, and closed down multiple things simultaneously, which included schools. But, therefore, teasing apart the component that was due to schools was virtually impossible, really, based on the fact it was all done simultaneously.

Lead 8: Thank you.

So, Professor Whitty, just coming back, then, and so that we’re clear about the rationale for closing schools, as announced on 18 March – and when I say closing schools, I mean closing schools to most children as opposed to completely – in your view, was it necessary that schools closed in order to bring transmission rates under control? I think that’s the first question. And necessary in order to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I think what I am confident about saying is that had schools not closed, and based on the evidence we had at the time, and I don’t think evidence subsequently has undermined that, the peak of the pandemic would have been higher. And that would have had obviously direct effect from deaths from Covid in the first wave, but would have increased the risk of all the indirect effects from health services being unable to function, the already serious – and you’ve heard about that, you’ve heard that obviously in previous modules.

So I think not closing schools would have had a material effect on the pandemic being significantly worse.

That’s a slight rephrasing of the question you asked but I think that’s one I feel confident I can say.

Lead 8: I’m grateful. And I think this will come – you’ve touched on an issue which I think perhaps we’ll return to when we look at the consensus statement, but as you’ve alighted on it perhaps I can just ask you now. Is there a clear understanding now as to the effect that closing schools during the first period of school closures had, and whether it was the closure of schools that had the effect or whether it was the indirect impacts that had the effect and whether it’s possible to disentangle the two? And I hope that does makes sense.

Professor Sir KCb: That makes complete sense. I think that various people made heroic attempts to do it. Were I in the unfortunate position of having to deal with another pandemic, I don’t think the data is strong enough for us to actually be able to say with confidence even the absolute effect of schools, although I think in overall terms I’m confident they brought the numbers down significantly. But exactly what the proportion was, I think difficult to say. You can do it by modelling but it’s quite an indirect method. And certainly harder still to be confident about was it the direct component of school – of children mixing or the indirect things that you have talked about, in terms of, for example, the impact on parents meeting up and their behaviours.

Lead 8: That – I mean, it might be thought – that might be thought surprising to most people, because if the effect was really the indirect one, so, for example, that when children go to school, more parents go to work, the idea that that would justify the closure of schools, it might seem very surprising, sorry –

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, it’s less to do with parents going to work, although that may have been one issue, but it’s things more like parents meeting one another.

So, to take a step back the key thing we were trying to minimise was households meeting, because once Covid got into a household, our view was it was likely to transmit a lot within the household. So the unit of transmission, from that point of view, was the household. If you have three parents from three different households meeting at the school gate, even if they’re – you know, unless they take very careful precautions, you run the risk that you’re bringing together three households where one might be infected and the other two not, and that might not be the situation as of half an hour later.

So I think that – you know, it is quite difficult to be absolutely sure.

But the reason it’s difficult to tease apart, with the benefit of the data we have subsequently, is because so many things happened simultaneously, both directly as a result of government decisions, so the decisions that were taken on the 16th by the Prime Minister and announced by the Prime Minister, the decisions on schooling and the lockdown happened in an extremely short period of time, and then, of course, people were changing their own behaviours in response to the threat they saw, not to do with the way in which government was telling them to do things but because day were using their own common sense about things they would do.

If you put all of those together, they were all happening over the same very short period, and trying to pull apart, therefore, the individual components of this is really very difficult.

Had we been in a situation where the decisions on the 16th, the school closures, and lockdown, were, let’s say, three or four weeks apart, it would have been a lot easier at least to say: what is the impact of schooling alone? It might or might not have been possible to have said something about the impact of the indirect versus the direct.

Lead 8: Thank you.

I’m going to move on, then, if I may to ask you a bit about the impacts on children during that first period of school closures.

I think it’s right, isn’t it, that during the pandemic there were already some studies which had been done based on a number of other pandemics or outbreaks of illness, like equine flu, that enabled scientists to understand something about the psychological impacts of quarantine; is that correct?

Professor Sir KCb: That is correct.

Lead 8: And specifically there was some work or some research which had been done which demonstrated that quarantining children could have psychological effects on them as well?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, I think – I mean, in a sense this is a statement of the obvious, but I think it’s still worth saying that there’s extraordinarily strong evidence that being in school as just being in school is very good for children, developmentally, educationally, in terms of mental health, arguably in terms of physical health – data on that is a bit less clear, and it’s pretty obvious that having children isolated is not a natural situation and is not good for children and, in a sense, the scientific evidence all supports what common sense would tell people, but it’s all in a line, which is that these are things you would not wish to do to children except under the most extreme circumstances.

Unfortunately, we were in the most extreme circumstances, and I’ll go back to probably my opening, almost my opening kind of comments about Module 2, which was: all the decisions we had were very, very bad, and it’s that some of them were a bit worse and some of them were a lot worse. But, you know, these were bad choices to have to make.

Lead 8: And is it your position, Professor Whitty, it didn’t take scientists to tell decision makers or policymakers that closing schools to most children or lockdown would cause these kind of psychological consequences that the studies suggested they would have?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes. I mean, I don’t think – I don’t think there was anybody who I heard talking about this who wasn’t absolutely confident, with or without scientific advice, that closing schools was a very bad thing for children and should be avoided at all costs. And, you know, I’ve read the witness statements of many of the political leaders, and they make that point, and I absolutely – that was their view. The science, in a sense, supported their view but their view was the commonsense view that I think every parent and every citizen probably would have.

Lead 8: I think, I’m sure that that’s correct. I think I’m asking you about something slightly different, which is the evidence that school closures – well, it wasn’t school closures, it was quarantine could have quite distinct psychological impacts –

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, and again –

Lead 8: – focused on children, I think on adults too, but there was specific learning.

Professor Sir KCb: No, absolutely. And I think, you know, isolating people is bad at all stages of life, during periods of development the implications are likely to be worse and that’s what the scientific evidence would certainly support.

Lead 8: So can I ask you, then, just turning to the role of SAGE during this period, did SAGE have a role in monitoring the sorts of impacts that school closures were having on children and providing advice to government, or was that outside SAGE’s role?

Professor Sir KCb: So the important thing to remember is that SAGE is a scientific body and its job was to look at scientific data. It didn’t have any data-collecting capacity of its own at all and that wasn’t its job and, indeed, I don’t think it would probably have been particularly good at it because that wasn’t what it was set up for, it was the wrong people. So where evidence came out of scientific studies based on data collected by others, SAGE was in a strong position to help policy leaders, policymakers, interpret that, and in particular to look at the strength of scientific assertions that were made in papers and in some other – and in what’s called the grey literature, so unpublished studies. So it was able to do that.

But what it wasn’t able to do and wasn’t expected to do, was actually do the monitoring. That was very much done by organisations like DfE, in the case of education, Public Health England, as it then was, in the case of the public health interventions, NHS for the NHS interventions.

Lead 8: Can we maybe look at that distinction in terms of the advice that was given, and maybe look at INQ000074924.

So this is advice that’s coming much later about the role of children in transmission. We can see this is 16 April 2020 so very much in the thick, as it were, of the first period of school closures. And if we look at 2, it says:

“There is a consensus that evidence on the role of children in transmission of COVID-19 is unclear, with a number of gaps in understanding.”

And then it sets out a number of bullet points around that. So, for example, there was limited information on the behaviour and contact patterns of children.

And then at the final bullet it sets out:

“There is a lack of information on current experiences for children and parents – for example, in terms of: variation in the extent and quality of home/distance learning, attendance by vulnerable children and changes on child protection/safeguarding services, impact on parental mental health etc. There is an evidence gap around longer-term impacts for children, particularly around mental health and child development.”

I mean, just looking at that, Professor Whitty, I think the first question is why that sort of advice – why that is being incorporated, as it were, into SAGE’s advice at this point and I think the second point is, I think we know that there was evidence and information available from around this point about some of the impacts that arose or that were certainly becoming patent alleged this point. So it’s really just trying to understand SAGE’s role and whether there’s an issue here as to the sorts of evidence and information that was becoming available at this point being passed on, as it were, to SAGE.

Professor Sir KCb: I – well, I mean, firstly, I mean, this is an example, and there were others in other areas, where we were moving at unbelievable speed almost every day, big changes in the data that was coming in, up to and including the lockdown period. Having, once we were in that, we were able to write out in much longer form some of the discussions that were being had verbally in SAGE prior to that and which we’d only communicated, and also set up subgroups, and the subgroup on children, which was chaired by the chief scientist from the Department for Education, Osama Rahman, at that time, and, you know, what they were able to do is say: this is the state of knowledge. What they’re saying here is not that there was no effect, what they’re saying is that against normal scientific criteria the data are not strong enough for us to be able to say here is a review we can point to, here’s a systematic review, here’s a big trial that can make these points really solid. We need to now test these and try and find information out about them.

And we were aware, of course, that these questions were not just being asked in the UK; they were being asked all around the world. But I think if you’d asked scientists from around the world, remembering that science is an international discipline, was this a fair summary of what was known? At this point I don’t think anyone would have said, “No, that’s not a fair summary of the gaps” and these gaps therefore needed to be filled.

But in policy, you can’t – the fact that there’s a gap in evidence in an emergency doesn’t – you’re not – you can’t wait until that gap is filled. You have to make decisions and try and fill the gap and then adjust your course subsequently, and of course we’ve seen – we saw that multiple times during Covid.

Lead 8: So I think if we just took, for example, by this stage it was clear that vulnerable children were attending school in very low numbers, on the basis of the Department for Education’s own data, so I suppose the question is, if – would that sort of information, or that being confirmed, was that going to change advice that was being given at this stage? If these were gaps that were being identified that were capable of being filled –

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I think – I mean, whatever SAGE had said on this – and I think this is SAGE doing its job, which is not overstating things, because it doesn’t have scientific evidence – there was already a policy decision to get – to ensure that vulnerable children could be in school.

Lead 8: Yes.

Professor Sir KCb: And already a strong policy intent by DfE and social services and others to make sure that did happen. So the decision of whether or not to try to ensure that that was available and indeed made as easy as possible for children who were vulnerable was irrespective of this. This was a scientific point. The policy was going on regardless. Rightly going on regardless. That had already been decided.

Lead 8: All right. I mean, the reason I’m asking about this and perhaps we can go on to look at this, is that social distancing I think was being reviewed at this stage.

I know that we’re probably coming up to a break. I think we’ve got five minutes. I think we can make some progress in that five minutes.

But if we look, please, at INQ000109278, please.

So this is the social distancing review of 14 April. So, I mean, it would seem that that kind of information, and understanding the sorts of real-life impacts that the pandemic was having on children, might be important and relevant at this point?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, but again, remembering that a scientific advisory body should not go beyond the science. So its job is not to say, “Well, common sense would tell you”; its job is simply to go on the data that is currently available, which is considered to be strong enough to be able to say that. That’s what policymakers rely on it to do.

Lead 8: Yes, and I think we’re coming to the issue, really, that’s at stake here, which is where did those various bits of information feed into the decision making?

If we just look at this social distancing review of 14 March – sorry, 14 April, and, for example – I’m just picking this up – if we look at page 11, and paragraph 20, for example.

So I think at this stage, relaxing restrictions on the use of outdoor spaces was being contemplated and allowing adults I think more freedom to go outside; is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I think it was – the idea was to make it possible for – to be more freedom to go outside in general.

Lead 8: Yes.

Professor Sir KCb: And I think it is possibly worth reflecting at this point that the restrictions on outdoor activities were much stronger in many other countries, for example France, than they were in the UK. So we were, in fact, at the more liberal end amongst many of our peers. But I think there was quite a strong view among SAGE that outdoors was a lot safer than indoors already by this point, and that only strengthened as time went by as the evidence came in.

Lead 8: And I think we see at the end of this, I won’t read out the whole paragraph, it says:

“It is important to note that such a relaxation should not cover shared hard surfaces such as children’s playgrounds without NERVTAG agreement.”

Professor Sir KCb: I think the keyword there is “shared”. It was the sharing not the hard surface that matters here. And it was really to ensure that people had thought through the implications of contact sports and a variety of other things at this point in the pandemic, when we were still at a very perilous point.

Lead 8: Thank you. That can come down.

I think one of the issues that the Inquiry has heard quite a – Module 8 has heard quite a lot of evidence about is how the pandemic restricted children’s ability to play. And it might seem surprising, given what was known, certainly by 14 April, that whilst a potentially more relaxed approach might be taken to adults’ ability to go outside, that that isn’t being reflected in the advice that’s being given about children’s playgrounds, for example?

Professor Sir KCb: I think that’s a –

Lead 8: Sorry –

Professor Sir KCb: I think that’s a slightly misleading way of putting it, because it implies that there was more restrictions on children than adults, which is not correct. The difficulty is that a lot of child’s play, particularly in, for example, schoolyards, tends to be quite physical and tends to be quite physically close, and outdoors makes a big difference, if you’re talking about more than 2 metres apart, for aerosol transmission, which was – that’s come up multiple times in the Inquiry so I’m not going to go into that in any detail – if you got someone who is 2 inches apart from someone else, it doesn’t matter whether it’s indoors or outdoors, if they shout or sing or bellow or cough over them, that’s ballistic and that is not going to be – you’re going to get a transmission.

And the key point on this, and I cannot stress this too much, is it’s about households transmitting to other households. So if it was children playing within their own family, in due course within a bubble, a variety of other things, that was not going to increase the risk. If you got 12 different children from 12 different households all in a scrum together, then the potential for transmitting between households is going to be there. And so that was really the issue.

And expecting the children, and particularly young children, to maintain the kind of strict social distancing that was relatively straightforward for adults, has a – you know, you have to have a certain reality about this.

But there was no intention to disadvantage children. Quite the reverse.

Lead 8: I think, just going back to that bit of advice about the hard surfaces, the Inquiry understands, but this may be wrong, that was part of the reason why school playgrounds were not reopened until, I think it was, the July of 2020, and then it was a matter for individual local authorities to risk assess the position. Is that correct?

Professor Sir KCb: That is correct. I mean, I think if we were running things again, this is one of the areas where I think I would have preferred a policy that was more liberal about children’s play in reality. But that is a policy view, which is not really my job. At this point we didn’t have scientific evidence to help us particularly except for the point I’ve just made, which is: when you’re very close to someone, it doesn’t really matter if you’re indoors or outdoors, ballistic transmission or touch transmission is going to occur at just the same rate.

Lead 8: I understand the point you make, Professor Whitty, about it’s a policy position on play, but given that you were in a position of being able to offer epidemiological advice and can reflect an epidemiological perspective to Module 8, that sounds as though the imperative for restricting children’s play may not have been sufficiently strong to warrant the kind of restrictions that were placed on children’s play?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, if I can go back to some repeated evidence that was given early on, in February, March, repeated up to this point in April, one of the things that we said was there is no – and I’m going to paraphrase a bit, but there’s no point in closing schools if what we then do is recreate all the situations that lead to schools having children meeting together, and indeed their parents meeting together, they – just because the schools are closed. There’s nothing gained by that.

So I think it was important in considering this, and I think policymakers were right to do this, that in the decisions that were taken they didn’t recreate the environment of schools but without a school. That would have essentially defeated the huge sacrifice of having the schools closed in the first place.

Lead 8: But would it have been possible to take a more nuanced approach and perhaps say to parents “You can let your children” – you know, they can go outside and mix but parents mustn’t congregate, for example, you must stay separate? I’m trying to explore what it is you think could have – what could have been relaxed in respect of children’s play?

Professor Sir KCb: There is – well, at this point in the pandemic, and I think nothing overturned this, actually, there was no evidence that children could not transmit to one another. So it’s not magically that if you just leave the adults out of it, the children can play happily together and nothing will happen. That isn’t a reality in terms of the epidemiology of this.

The difficulty was how to make it possible for children to play in a context where they were not going to recreate the situations you’d have in school or bring households together and therefore lead to transmission of infection in a way that otherwise would not have happened. And I think it’s important that we don’t get ourselves into a situation where we imply that there was a lovely outcome that could make play easy and it wouldn’t have a negative epidemiological impact. It would do. I certainly think we could probably have done this in a more subtle way, and there might have been ways we could have done it which would have been better. But at this point in the pandemic, and remembering in mid April we’re still talking about an extraordinary impact on the health, very large numbers of people dying, very large effects on the NHS, I think, you know, we had to be rational in the way we were doing this and the policymakers were doing their best in the decisions they were taking to give children as much flexibility as possible, as well as adults, outside, but without leading to a recreation of bringing households together. And that was really the tension.

Lead 8: Yes.

Professor Sir KCb: Of course everybody wants children to play, just as everyone wants children to go to school and everyone wants people not to die of Covid. Unfortunately, those policy aims were essentially in some degree of tension.

Lead 8: And just understanding all of that, and the fears that existed at that time, in terms of the more subtle approach that could have been taken or could have been taken later on to play, practically speaking, what might that have looked like?

Professor Sir KCb: I think, as we became increasingly confident that the outdoor environment was safer than the indoor environment, which we thought was probable but the data for it was much less clear in April than it was later, I think probably it would have been possible to take – well, certainly, for example, increase the amount of time people would spend outside and, you know, time outside was not in itself a risk.

The thing which – I’m repeating myself but I’m repeating myself because I don’t want this to come out as a recommendation of the Inquiry and then cause problems in future pandemics, we – doing that at the expense of recreating chains of transmission between families would undermine the effects of closing schools, which in themselves is a very bad thing for the development of children, so play is not the only thing. Yet I’m completely sympathetic to the view that children, play is incredibly important to children. But the problem is that we had policy aims that were in tension.

Lead 8: So is the issue really about, and when I say messaging it’s also about people obviously complying with messaging as well, but there might have been more capacity for children to be outside and to play but as long as it was within quite strict parameters and didn’t involve the mixing of households?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, and that in a sense, I think, is what that last document you showed me is hinting at which is: there is an environment where generally children tend to be very close together and – you know, contact sports and so on – and then there are other environments, and the ones that we were concerned about were those sorts of environments that would recreate the effect of a school but whilst the school was closed. And I wasn’t involved in the policy decisions on this, but I’m just trying to explain the kind of logic behind it.

Ms Dobbin: Yes.

My Lady, is that a convenient point?

Lady Hallett: Just before we break, you said, Professor Whitty: if running again, I would have perhaps had a more liberal policy.

Is that with the considerable benefit of hindsight?

Professor Sir KCb: No, I think the bit of the restrictions which at the time I was – I thought we could – we should have been more liberal, if I’m honest, was the amount of time that people could spend outside. I think – I couldn’t see the logic of that from a – from an infection control point of view, to be honest.

I think it almost happened by accident, and that, I think, probably is something we should have looked at. And for children in particular I think that’s very important. It’s important for everyone.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much.

As you remember, we take regular breaks. I shall return at 12.05.

(11.50 am)

(A short break)

(12.05 pm)

Lady Hallett: Ms Dobbin.

Ms Dobbin: Professor Whitty, I just want to stay, if I may, on the issue of consideration of children’s interests by scientists and how it works in the context of a pandemic.

You might recall that the Children’s Commissioner for England wrote to Sir Patrick Vallance, and that you and he both replied to her, and I wanted to ask you a bit about that, if I may.

The Children’s Commissioner’s letter is at INQ000588094.

We can see that she wrote on 30 June, and as we can see, she introduces it by saying that she was concerned that some of the scientific advice and public health guidance was failing to recognise the specific needs and circumstances of some children.

And then she set out in the second paragraph some of the considerations, I think, that she thought might be relevant to this. So, reflecting that children faced less of a risk from Covid-19 than from adults. So, I think the point that you had made from an earlier point.

She also said there was a range of paediatric evidence indicating that children were less likely than adults to get Covid-19.

Can you recollect at that point of time, was there a consensus of opinion to – that demonstrated that?

Professor Sir KCb: So, in – well, I mean, firstly, it is absolutely the job of the Children’s Commissioner to raise these sorts of points, and I think it’s important that she did that. And the reason that Sir Patrick, as he then was, asked me to join him in reply, and I agreed with that completely, was because I thought the points being raised were very reasonable and important ones. So, I mean, I very much see this as a key question.

In terms of that paragraph, I think the last sentence that you’ve – of the paragraph you’ve highlighted is the only one that I would have a little bit of caution about, which says “children have fewer contact points outside … home compared to adults”. Actually, it depends on their age. And in fact, older children, adolescents and young people, often have a lot more contacts than their parents may. That’s just the nature of that point in life. So it would be true, for example, for primary school children, less true for older children.

And I think if had sort of an overall commentary on some of the points she was raising, she was talking about children generically, and actually the age differentiation makes a very big difference, both in terms of clinical risk and risk of transmission.

Lead 8: All right. We’ll bear that in mind, perhaps, as we read down. I mean, she goes on to say:

“Critical illness amongst children is very rare.”

That was, I think, well established –

Professor Sir KCb: Yeah.

Lead 8: – by that point.

“… that children play a limited role in transmitting Covid-19 and are less likely than adults to bring infections into a household.”

Is that one of the points at which you would say depends –

Professor Sir KCb: Depends on the age. So, for younger children, for the sake of the argument primary school children, I think that was a fair statement, although it wasn’t at this stage definite, but I think that’s the way the evidence was heading. That was much less clear for older children, so secondary children. The closer they get to adulthood, the less true this will be.

Lead 8: All right, but does that mean that there was a body of evidence at this time that suggested that there was a potential for treating children below a certain age potentially differently –

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: – from adults?

Professor Sir KCb: It was heading that way. I mean – and from first principles we thought it was likely, and the evidence strengthened as time went by.

And I think when I wrote to parents, along with all the other CMOs and DCMOs, about schools reopening, I think this is a point we reflect, actually: the difference between primary and secondary children.

Lead 8: All right. So what she goes on to do in this letter is to set out some of the ways in which the rules that had been decided upon were affecting children differently. So I think, first of all, the obvious one about the closure of schools; the second one, about the closure of summer, sport and play schemes; the third one about the closure of youth clubs and other safe spaces for children; and then the isolation of children for 17-14 days upon arrival at a residential children’s home; children in certain settings, so hospital, youth custody and children’s homes, and foster care being denied visits with their families; and then the final of these: the confinement of some children within their cells for more than 20 hours a day in some young offenders institutions.

Can I ask you, perhaps, about the last three. Were you aware that some of the advice that had been given was resulting in some of those impacts for children?

Professor Sir KCb: I wasn’t aware of the last of those in terms of young offender institutions specifically, I mean, just simply probably because I didn’t ask the question, but there are a lot of settings, that’s an important point, until I got the letter. Obviously once I had it, I was then aware of it.

The other ones, I was aware in principle, but the number of regulations from multiple different bits of the system was very large, and we did actually try and keep an eye open for things where some differentiation could be made. These ones here were ones which were really, back to the previous conversations we’ve had just before the break, were all about trying to reduce the risks of different family units being brought together in an environment where some form of transmission could occur at this point in the pandemic.

Lead 8: I mean, I think what the Children’s Commissioner was getting at, and I’m summarising her letter, and we’ll go on to the questions that she asked, was really that these consequences for children were disproportionate to the epidemiological end. So whilst that might have been a legitimate aim, obviously the consequences for children in terms of not being able to see their families in person, and, you know, we might be talking about siblings here as opposed to parents, that that was – that that was too severe an impact on children and that there needed to be, perhaps, a bit more nuance. So I’m summarising but I think that’s the point she – (overspeaking) –

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, and in a sense I have a lot of sympathy with the overall position she starts with. Narrowly, I was not involved in drawing up these literally thousands of different individual policy decisions, and it would be quite inappropriate for me to have been so even if I’d had the time in the day to be able to do it, which I probably didn’t.

We did – but the points that are being made here, several of these, the logic as to why these would bring families together is reasonably clear. The last of those, confining children in their cells, the logic of that position is much less clear if a way can be found for them to be out of their cells but without meeting others who they could transmit to.

So I think it’s really asking the question: was there at least an epidemiological – of any sort? And the answer to the previous ones was probably yes; probably on the last one less so.

Lead 8: All right, we’ll come back and look at those. I just want to finish the letter before going to the principal points that I think she’s making.

She sets out on page 2, and we can see it at the second paragraph, that she was aware that none of those decisions fell directly under Sir Patrick Vallance’s responsibility, but her concern was that they all stem from the same thing, which was the public health guidance that was principally aimed at adults having these sorts of more profound consequences, potentially, for children.

And then she went on to ask the three bullet points, and I think it’s important that we just look at them. So:

“what consideration SAGE has given, in producing its advice, to the differential susceptibility of children to COVID-19 …

“whether SAGE has explored the potential for differential social distancing requirements …

“whether SAGE advice recommends treating children in the same way as adults in terms of social distancing requirements; and if so, what the reasons for this are.”

So I think if we took a really practical example from this scenario she had put before you, if you take children being required to self-isolate for 14 days when they were admitted to a children’s home or an inpatient mental health hospital, I think there she’s saying, is that really necessary, as a matter of epidemiology, in order to protect those children?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I mean, let’s just take that one, because I think it is a – in a sense, the challenge is a fair one, and I want to be clear that SAGE was giving pretty high-level advice, which policymakers were then interpreting as best they could, in multiple different environments. But much of some of your previous modules of this Inquiry have been about the risks that came from people going into a health environment without having a period of isolation, and those points were made incredibly powerfully. Here the opposite point is being put. In a sense – you can’t have it both ways. This is a situation where, if you bring someone who is potentially infected into a closed environment, there is going to be a significant risk to everybody else in that closed environment. That’s a reality.

Now, you could say, if they’re all children, well, that doesn’t matter because they’re not going to come to any harm and let them become infected. You could make that case. But that’s the – you know, that isn’t, in a sense, directly the case she’s making, and I think there are risks to that argument and there, you know, were children who’d not been infected come to harm – or, indeed, staff in these environments, because remembering they’re enclosed environments, come to harm, probably higher probability of that – as a result of that. I think people would feel that was quite a serious thing to have done, to have happened.

So I think, as with so much of Covid, you were forced into a choice of two terribly bad options, and the decision at this point, at the very high point of the pandemic, as it still was at the high point of the pandemic, although going down by now, was that the risk of the transmission was greater.

As we got into a much lower period, July/August time, the risk-benefit actually shifted not because the individual risks were different but because the probability of someone being infected, for example, was going to be smaller. So there were changes over time.

Lead 8: I think what the Children’s Commissioner is raising, and it’s appreciated that it may not have been an issue for SAGE to resolve if this really just about the policies that were being applied, but if you took, for example, the isolation of a child going into a psychiatric inpatient clinic, the suffering that might cause to a child is potentially quite extreme, coupled with, for example, their inability to see their family. And I think what, again, I think she’s raising is whether or not the rules needed to be quite so blunt, potentially, in those situations where you’re dealing with potentially vulnerable children.

There may be – it may be possible to have blunt rules for everybody else, but whether or not, when it comes to the specific vulnerabilities of children, the rules couldn’t be slightly more nuanced, or if there wasn’t a different risk assessment to be made in that situation.

Professor Sir KCb: I think, and, you know, everybody would give primacy to the needs of children, so I think – I want to make that as a first point. But because I was present hearing some of these debates played out, although I wasn’t actually the person who was making the decision on them, what I was aware was that virtually every single group said that they were a special case for whom there should be a carve-out. So you had to have a good logic as to why, a particular group, it was reasonable to do that.

Now, I think there is an argument, which is the reason we wanted to engage with this very seriously, for saying children are a group apart. But even within children, there are multiple different subgroups based on age and based on a number of different areas and, as always, it’s the educators that cause problems in policy terms.

So the starting point has to be the rules start the same for everyone. Then you say: okay, is there a way in which we can make them easier for children as a group? And then ask: are there some specific groups of children who are particularly vulnerable for whom we can make a particular carve-out?

But that was the way in which the policymakers were trying to work.

SAGE couldn’t really particularly help them with that because we wouldn’t have, for example, to take the example she was giving, data that would help us to work out whether, in a particular mental health institution, there would be an increased risk – for example, the children who were at – some of the children who were at most risk of Covid were people who had, you know, developmental issues, some of whom overlap with areas of mental health, most don’t. But there are a whole series of sub-questions. And as soon as you look at them, what you start to see is that these are quite complicated questions which individuals are having to answer. And we don’t know the level of disability, the level of other risk factors that would be in these institutions we’re talking about.

So I just think it is very easy, always, to make a reason for each individual exception, and then when you look at the totality of all the exceptions you’ve made – and this was a problem we had all the way through Covid, actually – you find out that you’ve actually undone all the good of the really difficult social interventions, like closing schools, that had been achieved previously.

Lead 8: But is there not – and I appreciate this is specific to Covid-19, but was it not really important that the clear difference here was that most children wouldn’t become seriously ill with Covid? Of course, appreciating there were exceptions, but for the most part they wouldn’t. And that that did provide a good policy basis, potentially, for differentiating the position of children?

Professor Sir KCb: So here, I think, what we have to differentiate on a high level, back to a much earlier discussion we had, is there are broadly two groups of things that were being done by elected leaders. One group of things were – with – which had an effect on children directly. One group of things were for the benefit of children narrowly, individually. And if the intervention that was being talked about was to protect a particular child, then you could actually start from the principle of, actually, this is a pretty low risk infection, relative to other risks they’ve got. Not zero risk, to be clear.

Lead 8: Yes.

Professor Sir KCb: There were very – you know, some children came to significant harm. Small numbers, but tragic ones in each case. And in aggregate, not necessarily even small.

But these kind of interventions were not designed to try and protect individual children. They were designed to try to pull down the overall rate of infection for the whole of society, from which you have to start off with some broad principles and then there will be a necessity for some carve-outs, and the examples of children who were vulnerable going to school was an obvious carve-out that was made at an early stage, but there’s only so far you can go before either you get policy incoherence or you actually start undermining the policy aim that you were trying to achieve in the first place and undoing all the good and the sacrifices that have been made by these really hard social interventions including their effects on children in the round.

Lead 8: I’m going to come to look at the reply that you sent and then ask you, I think about the two principled issues that arose out of this consequence.

The reply is at INQ000239696.

So I think – and this is the letter that both you and Sir Patrick Vallance sent in reply. So I think you set out at the first paragraph and we can pick it up from the third line down:

“… we have sought to differentiate between the effects on children and adults …”

And pointing to the Children’s Task and Finish Working Group.

Yes?

Professor Sir KCb: That’s correct, and – so there was a very distinguished group of people looking at just specifically issues of childhood which was active and you’ve seen some of the outputs which they did, which I thought were very thoughtful and well evidenced for the point time in which they were written.

Lead 8: Then the second paragraph in response to her question:

“What consideration SAGE has given, in producing its advice, to the differential susceptibility of children to COVID …?”

And I think here you’re confirming that younger children might be less susceptible to infection?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, and we put a bit more of a confidence around that statement.

Lead 8: But that it wasn’t – there wasn’t sufficient evidence to be clear about that in respect of children aged 14-18; is that correct?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, that’s correct, and that remained the case for quite a long time.

Lead 8: And then at the third paragraph down, that the indirect effects – sorry, picking this up from the second line:

“The indirect effects of reopening schools, regardless of which option is taken, is likely to have a greater impact on transmission than schools themselves.”

So is that something that had emerged more clearly at that point, that it was the indirect effects rather than the direct effects?

Professor Sir KCb: That was a supposition at this point in time. There wasn’t good evidence to support that.

Lead 8: And then turning to the next page:

“Whether SAGE has explored the potential for differential social distancing requirements …”

You explained that that hadn’t been considered by SAGE.

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, I mean, I think, with the exceptions of the things where we could actually make a differentiation where schooling was the obvious one, we didn’t think there was sufficient data to provide a scientific answer. I mean, the policy questions are important policy questions, but what we weren’t able to do, one way or the other, was say there’s a strong scientific rationale for one position or another position.

Lead 8: So her third point:

“Whether SAGE advice recommends treating children in the same way as adults in terms of social distancing … and what the reasons for this are.”

You explained that SAGE hadn’t given specific advice as to whether children should be treated differently in terms of social distancing requirements. However, when it came to schools, it had been assumed that social distancing wouldn’t be in place. Correct?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, although I think the age of the children here is really important. So, you know, I think it’s difficult to see a situation where, for example, young primary school children would really be able to maintain social distancing in any meaningful way in the way that adults are able to. If you’re talking about older young people, people in their, sort of, you know, 15, 16, 17, you could see a way in which they might be able to do it. Whether they would choose to is a secondary question, but you could actually see a way in which that could happen.

So this is, in a sense, my point about it’s important not to lump all children together. Children are in very different positions, both in terms of their risk on their epidemiology and in terms of what they can and cannot do.

Lead 8: So can I go back, then, to the two principled issues I think the Children’s Commissioner was raising. I think the first one was that she was asking whether or not the advice being commissioned by SAGE was sufficiently asking the question whether children could be treated differently. So that’s a question of commissioning advice, and asking the question, can children be treated differently?

Can I ask, then, could more advice have been commissioned towards that end?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I think, let’s separate out two separate things. SAGE was, in part, a self-commissioning body, and that’s why we had the children and young people’s and schools’ task and finish group, and then there were subgroups of that, actually, and they would be looking, off their own bat, at areas where they thought the science was helping us to understand issues specifically on children and young people, and if they identified them, they would then flag them to SAGE so that we could pass them on, if we agreed with their analysis, and there was no point that I can recall we didn’t agree with their analysis. We thought their analysis was sound.

So that was one route by which SAGE could do it itself, but very large amounts of what SAGE did, and properly, was in response to policy questions. So if a – if Cabinet Office, if the Department for Education, if Minister of Local Government had said, “Can you tell us, we would like to differentiate children from non – from – or children of different ages from one another or children from adults, what will that do?”, then the modellers, the social scientists, or SAGE more widely, would respond to that area.

But – and I think a misapprehension that quite a lot of people had all the way through the pandemic was that SAGE’s job was to devise and promulgate policy. That is not the case. SAGE’s job was to provide scientific evidence either for areas where, in a sense, we could see it coming out of scientific literature irrespective of the policy question, hence the children’s subgroup, because they were up on that literature, or, where we were commissioned by policymakers to ask the question: can we make a differentiation here in the case of children, for example?

SAGE was not driving government policy, and that, I think, is an important differentiation which, to be clear, the Children’s Commissioner fully appreciates. She says that in the letter that she’s writing to us.

Lead 8: Yes. So just again, if we take a really practical example, that of children having to self-isolate for 14 days when they go to hospital, for example, I suppose the question is, is it – was there sufficient commissioning of advice to say, “Do we have to do this for children?” Or is it your view that that question didn’t even need to be asked because it was clear it had to be done in order for the policy to be effective?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, given the point I made about thousands of policy decisions being taken, an issue had to be a relatively high-level one for it to be sent to SAGE. So to take that as an example –

Lead 8: Yes.

Professor Sir KCb: – to have a situation where SAGE was trying to adjudicate on these thousands of policy decisions wouldn’t have made no sense (sic), because we’d have added no value. We had nothing, you know, the level of modelling would in no way have allowed us to go to that point.

Now, there were people who were, in a sense, intermediary between SAGE and some of the decision making which would include, for example, Public Health England, what then became UKHSA, and others, who might, in a more granular level try and interpret it in a consistent way, because consistency was very important on this, and what you couldn’t have is a set of decisions in one part of the policy sphere that looked completely incoherent from decisions that were taken in other areas. But that, you know, I’m trying to narrow down to what SAGE could and could not do.

Lead 8: Yes.

Professor Sir KCb: SAGE was not there to police every single individual policy decision, nor would it have been able to, and it would have been an inappropriate use of its skills which were not in that area.

Lead 8: To be clear, Professor Whitty, I think that’s the direction of the questions. It’s trying to understand where, if you have these quite broad, blunt policy tools intended to reduce transmission, where does the question of whether they can be applied in a more nuanced way to children come in? Is it at the SAGE level or is it somewhere below that?

Professor Sir KCb: It’s much below that. But I think SAGE’s position throughout, and you can see that from the Children’s [and young people’s] Task and Finish Group, was that children were likely to be particularly badly affected by the social measures, not just schooling, but others, and that, therefore, where a possibility was available, I suppose, our broad answer would be: yes, yeah, we should prioritise the needs of children. So very much in line, really, with what the Children’s Commissioner was saying to that extent. But what we weren’t able to do was then go down several levels down to these individual policy components.

Lead 8: And might that then be a question of ensuring that when it comes to the promulgation of policy in these areas, that decision makers are provided with enough latitude, I suppose, to potentially recognise that, in certain situations, children might need to be treated in a different way?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, but I mean this is straying beyond my –

Lead 8: I understand.

Professor Sir KCb: – the SAGE point, but I – I would go back to this point about consistency. And it was very important across government, for reasons of fairness, that people didn’t have sufficient latitude that actually one area of policy would be incredibly liberal and another would be incredibly strict, just because people had chosen to use their own initiative. There has to be some degree of uniformity across government or actually issues of unfairness start to arise.

And as you’ll – you’ll – I mean, in a sense it’s an obvious point but it’s come across in multiple previous bits of the Inquiry, the quickest way to undermine public confidence in measures is for them to be seen to be unfair. So, fairness is important. And if you’re going to differentiate, you have to be able to explain the logic and explain why it’s not the same as another policy area.

Lead 8: I’m grateful. I think the second principle point that’s potentially raised by the commissioner’s letter is where did the societal impacts on children come into decision making? So, on the one hand, I think she is asking about scientific advice and whether it specifically differentiated the position of children. And the second question is, if these sorts of decisions are going to have potentially disproportionate impacts on children, where does that factor in.

I think the question is, does that come in at the SAGE stage? Is it for SAGE to provide that perspective, or does it come at a different point in the decision making?

Professor Sir KCb: So let us say SAGE had been able to say, which unfortunately we were not able to, but it would have been a good position to be in, primary school children, so children under the age of 11 for the sake of argument, do not transmit this virus, nor do they come to major harm, then it would have been possible, essentially, for practical purposes, to exclude primary school children from all interventions. That would have been a very good outcome.

Unfortunately we weren’t able to do that. But that’s the kind of thing where SAGE advice would be useful, is where we can make a kind of quite broad statement that actually takes a group of the population out of the equation altogether, or says it’s very significantly – so significantly lower risk that actually it is reasonable to make different decisions on that basis. And actually, when it came to reopening schools, I think the point about primary schools being probably at lower risk than secondary schools was an important point for SAGE to make. That wasn’t a narrow point; that was quite a broad point. But it’s the breadth of the point, I think, and is it based on science rather than on supposition, that makes it a SAGE issue.

Lead 8: Yes, all right. But in terms of – I mean, there was no decision that was that clear-cut during the pandemic and there probably never will be. There’ll be far more nuanced assessments of risk.

When it comes to those very broad points about, for example, if you close schools, the sort of panoply of effects that it will have on children and the need to balance that, or weigh that in the balance, is that a matter for SAGE or is that something that belongs in the realm of the policymakers or the decision makers?

Professor Sir KCb: Where the significant driver of the decision is or could be based on scientific evidence, then absolutely. And that’s most important, actually, when the science is counterintuitive.

So, if the science lines up with common sense, it actually probably makes rather less difference, but where, as sometimes happens, the scientific output is not intuitive to people – and actually, for example, the effect of exponential rises in infections is not intuitive to people – then the science tends to be very powerful.

Lead 8: I’m being asked if you can slow down slightly, Professor Whitty.

Professor Sir KCb: Sorry.

Lead 8: And again, I’m just staying on this broad issue of where children’s interests come into play, to ask you about the rule of six, which is obviously put forward as a paradigm as to when a different decision could have been made that would have favoured the interests of children but wasn’t, but that in other parts of the United Kingdom, children were excluded from the rule of six. So can I ask you about that, from a scientific or SAGE perspective, why children were included in that rule in England?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I think I’d go back a step, which is there was a prior debate about whether the correct, you know – well, let’s start to go back even further than that. The aim of this was actually a liberalising aim. So, prior to this, families would not have been able to meet at all. So the first point is the aim of this was actually to allow family members and friends and others to meet who previously would not have been able to. So this a liberalising rather than a restricting issue.

But the advice from SAGE was that the key unit – and I’ve said this several times – is the family. Or at least the household, not necessarily the family, but the household. So the assumption being that once an infection was in one person in a household, it was likely to transmit within that household.

So – now, the reason I make that point is it would have, for example, been arguably at least as good, and probably better, epidemiologically, to have allowed three households to join together, irrespective of size, than to have six individuals who might be from two households or who might be from six households joining together.

And that was debated quite extensively within – having made those points reasonably clearly, and that was a SAGE point, then the way it was turned into the policy of the rule of six was essentially a policy decision that, for a variety of reasons, the government felt it was preferable – the government meaning the wider government – felt it was preferable to have the rule of six model than one which was a smaller number but a household-based one.

And that was based on a number of factors including, actually, enforceability. That it is – you know, the police can, at the end of the day, count six people. Whereas if you see 15 people together and you say “Are you three households?”, and someone says “Yes”, it’s very difficult to tell that one way or the other.

But there were also wider issues, I think, in terms of why they went down that path, but they were not science-based reasons.

The science-based point was the smaller the number of households meeting together to achieve the policy aim, which is to allow people to have some social interaction, to meet and to have the benefits of that, it could have been achieved by another route.

Now, your question is a slightly more specific one, which is: would it have been possible to have had the rule of six model that we had in England with children excluded? And the answer to that is: yes, although it would probably have led to a higher level of transmission than if children were not excluded. And the question is, where does the risk-benefit then lie?

But children are not, as is sometimes implied, magically a group who are never infected and never infect others; they are part of the infection group.

They differ by age band, and it would be possible to say, for example, that young children have a lower probability of contributing to the effect than others. So you could have said, as happened in Wales, I think, children under 11 are not – don’t count for the purposes of this, and there is a logic to that. It doesn’t mean that you won’t have some upward pressure on transmission. You will. And therefore, as a result of that, there are other things you can’t do.

Because what we were trying to do at the point that the rule of six was brought in was to be accepted that we were on a knife edge, and everything we did that was liberalising meant that we could not do something else that was liberalising because otherwise the R would have increased. So the decision that Wales took was a perfectly reasonable decision but it came at some level of cost in terms of potential transmission.

Lead 8: But isn’t that – that is just a question, isn’t it, of weighing your risks –

Professor Sir KCb: Right.

Lead 8: – and recognising that, because children – because it was having such an impact on them, that this is something that could be done that actually might have a real benefit for children, and that the cost – I mean, as you say, it may have come at some cost, but it was a cost that could be borne?

Professor Sir KCb: If I’d been a policymaker I would have argued for having, let’s say, three households able to meet, or – I’m making the number up – rather than six individuals. But I wasn’t a policymaker; I was, in a sense, making the scientific point and then it was for policy people to try to interpret that.

Lead 8: Yes. But I think if we’re again just understanding it from the science perspective, can we take from what you’ve just said that there was no particular imperative to have children within the rule, that there was an alternative that could have been an alternative course available that might have meant that children could have more socialising?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, but you’d then have to accept that you were probably going to have to not do something else you wanted to do. So there was a – you know, as this went on, we developed the concept of essentially a total tariff of things you needed to do, and the more you do in one area, the less you’ll be able to do in another area. And it was the choice for policymakers – this is classic policymaking – to choose between these options, all of which of course were bad options, but to decide which was the one which had the least social disbenefit for the same amount of impact on the pandemic.

Lead 8: All right, so a decision for the policy realm as opposed to the scientific realm?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, although the scientific realm can help to say: these are the things that will make an impact. And then the policymakers have to make a choice as to which is the bundle of things at this point in time which they think is socially the right one to go for within that kind of tariff.

Lead 8: Professor Whitty, I’m going to move on, if I may, to the decision to reopen schools and to some of the evidence that was given by Sir Jon Coles, to which you’ve responded with your tenth witness statement, and I think it’s probably best if I just say what Sir Jon Coles said, so it’s accurate, rather than trying to summarise.

He said, now:

“It wasn’t until August that Chris Whitty said, ‘There is more harm – there will be more harm to children from not attending school in September than there ever would be from contracting the virus.’

“Now, he said that in August. Of course, that was also true in March, and we knew it to be true in March, but it doesn’t mean that it was the wrong decision. You know, I’m sure this is something the Inquiry will be looking at extremely carefully. I don’t know whether it was the right decision or not to close schools in March, but I understand why that was the decision. But I don’t think it should have taken until August for Chris Whitty, the health side, and the education side, to be saying in very clear and loud terms to the whole of the country: Look, the reason we’re closing schools is not because children are at risk. Children are not at risk. We’re closing schools in order to protect the wider population, at-risk people, the elderly, and to avoid damage to the NHS.”

That was his evidence.

You’ve set out in your tenth statement some of the statements that you made from March 2020. I’m just going to summarise. You said in March 2020 that children have a milder disease but that the risks shouldn’t be trivialised. You said in April that the great majority of children either don’t get Covid or the symptoms are minor.

Professor Sir KCb: Yes. I went on to say more than that, actually. Are you carrying on or shall I –

Lead 8: No, I was just trying to put the headlines of some of the – (overspeaking) –

Professor Sir KCb: So those – yes, I – certainly that was true and we said that repeatedly.

Lead 8: And that you were lacking evidence about the role that children played in driving transmission at that point as well?

Professor Sir KCb: That was also true.

Lead 8: And in May, you said that the risk to children is very, very low, and that the reopening of primary schools wouldn’t lead to an upswing in R if it was done very carefully. And I think you pointed out –

Professor Sir KCb: I think – all of those are correct, but there is an additional point which I made which I think is relevant to what Sir Jon said, and I have to say I – I agree with his general point but he just factually wasn’t correct in what I’d said, which is I said in several of the things I sent you – and there are many others, I just chose those – also said extensively, actually, when giving evidence to the Select Committee in Parliament – I know you don’t take those into account, but it was quite a lot of evidence on this point – that as a result of this – I said there were two possible reasons why you might close schools: one was for the protection of children – and that was not the reason we were doing this, and I’ve said that repeatedly through February, March, April and indeed beyond that – the alternative and additional reason was because of the impact on the pandemic as a whole, and that were schools to close – because at the point I was saying this, it was a ‘were schools to close’ stage – the reason would because of the effect on the pandemic not because schools were a particular risk to children.

Now, I said that for three reasons: firstly, that was what SAGE was saying; secondly, because it was clearly true but needed to be said; and the third was, whilst schools were open before they closed, that it was important parents didn’t think that there was a big risk to their children for children being in school at that point in the pandemic. And also, I could see forward to when we were trying to reopen schools, if they had to close, and it was important to lay down in public that that was the situation: that schools were not being closed for the protection of children, they were being closed because of the effect on the epidemic.

So, in a sense, we made that point or I made that point – many others did, but I made that point repeatedly over that period but for that reason. So I agree in – with the broad point; I just wanted to clarify the record.

Lead 8: Yes. I mean, I think Sir Jon’s point was – I think it was twofold. The first was that he felt there was a sort of void in the public argument, prior to the opening of schools, and that government wasn’t filling it, in terms of putting forward the positive case why schools could reopen. So I think that was his first point. And therefore it was falling to people like him to try to address it.

And then the second point he was reflecting, Professor Whitty, was that obviously the provision of this consensus statement by you and the other chief medical officers of the United Kingdom was very important, but it came at quite a late stage.

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, I think, in a sense, I agree with all of Sir Jon’s points. The only reason I responded to this was he made a thing of singling me out and saying I’d not said anything about this, which was factually incorrect, and that was the reason I put those out. But I also think it is worth making the point that the issue of schools being not – the reason for closing schools is not a – for the protection of the children, it was very important that point was made honestly and upfront all the way through the pandemic, and it was.

I gave you just the examples I gave, and many other people, Jenny Harries, for example, said very similar things in other environments. So this point was being made repeatedly. Sir Jon may not have heard them, so that’s fine, but actually the health side, as he puts it, were making these points all the way through. We were very consistent on our advice on this one.

Lead 8: All right, but can I just ask, though, it is correct that the consensus statement didn’t come out until 23 August, which is obviously just very shortly before schools reopened. Why – was it late because it was responsive to the fact there were voices arguing against the closure of schools, rather than it being a, you know, a positive, optimistic case as to why schools could reopen?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, parents will be very relieved by the fact that I very rarely write to parents. This was an exception to that, and the reason for that was that, inevitably, my view and the view of all the other CMOs was that children had been out of school for a while, parents would be understandably nervous, also, teachers and other school staff were nervous, and there were some voices, including some quite loud voices in the scientific community, who were arguing that schools should not open. Indeed, the British Medical Association argued that, various other bodies did, as well, slightly to my surprise. And so my view was that firstly, the time to write to parents was when they were thinking of sending their children to school rather than in the middle of a lockdown when schools were not being reopened anyway, that didn’t seem to me a terribly helpful thing to do one way or the other.

And secondly, because I did want to make sure parents and school staff had as best we could, a fair laying out of the evidence. So it wasn’t a simple “Send your children to school, it’s absolutely fine, it’s great for them”, it was a much more careful laying out of what we understood to be the science at this point in time, and that was because this was the stage at which parents would be making their decisions about whether to send their children to school or not, in terms of their own, at least, desire to do so. So our view was this is the point to lay this out in detail.

But I do want to restress that, you know, this was not – you know, none of the points we made in the letter were new in the sense they’d all been put into the public domain at some point along the last previous months. What was new was just bringing them together in one form that we hoped would be useful to parents, pupils, and school staff, including teachers.

Lead 8: And maybe if we just pick that up from your witness statement, please, at INQ000588046 at page 34.

I’m just going to jump straight to some of the points that may be important, Professor Whitty. But if we look at this and count I think it’s about five paragraphs down:

“Transmission of COVID-19 to children in schools does occur. On current evidence it is probably not a common route of transmission … it may be lower in primary age children than secondary age …”

And then skipping one, and we’ll pick this up again, this is the advice about shielding.

So by this point, being set out here:

“Based on our better understanding of COVID-19 the great majority have now been advised that they do not need to do so again and that they should return to school. A small number of children under paediatric care … have been or will be given individual advice about [that].”

And again, if we just go over the page. Setting out, as well, the position of teachers and other school staff as well, and I think if we look at the second paragraph setting out that transmission of Covid-19 to staff members in school does occur, but that it may largely be staff to staff rather than from children; is that correct?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: And if we go over the page, please, and the first paragraph:

“Because schools connect households it is likely opening schools will put some upward pressure on transmission more widely and therefore increase R.”

But making the point, and I think this had been said publicly before, that schools were much less important in the transmission of Covid-19 than was the position in respect of flu.

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: And then a couple of paragraphs down:

“Opening schools may be as important in linking households indirectly … For example allowing parents to go back to work or meeting at the school gates, on public transport …”

Thank you, that can come down.

So again, I think, is that a reflection of the lack – or the, I suppose, it was the lack of clear evidence that it was the school closures of themselves that were important as opposed to all of these indirect impacts.

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, and I mean, I hope, because you’ve seen all the other documents around that, you would agree that that was an accurate reflection of what the scientific evidence had been given inside government was at the time so it was trying to be open with the public about exactly where we were.

Lead 8: And obviously, that advice brings up the position of children who had been shielding before that point, or who were in families who had been shielding. And I think that in evidence that you’ve give previously, I think you reflected that shielding was a voluntary act and that some people would continue sensibly to continue shielding after this point, but the advice at that point, obviously, put children in a different position, because it wasn’t voluntary. They had to go back to school unless they fell within that narrowband of children who were particularly immunosuppressed or had very specific reasons.

So can I just ask you a little bit about that, and the rationale for that, given that children didn’t have a choice, they had to go back to school.

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I think that the key thing about shielding for adults, and I’ll come on to children, but I think, in a sense, that’s the comparison, is that over time, our understanding about the – who was at risk from an adult point of view improved, but we still were of the view that there were a group of people who were at a significantly increased risk and the reason that we felt that stopping shielding in the middle of 2020 was possible was because they had a very low risk because there was very little virus because of all the work that people had done in the community to date, including the closing of schools. So the rates were incredibly low, if you recall that, which I’m sure you do very clearly, the transmission in the middle of the year, it was very low, the number in hospital with Covid was relatively at a very, very low level.

So the reason we felt that adults could stop shielding was not because we had a different view of their risk. We still thought they had a high risk, but because the epidemiology had changed.

The situation in children was quite a different one, which was at the very beginning, and I was involved indirectly in this because it was the office of the CMO which did this, we had a list of conditions we thought children might be at particularly high risk of having – coming to serious harm. And as time went by, it became clear that – two things, actually. The first was the harm that we thought these groups might have didn’t, in fact, materialise whereas it did for adults, although the – exactly who in adults changed, but with children the risk was substantially lower than we initially thought it might be for these high-risk groups and the Royal College of Paediactrics and Child Health, who are experts in this area, kindly looked at this area and essentially said that the great majority of these children are at trivially increased risk relative to all other children. That’s not to say that some children don’t come to harm, but, for example, having asthma is not a reason why a child likely to come to particular harm.

At the same time, the low point in the epidemic which was there in August and September was also true for children as well as adults, but the difference between these was that adults – there was still an increased risk, whereas our judgement now was that the children, we did not see this increased risk, with the exception of some very, very narrowly defined and generally very ill or under very severe treatment children but the numbers for those were very small.

So it was a very different situation from adults. For children we were saying we thought there might be a risk and now there isn’t a risk, whereas for adults we were saying we thought there was a risk, there is a risk, but the risk at this point in time is much lower. Those are quite different messages and I think they point in quite different directions.

Lead 8: And what about children who lived with parents who were still at risk then? Was there not concern that these children, by returning to school, would go home and infect their at-risk parents?

Professor Sir KCb: There was some – there was – it was accepted to be some risk of that, although lower for secondary children than – sorry, lower for primary children than for secondary children. The overall – and this wasn’t a scientific point, it was a policy point, but I think it was a very reasonable one – the overall view was that the risk to their shielding adult household member, usually a parent or grandparent, not invariably, will be increased somewhat, but the risk to this child for having them not able to go to school will have the risk of scarring their life chances indefinitely, and on policy terms, the risk-benefit, the overall judgement of the government – this wasn’t a SAGE judgement, this was a government policy judgement – was the risk-benefit taking a child-centred approach was to prioritise the needs of the children.

And I don’t think, actually, anyone has pointed to convincing evidence that that was, with the benefit of hindsight, an incorrect judgement.

And I think all the way through this module you’ve heard the dangers of not allowing children to go to school, and that really does have to be given a strong priority in policy terms. So I think it was a perfectly reasonable policy decision for the policymakers to have taken.

Lead 8: I mean, it may be a policy perspective, but I think maybe looking at it from the perspective of a child who might be very frightened of passing the virus on to their parent, that might be a very difficult position for them to be in.

Professor Sir KCb: Of course, and I mean that’s where, hopefully, good individualised, tailored discussions with GPs, with nurses, with school staff and others, is going to be useful. It’s not … that child or young person is fairly unlikely to be swayed by a generic five-minute statement in a very short press conference from someone like me. What they need to have is a conversation with the doctor, that they and their family know, the nurse that their family know, et cetera.

Those conversations were happening, I know, the whole time and that’s very much the way that kind of conversation needs to progress.

Lead 8: I think one of the other points that’s made is, and I entirely, of course, on behalf of the Inquiry, understand that the Department for Education policy is a matter for the department rather than you, but parents being advised or families being advised that schools should bear in mind the potential concerns of pupils, parents and households who may be reluctant or anxious about returning and put the right support in place to address this, which I think is the point that you’re making, but suggesting that schools should provide reassurance to parents about the kind of measures that they put in place to reduce risk in schools, and I think the point being made is that schools aren’t clinical settings and these aren’t clinicians, and therefore, not really in a position to provide the sorts of reassurance that families who are worried and deeply anxious might have.

Professor Sir KCb: I think there’s, in a sense, that’s a two-part piece of advice. The bit which belongs to the school and rightly belongs to the school is: we are doing the following things. Those are statements of fact. And then the bit that belongs to the medical advice, which may be given at a high level by press conference but, actually, probably, is more usefully given by, for example, the school nurse or a school doctor or someone’s individual doctor, is: these things that are being done will materially reduce the risk.

That’s it. So essentially there are two different professional groups who are going to be involved in this. The doctors can’t say what is being done, that’s for the schools. And the schools can’t say, “And this will be the effect on the transmission”, that will be for the medical and nursing and other health staff.

Lead 8: Okay, I’m grateful, Professor Whitty.

The other point that’s being made about the consensus statement, so on the one hand, you have someone like Sir Jon Coles asking why wasn’t this made more – said more emphatically and clearer at an earlier point? I think on the other hand, there is opinion that the statement didn’t make sufficiently clear the risks to children from Long Covid, or for the small group of children who might be more severely clinically affected by it.

Can I ask you about that, and whether there was reticence on the point – on the part, sorry, of you and the other chief medical officers to point out the risks of Long Covid for fear that it would then scare people into not sending their children back to school?

Professor Sir KCb: So I think – I mean, it’s a perfectly reasonable question. I think, if you look at your own expert witness statement on this, which I think is accurate, they make the point that the first reasonably consensus view about Long Covid in children (a), occurred later than adults, for reasons that we could go into if you’re interested, for the Inquiry’s benefit, or – and (b), was well after the time we sent this letter.

So to warn parents of a risk which at that point had not been identified would, I think, be difficult. It was clear that there were some adults who had prolonged symptoms; indeed, it was clear that there were some children who had prolonged symptoms. But the idea that – of Long Covid in children was not fully understood at this point and that was in practice – had we known at the point we wrote the letter what we knew nine months later, we probably would have added one sentence into it, which is to say that some children do have long-term effects from this, because that would have been an important and accurate point to add.

However, I do think, in general, we did make the point that some children – that although the risk of mortality was very low, there were some children, albeit a relatively small number compared to the overall, who had long-term effects, and to that extent I think we captured the point. We weren’t, in any sense, trying to take away from parents information that they would have wanted to have to make a decision. You can speculate, if we’d put in a sentence that said, “Some children have Long Covid”, whether that would actually have led to a change. My suspicion is the answer would be no, but in a sense that’s pure speculation. But what we couldn’t do is go ahead of the evidence which was there at the moment.

So what we gave to parents and pupils and staff in schools and teachers, was, as best as we could, a contemporaneous view about the evidence as it was at that point in time.

Lead 8: Professor Whitty, I’m going to move on to a different subject entirely and to try and make a little bit of progress on it before the short adjournment, which is the decision to close schools, as was announced on 4 January.

I think I can summarise some of the lead-up to that from your statement, but you explain that in the autumn and winter of 2020 there was a second wave of the original Wuhan variant of Covid-19 and that that was driving transmission up during that period; is that correct?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes. So we start – up to and including sort of the beginning of December, the increases that we saw were driven by the original Wuhan variant almost entirely, there was a little bit in Kent of what then later became called the Alpha variant. As December went by, that became the dominant variant, first in the south of England and then across the rest of the UK. And that, unfortunately, was a substantially more transmissible virus, as people will recall, and so the second wave was in reality two different waves: it was a Wuhan original wave, if I can put it that way, and then an Alpha wave which overlapped with one another but were distinct from one another.

Lead 8: Can I just ask, just in terms of the practical consequences of that, does that mean that when the Kent variant emerged, that transmission rates were already quite high? In other words, you were starting from quite a high level of infection in the community to begin with?

Professor Sir KCb: So even if we’d not had the Kent variant, what became known as Alpha, we did have a significant wave of Covid due to the Wuhan variant, or the original variant, which was happening through November and December, which we’d entirely expected, so that this wasn’t a surprise. We were expecting in winter to have a second wave, and we did have a second wave. And that was the second wave, in a sense, we’d prepared for and expected. There was quite a heated debate within government about what was the right way to approach this, as was very clear from, I think, some of the Module 2 evidence you’ve seen.

But one of the things which we thought we were – it was possible to do was to spare schools. And that was a very clear policy decision which we all thought was sensible, which was to do things we could which would mean that we would bring the R for that wave down below 1, but without having to close schools. And that was achieved, actually, during the autumn and into the winter – the Christmas holiday.

The problem we had was that the Alpha wave had an R which was substantially higher than that, and which all the things which we’d previously used which had managed to turn the corner on the original variant Covid were just not capable of holding, and we were back to a situation we’d been right at the beginning of the pandemic: that we had a very, very rapidly rising wave, but with a higher rate of transmission, and indeed, with some evidence that there was a greater proportion of the transmission in children, and that’s what faced us towards the end of December. But that was different to what faced us at the beginning of December.

Lead 8: And I think just a short point, you touch on this in your statement, but whether or not decision making about Christmas – whether or not that made the situation more difficult. I think you suggest in your statement, because it was quite last minute that the decisions were taken to impose more severe restrictions, that that also contributed to the difficult situation reached in December?

Professor Sir KCb: So, what I want to – I mean, I was on record as saying, including in press conferences at the time, that I was pretty doubtful we were in a good place on what we were doing running into Christmas. I won’t rehash that ground, it belongs to a different module, but I don’t actually think that even had we managed the pre-Christmas period – so, for the sake of argument, from mid-October through to the Christmas period – optimally, I think we would still have been in a situation come January where we would have been faced with a wave we couldn’t actually get on top of, short of interventions that had a big impact on schools.

And so I don’t want to imply that that, I think, rather messy period that led up to Christmas was the reason why the wave was difficult to achieve without – to get on top of without schooling closing afterwards. I think they were separate in the sense they were separate challenges.

Lady Hallett: But whatever you had to do in the January, had you had a more optimal approach – prove the term “messy” – that’s not a criticism of you but of others who were taking decisions – what you then had to do in January might have been different?

Professor Sir KCb: I think we’d have probably have ended up in the same place but in a more – a more structured way. But there was also, as is obvious from the evidence that you’ve received from Sir Gavin Williamson and Mr Johnson, then Prime Minister, there was also a complicated political element to this which was nothing to do with the epidemiology, it was to do with other factors.

Ms Dobbin: So if we just pick that up maybe from your witness statement, Professor Whitty – and I think we have this from paragraph 4.1 onwards, but if I just look at 4.2, and perhaps that can be brought up on screen – but I think you’re setting out there that it’s from 11 December that the impact of the Kent variant is starting to become apparent is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, I think from 11 December it was clear that this was a significant variant. I think the scale of what it was going to do for the country as a whole, we – at this point it wasn’t clear. And that became clearer steadily as we went through December.

So, by mid-December, it was clear this was going to become dominant. And by around about the 20th or 22 December, it was clear that this was going to cause us a very serious problem indeed.

And of course the UK was the first country – and specifically England was the first country – which actually had this variant. So what we didn’t have was any other country to say: well, what happened in that country? We were – in a sense, we were on our own, on our own in terms of the evidence on this one.

Lead 8: And I think we can probably deal with this quite quickly. It’s set out over the page from paragraph 4.4 onwards, that you set out that on 18 December it was understood that there was a substantial increase in transmissibility because of this variant.

If we look paragraph 4.6 – I’m just picking this up from the middle of the indented paragraph:

“There is high confidence that this variant is spreading faster than the other SARS … variants circulating in the UK, based on several different analyses.”

And then setting out, we see just below that, that harder measures might need to be taken in order to deal with that.

And if we go over the page, please, to paragraph 4.7 I think the important point for the purposes of this module, again, looking at the indented paragraph below:

“Overall accumulating evidence is consistent with increased transmission occurring amongst school children when schools are open, particularly in children of secondary school age …”

And that’s said with “high confidence”.

Professor Sir KCb: Yes. And I think it’s important that – to – and, you know, I’m not going to read out, but the rest of that paragraph is a demonstration of the fact that actually we now had evidence that every time schools closed, for example, for holidays or for half-term breaks, that led to a slowing of the pandemic, and then, when they opened again, it took off again. So I think it was, again, further evidence that schools did have a role.

But this was in the context of transmission among children. What it didn’t – what we weren’t able to say with confidence was the effect of that on the R with this new variant.

Lead 8: And I think, again, it’s probably important to look at the last sentence of this:

“It is difficult to quantify the size of this effect, and it remains difficult to quantify the level of transmission taking place specifically within schools compared to other settings.”

Professor Sir KCb: Exactly.

Lead 8: So even at this stage it’s not – do we take it from this, it’s still not clear whether schools are having a direct effect as opposed to the indirect effects around schools being open?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I think that they were – I think we were confident that they were having a direct and an indirect effect. What we weren’t clear on was what the ratio between those two were, and indeed, the interaction between school closures including, in a sense, planned ones, like holidays and half terms, with other inter – other things which happen.

So people change – you know, people who have children change their behaviour during holidays in a whole variety of different ways which are not just – which are to do with the fact that they’ve planned their holiday, for example, around when their children were going to be home from school, so they leave work, and all the things that follow from that.

So you can’t absolutely translate from a holiday experience of – on transmission to a, sort of, out-of-holiday unplanned period. Those are different – potentially different behavioural things that are going to occur.

Lead 8: Okay, I think that can come down.

I think the issue that arises and that is important in terms of this point in the chronology is that of testing, and trying to understand the extent to which a testing regime in schools might have met the challenges that this new variant presented. I think that’s probably a whole topic of questioning, but I had just wanted to ask – if I can fit this in before the short adjournment, I’ll try – we understand from the evidence that was given by Ms Acland-Hood that there were increasing asks being made of the Department for Education prior to this point about testing, and which the department understood that if they met, there was a prospect that schools could remain open. So I think the first question that arises is why these demands were being made of the Department for Education to increase the levels of testing that would be provided in schools?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I think it’s important to just clarify that these demands are not coming from me, from SAGE, or anything of that sort. So in a sense, I’m an indirect witness to this point, if you wish. This wasn’t centre of my area. But the logic of this was that there was an understanding that before Christmas – and this was before the Kent, subsequently Alpha variant, became dominant – that R was above 1 and that although it looked as if, with what was then called Tier 4 measures, whilst schools were closed, it was possible to keep that below – the R below 1 or at least at 1 or below 1, and in many parts of the country at least there was a strong expectation that when schools reopened – this is before we get to the Alpha, I want to be clear about that – that this would then lead to an upswing again of the original Wuhan variant, and that would make it very difficult to open schools in the middle of winter at the point in the year when the NHS is anyway under its greatest pressure for all the reasons that everyone knows.

So there was a good logic, which was not really related to the Alpha variant; it was related to what had been happening to that point in time, and the view was, although the testing won’t – is not in any sense a panacea, and will not replicate the effects of closing a school, what it may do is reduce the risk sufficiently that the opening of the schools won’t lead to the R going above 1 again and the Wuhan variant taking off.

Unfortunately, the arrival of the Alpha variant rendered all that moot, because then we had something which was substantially more transmissible, and the relatively marginal benefit that came out of the testing regime, not zero, and it was fantastic that the Department for Education did the things they did, it was not going to achieve getting R below 1 in terms of that component, the component that came from schools.

That said, it was useful later for reopening schools and I think it allowed, probably allowed us more confidently to reopen schools in March. So it wasn’t wasted effort to that extent. But I think, if you had – if you went back and reran that period, absent Alpha, I think that what the Department for Education was doing would have made a useful, potentially very important, difference. It’s just that the Alpha wave was so much more powerful in terms of its transmissibility that it potentially overran those defences.

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, is that a convenient moment?

Lady Hallett: Certainly.

I shall return at 2.20, and we will finish you today, I promise.

(1.17 pm)

(The Short Adjournment)

(2.19 pm)

Lady Hallett: Ms Dobbin.

Ms Dobbin: My Lady.

Professor Whitty, before the short adjournment we had touched on the issue of testing and the ask that had been made of the Department for Education in December, and its understanding that if the ask was met, there was a prospect that schools would open.

I think towards the end of that section of your evidence you said that testing wasn’t a panacea. Can I just ask you a bit about that, please, just to understand why testing wouldn’t have met the challenges that the new strain of the virus then presented, in respect of schools, because, on the face of it, the idea that you could have a mass testing event at the start of term and then regularly test children might be thought to have been quite a good way of keeping the virus out of schools. Can you explain a bit more about why that wasn’t the position.

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, so – thank you. At its simplest, and I can go into more detail if it’s useful, testing will reduce the amount of transmission between people if it’s well done and if people, sort of, buy into it and, importantly, if they test positive, they isolate. That is a key issue. And the Department for Education – and I’d like to pay great tribute both to the department but also to the teachers, because teachers did a terrific job all the way through, as did all the other school staff all the way through the pandemic, under very difficult circumstances, so I can see why they would have found this very difficult to understand at the time.

But the difference you make is relatively – is partial. So you reduce the amount of transmission between people but you don’t take it to zero. Clearly if people don’t meet up at all you take it down to zero.

So, the difference between a school closure, which essentially leads to no transmission in the school and a reduction in direct transmissions we’ve talked about, will have a much bigger impact on the R than the testing will.

Testing is at its most useful in stopping outbreaks within a school. So when you’ve got very low transmission, an outbreak starts, you get on top of it by testing. It also allows individual pupils to, rather than isolate, do serial testing so that they can carry on going to school as long as their test is negative. So those are two very positive things.

What they have much less effect on is the ability to actually have a substantial reduction in the R component, which is what schools contribute, unfortunately, to the total R, the total transmission, force of transmission for the country as a whole.

So, the testing wasn’t able to make the difference between the schools being open, schools being closed, and in particular it wasn’t able to make the difference when the transmission rates were high.

So, all the evidence shows that testing systems are at their most useful – testing and isolation systems – when the numbers are small and you can essentially find small clusters of transmission and jump on them very quickly, before they start to spread.

When transmission is as widespread as it was by the time we got to the beginning of January 2021, that rate of transmission was so high that the chances of testing and being able to get on top of it were also very low. In a sense, that’s a separate point to the previous point I made, but it’s linked to that.

Lead 8: All right. Maybe we can see that reflected in some of the advice that you gave at this stage.

And perhaps we can start by looking, please, at INQ000072272.

So, I think we can see this is an email from you of 28 December, and you’re commenting on a document. I don’t think we need to look at the document because we’re going to come to another document that you commented on, but I think we can see, if we look at paragraph 1 – and the Inquiry has already heard evidence about what the Department for Education was trying to provide and working towards providing at this point. And you’ve set out:

“I think the pros and especially cons of the current DfE case are not fully laid out in a way that Ministers can make an informed choice. It’s obviously a bit of a shot in the dark, with limited but worrying data. The current DfE proposal in response to this substantial new threat is absolutely minimalist; delay by 1 week some secondary school pupils returning – that’s it, everything else steady as she goes. Which if we get control is fine and will look sensible. But if in 4 weeks we find that we have lost control in the sense that cases are rising significantly despite Tier 4 [plus] school opening, and we may well find that (modelling suggests we will), and the NHS is under significant pressure/deaths are rising fast we have to pull the emergency brake.”

Can I just break that down a bit to try to understand what you’re advising. Can I just break down, please, what that advice was essentially setting out.

So, I think it was being suggested that what was being suggested by the Department for Education to meet the threat was minimalist, although, from the evidence provided by the Department for Education, it was meeting what had been asked of it by the Department of Health. And I suppose the question is: is there more that could have been done at this stage in order to meet the threat? Or, really, had the point been reached where there wasn’t any more that could be provided?

Professor Sir KCb: In a sense, my view is that both the Department for Education position and what is said here are both true and compatible.

So what the Department for Education essentially was working to was a Wuhan variant playbook based on the fact that we had managed to get some level of control on Wuhan in what was then called Tier 4, with schools being closed for the holiday period, and the view was probably, with a bit of luck, with the Wuhan variant, if they’d done some relatively modest interventions plus the testing, that might have been enough to have allowed schools to open.

The point I’m making here, though, and this is explicitly about the new threat, is it’s not going to be capable of meeting this new threat which is substantially more transmissible. And this, I think, is where the gap of understanding probably opened up between some people, only quite a minority, in my view, but some people in the Department for Education and people who were looking at the data, was that this was not just a small modification of threat, this threat was substantially greater and was going to require a substantially greater set of plans than the ones which had been aimed for before this point in time.

Now, this, of course, was also complicated by the fact we were in the middle of the Christmas/New Year period, so data were not coming in as fast or as reliably as you’d expect, and there were a lot of uncertainties about what the data meant because social mixing over that period is very different to what it is in rest of the year.

But that’s the fundamental, is that it was not really meeting the size of the new threat rather than that it hadn’t been properly executed for the old one.

Lead 8: And I think the question that I’m asking, recognising that, is whether or not there was more that could have been offered or planned at this stage, short of school closures, again, to most children?

Professor Sir KCb: The implication of what I’m saying, reading between the Civil Service lines, is if the Department for Education had suggested, for example, that there’s just these two groups that absolutely need to go into school because they’ve got exams coming or whatever it is, we might have been in a position where we could look at that, but the kind of – what, essentially, was being offered was something that was so small, there was zero chance, in my view, that were this to start to run, which I thought it was likely run and, indeed, it did run, that it would actually meet the need.

So that was the problem, was the Department for Education wasn’t – and, you know, I’m sure we were all at fault on this, but it wasn’t, in any sense, in my view, providing a solution that, with some modifications that they could have defined, would have met the need given the emergency we were about to face.

And I think it is important to say at this point, you know, people forget that more people were in hospital by a long way and more people died, by a long way, in the wave that followed this than the first wave that people tend to put a lot of their emphasis on. This was a huge impact and it turned into a massive issue which I think sometimes when you read these, you kind of think, okay, this is a bit of a bump in the road. This was the biggest wave we had in terms of mortality and in terms of pressure on the NHS.

Lead 8: Just reading what you’ve said here. So first of all you posit, and this is four lines down, “which if we get control”, so was it, did you think at this point there was a possibility that control might be obtained over the virus at this point?

Professor Sir KCb: I thought it was possible, but I think that the general view of SAGE at this point was that it was fairly unlikely. And then as new data came in, in the next few days, as I say, probably not helped by irregular data over the Christmas period, I think it became clear we were not going to get control with the measures we had in place.

Lead 8: Okay, and then the other thing that you say, it’s a few lines down, and it’s the point of deaths are rising fast, we’ll have to pull the emergency brake, and you say:

“At short notice, this is likely to mean the close of all education (primary, secondary, uni, [further education]) as that’s the only thing we have left with a significant impact … This would obviously be … disruptive to all education.”

That is effectively what happened, though, within a very short –

Professor Sir KCb: Yeah.

Lead 8: – period of time, although it was the school holidays, and therefore not quite the emergency brake, nonetheless some primary schools did go back on 4 January. I mean, was there – and we’ll come on to the advice that was given the next day – but was there any scope for letting this play out a bit longer to see what the direction of travel was before pulling the emergency brake as seems to be posited here?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, in reality, here, I thought that we probably had a few more days than we actually in the end did, and, you know, running forward, hoping this is helpful to you, running forward to the point where the CMOs said, based on JCB advice, this looks as if, in all four nations, there is a high chance that the NHS will be overrun within 21 days. That was the test for a tier 5. At that point, essentially all you have is emergency brakes because the speed at which it was moving, you couldn’t then wait, given the doubling times that were happening and given that, you know, compared to where we were when we closed, we collectively – the country closed education with the Wuhan variant, actually the number of cases and number of deaths was relatively small at the point we did that.

At the point we did it with the Alpha variant, the numbers were incredibly high already, and three or four doubling times from that was an extraordinarily dangerous place for us to get to. So waiting for another couple of doubling times to see what happened would have been, in my view, potentially catastrophic, and that really was at the foundations of the decisions that were made at this point in time.

Lead 8: So if we just look, then, at the advice that was provided the next day, and this INQ000072273, and this is some draft advice and I think, Professor Whitty, your comments are in the boxes alongside it; is that right?

Professor Sir KCb: Probably.

Lead 8: Let’s see if you recognise them.

Professor Sir KCb: Yeah.

Lead 8: But if we go over the page, please, to page 2, that might be a helpful starting point just so that we can make sure we have this correct.

At paragraph 7 we can see there’s:

“Placeholder: in light of the worsening situation … Alert Level 5 update.”

And then I think here is:

“The test is: do we think the NHS is likely to be ‘overwhelmed’ in the next 3 weeks?”

And it sets out here:

“Although some areas and hospitals are under significant pressure, nationally the judgement of the NHS Medical Director, with which I agree, is that they will not. Overwhelmed is a high bar for an emergency service.”

Professor Sir KCb: Yes –

Lead 8: Is that – sorry, I just wanted to make sure –

Professor Sir KCb: These are my comments. And in a sense, what changed between this and the point we actually said that it needs to be level 5 was that our judgement was actually now we were going to – I think what this makes clear is that I was reluctant to do this. This is not something that I or the medical director of the NHS, or indeed any of the CMOs, wished to go down this path. We went down it because we had to, rather than, as you can see from this, because we had any desire to.

Lead 8: So if we look, then – if we go to page 4, please.

And I think this is in terms of the advice that’s being provided to the Prime Minister: .

“Option A: escalate through the tiers, proceed with [the Department for Education’s] recommended schools plan.”

So those are the plans that we’ve heard evidence about –

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: – in respect of testing and holding back the return to school, I think by this stage, for secondary schools, to 18 January.

And I think we can see, if we look at paragraph 16, that’s set out.

Professor Sir KCb: Yeah.

Lead 8: And – in fact it’s made clear in the last line:

“Schools would rollout their testing programme in [the week commencing] 11th January and exam cohorts would return to face to face teaching, with a full return of other groups by [the 18th].”

So, obviously by this stage schools had been off on their Christmas holidays. Quite a long period had elapsed in terms of taking things to 18 January.

I think we see, then, in your comment beside that:

“Let’s be frank here. The suggestion of [the Department for Education] means that in response to this substantial new threat where opening schools increases the threat there is no change to early years, primary, vulnerable students, children of key workers, and a maximum of 1 week change to remaining secondary pupils. I am not saying this is wrong (that’s a political decision), but it is about as de minimis a change as it would be possible to conceive and still be credible. The way this para is written implies this is a significant shift, which it is not, it is minimal.”

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, and my point – I mean, leaving aside that, by Civil Service terms, that’s quite a strong statement, what I’m really saying is that this is not laid out in a way which, in my view, was clear and would make ministers understand the choice they were making. And my worry was that this was a paper that was going to be put to the Prime Minister and to cabinet ministers that implied, if you read it quickly, you’d think: oh great, they’re doing lots of things. And actually, what they were intending to do was very much the plan that we had before the Alpha wave began, and my concern was that ministers had to see, in very stark terms, what was it that they were agreeing to do. And my view was, the way this was laid out, it was laid out in a way that made it very difficult for them, I think, to realise how little they were in fact doing, compared to the previous plan.

Lead 8: All right. And if we look, I think, again at paragraph 18, which set out:

“The approach relies on robust delivery of testing with maximal take up by schools … on which we have significant concerns. Even with the extra week’s delay in the return of secondary schools it is an ambitious timetable. [The Department for Education] has been commissioned for further advice, but key delivery challenges will include the competency and willingness of schools in setting up testing arrangements …”

We’ve heard evidence from Ms Acland-Hood that, in fact, the Department for Education was quite confident that schools would apply the testing regime, but in your view, would that have made any difference by that point? So, in other words, even if there had been confidence in the plan, and schools were ready and willing to implement it, would it have made a difference?

Professor Sir KCb: I mean, I absolutely can see the determination of schools to wish to open if they could, and for the Department for Education to make that possible. And so I didn’t see any reason to doubt that they would achieve a good outcome in terms of mechanistically what they had said they would do. The problem was that this was no – this was no longer sufficient for the extraordinary change in the risk that we now faced, based on a very – starting with a high level already, and accelerating up at a very considerable rate at this point.

And that’s the point that I’m trying to capture here, and I think what I suggested would happen is what happened.

Lead 8: Yes. And I think in the box there you’re repeating again that you thought the worst outcome would be to let this play out and then have to pull the emergency chain?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, I think this is – actually, I think almost certainly this is something that was attached to the email I sent, because the two look as if they’re referring to one another.

Lead 8: So it’s the same point again?

Professor Sir KCb: It’s the same point, just put in a different way.

Lead 8: But in any event, that point was reached by 4 January?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: And the emergency chain was pulled?

Professor Sir KCb: Unfortunately, yes.

Lead 8: And can I just ask you about that, because Sir Gavin Williamson has given evidence before the Inquiry about that decision, and I think there are a couple of points that he made that I think I need to put to you to ask for your epidemiological perspective on them.

I suppose most important of all, he said that it was a decision – and I’m talking here about the decision to close schools to most children again – he said that he thought that it was wholly unnecessary, and he said that there had been exceptionally high rates of Covid-19 in northern towns and cities, yet it had been possible to keep schools in these areas open over this period, and that whilst it would be exceptionally challenging at a national level, he thought it would be the right thing to do, as keeping children in school was so beneficial to them.

So can I ask you about, from an epidemiological perspective, his opinion that closing schools was wholly unnecessary?

Professor Sir KCb: I mean, I think – well, I think there are, sort of, two ways of answering that, and I obviously can’t see into his mind and the way he’s thinking, nor would I think that would be helpful to the Inquiry, but what we had at the moment, objectively, was a very large number of people already in hospital and the numbers going up every day. So we were starting at a very high base, in the middle of winter. Second point.

Third point, where the R was now significantly above 1, not because anyone wasn’t doing what they were supposed to – because by and large people were exceptionally good at trying to follow the recommendations that came from government, both professionally and personally, so it was absolutely not that – but it’s just we had a really substantially – not slightly, but substantially – more transmissible virus, that had an R now that was – the – that was potentially quite a bit above 1, and where we thought we could pull it down with non-school measures quite a lot of the way towards 1, but we were not at all confident to the point of thinking it’s unlikely that we could put it all the way below 1 without closing schools.

So the choice, therefore, in front on the Prime Minister and ministers, from an epidemiological point of view, is: are you content in the middle of winter, with this very high number, for the R, in all probability, to be above 1, ie, for this virus to carry on doubling, for the foreseeable future? That was the epidemiological reality, and it was to that reality, given the very large numbers of deaths, that the Prime Minister and the cabinet as a whole was responding.

So I think – and this is – this was not a theoretical point, as I say, because as it showed, unfortunately, over the next three months, more people died in this wave, more people went into hospital in this wave than did in the first wave.

But there was a final point and I think this is one that also, I think, sometimes gets lost and I wasn’t convinced that Sir Gavin picked it up in his evidence, so I’m going to make it now, which is: we now knew we had the vaccine, and we were rolling it out. And we were confident that, unless this new variant was very resistant to the vaccine, and we saw no particular reason why it should be, because it wasn’t under any selection pressure so I don’t – we didn’t – sort of ecological selection pressure, so there’s no reason why it should be, we were confident that the mortality and severe disease from this disease would be falling away very rapidly by the time we got to about March, which would also be about the point when the NHS tend to be under less pressure, and then it would improve basically day on day from then on in, but we hadn’t yet got to the point where all the most vulnerable people were vaccinated. You then had to wait two weeks for the effect to actually happen.

So if we could just get through this next few weeks, then even if the rates remained high, the mortality rates, as indeed turned out, would fall right away, and from then on in, even if Covid continued to circulate, the risk of mortality would be very, very substantially reduced. And that was very different to the first wave.

In the first wave you can make the case that okay, people won’t get it this time and die this time, but there will be another wave and they’ll catch it that time, so in a sense it’s just delaying, whereas in this wave, if you could just delay for three months then you could be in a situation where actually most of those people had almost no chance of dying at all and a very reduced chance of severe disease.

Now, that was really therefore what the Prime Minister was faced with, was a very high risk and an exit strategy which is an incredibly durable exit strategy based on vaccination, and the question was, was he prepared to let it run and carry on going up? Because you can argue about exactly the numbers but it is absolutely certain that the numbers would have been higher had the school closure not happened.

So then I think the political choice, the societal choice, the philosophical choice, is: where do you put the emphasis between that substantially increased overall mortality and the substantial lifelong lasting effects of education not occurring for children and all the effects on mental health which have been laid out by other people? That’s a perfectly legitimate choice, but to imply that there wasn’t actually a very heavy, very heavy cost to not acting, I think is to misunderstand the problem from an epidemiological point of view.

Lead 8: I think one of the things he suggested was that school closures needed to be made, and I’m summarising his evidence, that this decision needed to be made in order to demonstrate to people how serious the situation was, in other words, it was to have an impact, to make people stop doing whatever it was they were doing, in order to reduce transmission; is that accurate? Was there any part of it that was – (overspeaking) –

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I never – so insofar as one reading, and this may not be what he meant but I’m going to take it as one possibility, one reading of what Sir Gavin said was that the only reason for doing this was just for a bit – for theatrical reasons to prove to people that it is a big problem. I don’t think people needed any proof on that, they could see the numbers going through the NHS, it was – day-to-day numbers were going up, so I think people were fully aware of that. Nor was there any evidence that I could see that people were not doing their best to adhere to the regulations and the advice that was given.

So certainly from my point of view, that would have been an unnecessary thing to do, and I didn’t see anybody who was arguing that in any of the meetings I was in, that the only reason we were doing this was to make a point.

I think people were absolutely seized of the view that stopping education for a further time was extremely damaging. I think that was universally agreed, so that, in a sense, to that extent, Sir Gavin’s position, and that of everyone else, was 100% the same. And I think what most people were doing were saying we’ve got a very difficult choice between two very difficult things, and that was obviously an extremely hard choice for the government to make. And you can argue whether it’s the right one, but it was certainly made on the basis that this is likely to save lives that would not otherwise have been lost, because the vaccine will very soon be in a position where it’ll essentially reduce very substantially the risk we face from hereon in.

Lead 8: It may follow from everything you’ve said, Professor Whitty, but was the decision to close schools in January 2021 a more finely balanced one than the decision that had to be made in March 2020?

Professor Sir KCb: I think, from an epidemiological point of view I don’t think it was finely balanced. I think it was if the only thing you were trying to do was trying to prevent deaths, I think that the case in January was every bit as strong as it was in the initial closure in March 2020, and arguably, because of this fact that the vaccine was just around the corner, in fact a stronger one, from an epidemiological point of view.

However, counter that, you already have children who have lost a lot of education. We have extremely clear evidence, not surprising evidence, but nevertheless very substantial evidence, of not just educational harm but mental health harm, many other harms, as well, from people being in school now. Difficult sometimes to tease those apart from being in lockdown and all the other strange things that were happening to childhood over this period, so I don’t want to claim it was all schools, nevertheless that certainly was part of it.

So the choices between those two terrible harms, and to that extent it is, in a sense, politically and societally balanced but it was not – the epidemiological case was an extremely strong one in January, unfortunately.

Lead 8: Can I just ask you then, coming away from that second set of school closures, was there any clearer scientific consensus as to whether it was the closure of schools per se that reduced the R number in that period, as opposed to the indirect effects? In other words, are we any clearer today as to whether it’s schools or the behaviours around schools that reduce R?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, leaving aside the question about whether many of the behaviours (unclear) around schools are just intrinsic to school. So you can’t – I think it’s a fantasy to believe that you can have schools open and yet none of them – no parents meeting at the gates, and so on. Those kind of things just will happen. That’s just a practical reality.

But leaving that aside, the evidence wasn’t massively clearer at this stage. What was – did appear to be happening and I think it’s – in retrospect, I think it’s a bit less clear than it appeared at the time, actually, but certainly at the time the decision was being taken by political leaders, it looked as if there was – a much higher proportion of the transmission was among children than previously, and that, if you look at the epidemiological curves that were done in terms of testing people per age, what you can see is, really, the highest peaks very often were in children of school age, in terms of the numbers of people affected, not obviously, the numbers, fortunately, in hospital or dying but in terms of actually infected. So there was certainly a lot of transmission among children. What we were still not clear about was what proportion of the overall transmission – R was driven by that fact but in fact there was probably better evidence of transmission among children in this wave than there was in the previous one.

Lead 8: The other thing that seems to be difference about this wave is that there were regional differences as well, so this wave was more focused in the south of England than the north.

In your view, would it have been realistic to have taken stricter measures in parts of the country and to have allowed other parts of the country – in schools, I mean specifically, in other parts of the country – to remain open?

Professor Sir KCb: I think that – well, I think in the document you showed last, the second point I made was: should we be putting to ministers, “Do you want to do this?”

I made that as an active suggestion to the Cabinet Office, that this is something which ministers maybe should consider. My worry was that – because it wasn’t being taken off the table because of epidemiological evidence; it was – essentially it was because there was an assumption that schooling decisions were taken at a national level. And I just thought: well, is that sensible?

Actually, as it turned out, the time between the wave maximising in the south of the England and the north wasn’t huge, so probably we wouldn’t have gained an enormous amount about it. But I thought the possibility was there that you could differentiate between, for example, the north and the south. You couldn’t do it at a kind of really micro level but you might have been able to at a slightly higher level.

Lead 8: Professor Whitty, I want to turn if I may, then, to some future planning and future issues.

I think, from evidence that you’ve given before, you are of the view that ventilation is potentially a more important issue than perhaps was previously realised; is that accurate?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes.

Lead 8: May I ask you about your views, then, on the use of ventilation in schools as a way of potentially dealing with future pandemics and – and generally in terms of ventilation being a good thing for children’s health and well-being?

Professor Sir KCb: Yes, so I think it’s an uncontroversial statement from an epidemiological point of view to say that improving ventilation in schools would be a good thing. It would – not just for future pandemics, hopefully we won’t have to face one of them for a long time, of a respiratory sort like this one, but also for just, you know, year-on-year flu and other respiratory infections, which cause a lot of trouble in schools, lead to individuals not having their schooling, lead to outbreaks locally. And it also, actually, has implications for indoor air pollution, which is something I’ve written on in a completely different context.

So, the advantages of ventilation are very substantial, and I think the school estate is very variable in terms of how much ventilation there is and also how much ventilation there is in a way that can also keep the school warm enough that children can be able to work and to study in winter.

Now, that’s something very much to put to Professor Noakes, who is – you are, I think, talking to in two days’ time, about the – whether – the extent to which that is a realistic proposition. But if it’s realistic – and I think her evidence implies it is realistic, from her written statement – then it is clearly highly desirable.

Lead 8: Grateful, Professor Whitty.

The other thing is that obviously during the period of the pandemic there were infection control measures brought into schools to encourage children to wash their hands. Also, simple measures like the wiping down of surfaces. Do you – and I suppose I’m asking you this question in the context of your role as CMO to England, do you think that there is good reason to continue those sorts of measures in schools, and is enough being done to encourage the continued use of infection control measures in schools?

Professor Sir KCb: I mean, on the second, I think you’d have to ask an educationalist, but on the first, very clearly there are advantages. Both immediate advantages, in terms of reducing infections and therefore the consequence of infections, which sometimes can be serious but often can at least be interfering with education, and, arguably, maybe even putting – in getting people used to lifelong habits which will reduce the risk to themselves and their families of completely preventable infectious diseases that otherwise would be transmitted via touch or respiratory routes.

So, no, I certainly think there are strong arguments for that.

Lead 8: And I think there are just two residual matters which I think I have time for in the couple of minutes left.

The first thing is just going back to SAGE and about who observes SAGE meetings. Do you think that there is any scope, for example, for having individuals who have statutory obligations towards children, like the Children’s Commissioner for England, to be able to have them as observers to SAGE so that they understand the potential ramifications of the issues that are being discussed and have the ability to raise that with government, or would that not be an appropriate attendee for SAGE?

Professor Sir KCb: What – so, as my Lady will have seen, the list of people who felt they should have been on SAGE and who were not would have filled this room very easily. So you have to be quite careful that you don’t end up in a situation where you have a very large numbers of people who either say nothing or are saying things that aren’t going to probably contribute to the scientific discussion.

That is the key. SAGE is a scientific body.

SAGE had on it paediatricians and people whose background was in child health. As it happens, in fact, my early research career was on infectious diseases in children, for example. So it wasn’t that there was any – there was no experience of children and their health problems.

You know, is it reasonable for people to be observers in certain situations? Yes. But I think what we should do is keep SAGE as a scientific body and have the policy decisions into which the Children’s Commissioner quite rightly wishes – wished to, in this case, insert herself, and the current Children’s Commissioner’s inserts herself rightly, keep them, in a sense, separate. There should – there’s a, sort of, scientific stage and then there’s a policy stage, and I think it’s generally better – unless they’re wishing to make a scientific point, it’s generally better that their contributions on a day-to-day basis are made in that way.

However, I did think that the challenge from the previous Children’s Commissioner was an entirely fair and sensible one. So I think from time to time a Children’s Commissioner saying, “Have you thought this, and I’ve read the minutes and I think you’ve missed that”, that’s a very sensible thing to do. That doesn’t require them to sit around the table and make comments. Because, unfortunately, there are many other people you could rightly apply that to.

Lead 8: And then the second thing is, I think that – and again, I’m summarising evidence that you’ve previously given before, is that you thought there could have been an earlier emphasis on wearing masks in relation to children; is that correct?

Professor Sir KCb: I thought there could be an earlier emphasis on wearing masks in the adult population, absolutely. And I was – you know, I think that’s one of the things, if we were to rerun the scientific advice, we would have got to that place at a much earlier stage.

For children, I think it’s a more balanced question. For the youngest children, I think everybody agrees that they’re inappropriate and potentially harmful, just at a physical level, and almost certainly interfere with their development.

But I think there was quite a lot of evidence alongside the benefits to masks from a transmission point of view that they also interfere with the – particularly the teaching process and the learning process, both of young children and for older children, and it was for that reason that we didn’t have masks in the classroom except at the absolute peaks of some of the areas, where the choice would have been between having a mask in the classroom and probably not having the school open at all.

So I don’t think any of us really looked back and wished we’d pushed mask wearing in children and specifically in educational settings, and I think we need to be a bit more differentiated – this is going back to the previous point – differentiated between the adult advice, where I think the advice was pretty clear-cut, albeit not as strong as sometimes implied, and the children’s advice, which is quite a bit more of a balance of two risks.

Lead 8: And, Professor Whitty, finally, you’ve set out some of your reflections in your witness statement. May I just ask on behalf of the Inquiry whether there is anything further that you would add to those observations, specifically in relation to children? Or if it’s all set out in your statement?

Professor Sir KCb: It is set out probably in my statement, but if I could just highlight two, one really obvious one, and one slightly less obvious to most people, although you’ve read my statement.

The obvious one is, I think, planning for children, and specifically for education, should be part of any pandemic. And the hope is you’ll never need to use it. But I think not to plan for it is not a good idea, given the extraordinary importance that education has for children.

So I think – and in a sense I think everybody who is a witness here would agree with that, but I’m adding my weight to that position.

The wider one, I think, is we need to be a bit careful – there’s – I’ve read some strong but well argued – there are also strong but less well argued things saying we should never ever close schools again. I think that we should be very careful of those kind of statements.

Every pandemic is different. Had this been a pandemic like influenza, particularly the influenza pandemic of 2018/19, where a very large proportion of the deaths and serious illness were in children, higher than most adults, I think we would very clearly be reaching for schools not only to reduce the overall transmission but also to protect the individual children.

So, at the other side, the last very serious pandemic we had, the HIV pandemic, school closures would have had absolutely no effect at all. It was a disease of young adults transmitted sexually.

So I’m just saying we need to be a bit careful that we don’t extrapolate from one pandemic to very different ones, and the routes of transmission also have an implication for that.

But I’ve laid that out in a rather more formal way in the statement.

Ms Dobbin: You have.

My Lady, those are all my questions. I think there are some Core Participate ones. I think some I have asked but I think there are some residual ones.

Lady Hallett: I think so and I think that, very helpfully, they’ve been abandoned given you have covered them.

Ms Hannett, who is just there.

Questions From Ms Hannett KC

Ms Hannett: Thank you, my Lady.

Professor Whitty, I appear on behalf of Long Covid Kids and Long Covid Kids Scotland.

On 31 May 2021 you advised the Prime Minister Boris Johnson that Long Covid was clearly a large enough problem to be concerned about in what was entitled “A short note on Long Covid”.

You gave evidence this morning that you well understood Long Covid in children nine months after the consensus statement of August 2020, and would have provided information on Long Covid to parents had you known about it in August 2020.

Why, then, some nine months later in May 2021, at the same time as you were providing that advice to Mr Johnson, was there not a further public statement issued on the risk of paediatric Long Covid and particularly given that it hadn’t been identified in August 2020?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, let me break that down into two parts. I mean, the first of which is I think you imply a greater degree of certainty than my note says. In fact, I start off my note saying, “The reason this is a personal note rather than a SAGE note is there is no consensus.” So this was me giving my view and I was really explicit about that at several points, “This is a personal view”, and the reason it was a personal view was the evidence was weaker and more mixed but, nevertheless, I gave the view that I had at the time.

There were very large numbers of things in Covid which, as we went along, we understood better. We didn’t just issue statements every time that happened. They got into the public domain in any case. Long Covid in children was discussed in the media, was discussed in other fora. So I didn’t think that there was a situation where nobody knew about it and only I knew about it and needed to tell people. That would be completely incorrect.

And also, I was quite cautious about going out with strong statements until we had a consensus or at least a pretty good central view from the scientific community, and as I started my comments by saying, I didn’t think that was the case at this point in time.

Ms Hannett KC: Just to follow up on that, if I may, Dr Arora from UKHSA gave evidence last week to the Inquiry that as much information that is known about a disease like Long Covid should be shared with the public even if that is to say where the limitations in the knowledge exist. Given that there hadn’t been any public statement at all by the summer of 2021 on the risk of Long Covid, so parents were effectively unaware of the possibility of Long Covid, do you not accept that it would have been sensible at that point to explain about that even if not all the information was available to you at that stage?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I think, in a way, I’m only repeating myself, but I think there are two components to why I’d be cautious about this. Personally, I was very cautious about going into the public unless I could tell people something which is going to help them to do something different. It wasn’t obvious to me what that would be. And secondly, I was very cautious about going out unless I was confident I was in a situation where I was in the middle of a pretty strong evidence base, and as my note to the Prime Minister made clear, at that point my view was, I was not in that state which was why I had to give a personal view rather than say, “Here is a SAGE consensus view” or “Here is a SAGE central view with a high degree of confidence.”

Ms Hannett KC: And just again, one further follow-up, if I may, my Lady. There still to this day remains, having been no – there’s been no public statement or no public health messaging on paediatric Long Covid; do you agree that there should be?

Professor Sir KCb: I think – well, first, I consider that most – if you asked most parents does this exist, I think most parents would at least have been aware of the debate around it. So I think the idea that this is not a known thing, I’m not sure I would fully agree to. It was in the – it was in quite a lot of publications and it was also covered in various bits of the media at various points. So I don’t think this is something which nobody knows about.

And I am really cautious about making statements unless I can say, “and therefore this is something which we are advising”. Here, this is much less clear what we would be advising.

The group who I think did need to know about this and I think the important point, but I was not the right person to do this, was the medical profession and other healthcare workers, and they do need to understand where the current science is so that they can respond appropriately when children who have symptoms compatible with Long Covid present.

Many of these children may not actually have Long Covid, they may have something else which is equally important, but certainly it should have been one of the things that healthcare workers are thinking about, along with the other things that could look like Long Covid but may or may not be at any particular point in time.

Ms Hannett: Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Ms Hannett.

And now we have Mr Wagner who is that way.

Questions From Mr Wagner KC

Mr Wagner: Good afternoon, Professor.

I want to ask you – sorry, I should say, first, I act for Clinically Vulnerable Families. I want to ask you first about the DfE guidance in July 2020 on schools reopening. I appreciate it’s not your guidance. But one of the things the guidance said was that because shielding had ended, or was about to end, this was a good justification for almost all children returning to school in September 2020, so a month later, including clinically vulnerable children and children in clinically vulnerable families. My question is this: at the time that shielding was paused, did you know or anticipate that it would be used in this way to justify previously shielded children or children in shielding families being mandated to attend school just a month later?

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I’m going to sort of repeat an answer I gave earlier because I think that overlaps quite heavily with something which Counsel to the Inquiry asked me, but I think let’s separate out two separate sets of things. The first set of things is the question, was the reason that we were advising children who’d been previously advised that they were clinically vulnerable or clinically extremely vulnerable to go to school, was that because we were pausing shielding? And the answer is not really.

The principal reason was because we no longer thought that they needed to have shielding based on much more up-to-date information. So in contrast to adults, where we considered the risk was still there, but had gone a long way down because the amount of Covid was much lower in the summer, in the case of children our view was the risk was not there, for that reason, but more importantly, it was not there because there was no evidence they were at increased risk in the first place, or at least in many meaningful way compared to peers of the same age.

The separate question, which I think I hopefully also addressed earlier, was the question about a child in a family where the adult is shielding, and here it is slightly more of a relevant consideration. In the period when the schools reopened, the level of Covid was extremely low. So the probability that the child, by going to school, would be introducing it to the vulnerable adult and the vulnerable adult would therefore come to harm, was actually very low, just on purely statistical grounds. So to that extent the shielding point was relevant there. But there was a wider point, which was, by this point the harms of children not going into education were really clear, and there was a policy decision which I think most people would consider is very reasonable, that we would prioritise the needs of the child for their lifelong learning, given the relatively small additional risk that this posed elsewhere.

Mr Wagner KC: Thank you. And clearly the risks went up and down through that period, and those different factors you’ve described will have gone up and down as well. And I just want to ask you, in that respect, about choice. I think you said in your most – in Module 3, that the end of shielding wasn’t a – that – a cliff edge, because people who were clinically vulnerable chose perfectly reasonable to continue what they had previously done. So some people chose to do one thing and some people chose to do others.

Now, would you accept that when it came to school attendance in September 2020, but also going into the autumn as cases started to rise, that it was important that those families that had a clinically vulnerable member of the family or a clinically vulnerable child could continue to choose to do what they had previously done, or to shield, as the risk factors started to change?

Professor Sir KCb: So I think that I would, in a sense – and this is just a development of what I said in the last answer – in the case of the children, we no longer thought that they were clinically vulnerable. And that was our clear advice to them, based on data put together by the Royal College of Paediactrics and Child Health.

So, in contrast to the adults, who were still clinically vulnerable but we thought the risk was low because there was not much Covid, in the case of the children, our view was they weren’t clinically vulnerable in the first place, based on objective evidence. So that’s the first key point.

There is a small number of people to whom that was an exception, but that was a very small subset of the number of people who we initially thought might be at increased risk, fortunately.

I think on the question about mandation of schooling for children, in a context where actuarially the risk is very low because the transmission rates were low at this point, the question about whether schooling should be compulsory or not strikes me as absolutely a question of political choice and societal choice rather than a clinical question. So in a sense, I would defer it, but I would say that historically, governments around the world have always tended to have a strong view that children should have education for their long-term benefit and I’m sure it’s on that basis that these decisions are taken by political leaders.

Mr Wagner: I’m out of time, I’ve got one more question.

Lady Hallett: All right, Mr Wagner.

Mr Wagner: Thank you very much.

Just finally, and it’s on the – a similar topic, who do you think should determine whether shielding or non-attendance at school for a clinically vulnerable child or a clinically vulnerable family is necessary? And I ask that in the context of the reports from CVF members, a lot of CVF members, that often when they, and particularly when the case rates were not low, that they were told during that autumn that they – and winter – that their children had to attend, or they’d be punitively dealt with.

Professor Sir KCb: Well, I think all of your questions are essentially the same question, so I will give a sort of same answer, which is the decision as to whether someone is or is not clinically vulnerable as an absolute, and the decision about whether this is a point in time which is a high-risk person for clinically vulnerable people are questions of, in a sense, epidemiological and clinical fact. So I think reasonably you would expect medical practitioners at an individual level and epidemiologists and public health people at a population level to be giving that advice to the public and therefore to individuals.

The question as to whether the force of the law can be used in one situation or another is entirely one for, essentially, the proper authorities, and, if the law is going to change, for Parliament and political leaders. It’s definitely not one for the medical profession.

So our job is the first bit: to help define the group of people who are at risk and to make sure they understand that risk and to make sure that the political leaders understand those risks when they make their decisions. The second choice is not for us.

Mr Wagner: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Mr Wagner.

I think that completes the questions we have for you, Professor Whitty.

I do understand – I’ve said it several times before, so forgive my repetition – I know we’ve placed a huge burden on your Office, on you personally, on your colleagues, and of course on the Department of Health, and so I’d just like to express my enormous gratitude to all of you for all the help that you’ve given.

As ever, today you’ve been a really helpful witness and I’m very grateful to you.

The Witness: Thank you very much, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Very well.

(Pause)

Lady Hallett: Hello again, Mr Hewitt.

The Witness: Hello. Nice to see you.

Lady Hallett: Sorry we’ve kept you waiting.

The Witness: That’s not a problem.

Mr Lee: My Lady, please may I call Mr Martin Hewitt.

Mr Martin Qpm

MR MARTIN HEWITT QPM (affirmed).

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Mr Lee: Before we start, my Lady, the evidence you’re about to hear will contain references to domestic violence and sexual offences involving children and young people. There may also be other content those listening might find upsetting.

Mr Hewitt, you have provided a corporate witness statement on behalf of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the NPCC, to Module 8 of the Inquiry, dated

And for the transcript, the reference we have for that is INQ000651552.

Now, Mr Hewitt, can you confirm, please, that the contents of that statement are true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Mr Martin Qpm: I can.

Counsel Inquiry: If we can start with your professional background, please, Mr Hewitt. You joined Kent Police in 1993 as a police officer. You transferred to the Metropolitan Police in 2005. You progressed to the rank of assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan Police,

and in 2015 you were appointed as the vice chair of the

NPCC, which I understand at the time was a part-time

role.

Mr Martin Qpm: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And you’ve split your time between the NPCC and your

main job as assistant commissioner.

And it was in 2019, you were appointed as the chair

of the NPCC, which now was a full-time role?

Mr Martin Qpm: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And therefore, you served as the chair throughout the

entirety of the pandemic?

Mr Martin Qpm: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: If we can quickly turn to roles and responsibilities of July 2025. 14 the NPCC, you set out in your statement that the NPCC is

a national coordinating body which represents all

UK police forces, including territorial forces in

England Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, some

British Overseas Territories, the British Transport

Police, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, and the Ministry

of Defence Police, and you go on to say that:

“[The NPCC] serves to drive best practice in

policing and to act as one voice for policing into

central government.”

Would that primarily be the Home Office?

Mr Martin Qpm: Primarily your route into the central government is through the Home Office, that’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And Mr Hewitt, in terms of your interactions, would that be with the Home Secretary, would it be ministers, civil servants?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes, routinely with civil servants within the Home Office, and then through the policing minister, and then for various issues you would interact directly with the Home Secretary.

Counsel Inquiry: And finally we know that, in 2015, it was the NPCC that replaced the Association of Police Chief Officers ACPO; is that correct?

Mr Martin Qpm: That is correct, yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Hewitt, in your evidence to Module 2 of this Inquiry, you referred to bringing together chief constables to plan for how the police would ensure candidate security in the run-up to a general election. In ordinary times, is that a good example of how the NPCC would coordinate nationally?

Mr Martin Qpm: I think it is an example of how, when you need a cross-policing response – because each individual police force is legally a separate entity – the NPCC can be utilised to bring different forces together to ensure that policing as a whole responds appropriately to whatever the situation was. And in that instance, as you say, that was – there were concerns about candidate security in a December election. So it is a good example of what NPCC would be used for.

Counsel Inquiry: And on the points of legal independence, you explain in your witness statement that the NPCC has no operational directive powers in relation to forces in the UK. So is it right that the NPCC doesn’t have any power to direct a police force on how to act?

Mr Martin Qpm: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And on the other hand, the NPCC can’t tell an individual police force to refrain from acting in a certain situation?

Mr Martin Qpm: No, we don’t have authority in that sense.

Counsel Inquiry: And is that also the case in the context of a pandemic or a national emergency?

Mr Martin Qpm: It is, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And whilst operational policing decisions remain the responsibility of force leads, are individual police forces expected to carry out their day-to-day business with reference to NPCC guidance, policy and briefings?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes, the role of NPCC is to provide some of that – some of that guidance, and working very closely with the College of Policing as well, in terms of providing both authorised professional practice and guidance.

So, there is an expectation, and every chief constable and every police force is a party to NPCC, but ultimately, the chief constable has the final say-so in terms of what they will actually deliver operationally in his or her force.

Counsel Inquiry: And Mr Hewitt, we know that from March 2020, as a direct result of the pandemic and lockdowns, that life changed for everyone and services had to adapt. We’ll come on to this in more detail later this afternoon, but can you explain generally how day-to-day policing changed?

Mr Martin Qpm: The – the start of the pandemic, I mean, fundamentally altered the challenge that policing faced. So, throughout the pandemic, normal policing requirements existed, but it was then being undertaken in a unique set of circumstances. There was new legislation, new regulations that fundamentally altered the way society operated and the way, therefore, that the police were engaging with society. And that was certainly one of my key priorities when we were establishing the strategy at the beginning, was about that relationship, maintaining the relationship that we had with the public.

It was very clear the regulations that were coming, because we’d been watching what had been happening from China and through Europe, in terms of the very strong nature of what was happening, that was going to put policing into a very difficult position. And there was no experience in policing of – of actually day-to-day policing pandemic-type regulations that were being imposed on communities.

So it was transformational in terms of what we had to deliver.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Hewitt, you made reference to the – policing the regulations. Is that in fact the Covid-19 regulations which we will get on to as a separate topic?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And is that also what you mean when you say in your statement that the police took on a public health policing role?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes. There was no public health policing role prior to that, but the primary objective here was saving lives and preventing harm. So that was a unique role for us to undertake.

Counsel Inquiry: And you’ve touched upon this already, Mr Hewitt, about normal policing in a unique circumstance. To what extent did the pandemic impact core policing functions that related specifically to children? So, for example, child protection and safeguarding units.

Mr Martin Qpm: So we were still – as I said, we were still having to undertake all of our normal processes but we were now undertaking them in an entirely unique set of circumstances, and – and from the very outset, once we realised what was coming, there was a real concern, particularly around – around domestic abuse in the general sense and also child abuse. For any interfamilial child abuse and any domestic abuse, quite clearly it was obvious that the pandemic and the Covid regulations were going to place people in very strict confinement within the premises where that sort of offending is taking place.

So we were very clearly identifying that there were potential risks to people within the household, and naturally, of course, children in those circumstances.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Hewitt, we’ll come back to the NPCC’s specific concerns relating to domestic abuse and child sexual offending, but please can we turn now to the NPCC’s specific pandemic-related response, which we know from your statement was named Operation Talla; is that correct?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: I think it’s important at this point to say that the purpose of Operation Talla was, again, not to hold operational command for policing, but to go back and provide national coordination?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And you set out in your statement what that looked like, and you said, in terms of a pandemic-specific focus, that you were to make sure that there was clear communication between police forces, you were to provide guidance to frontline police officers, for example, you’ve already set out in relation to Covid-19 regulations, to capture and to share learning and to support individual police forces in contingency planning.

Was there any specific work strand within Operation Talla or a dedicated lead within the NPCC that focused on children’s safeguarding or child protection during the pandemic?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes, so we were – we were operating, we brought Operation Talla together to ensure that we had consistency across the UK in terms of the way police forces were responding, but what we were utilising there was our existing structures within National Police Chiefs’ Council, and those structures are that we have a number, there are 12 coordinating committees that are each led by a chief constable, and in each one of those there are a number of other subcommittees and working groups that deal with very specific areas.

So we had a children and young person’s portfolio which was working within local policing, so the chief constable or the deputy chief constable, should I say, that was chairing that, was really focused on all of the implications as far as children were concerned as we approached how we were going to deal with the pandemic.

And then we also had a child protection and abuse investigation group, as well, that sat within our vulnerable – violence and public protection group. So those areas were looking at the specific areas related to children and they were then able to feed into our broader structures as we dealt with the pandemic in its various phases as it went through. But that allowed us to be identifying where we thought there were vulnerabilities and then responding, and most importantly, sharing learning and practice as the various stages of the pandemic progressed.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, Mr Hewitt, in terms of Operation Talla, we know that structures are in place in ordinary times but when the pandemic hit, what role did the Home Office play in Operation Talla?

Mr Martin Qpm: So the Home Office didn’t really play a role in Op Talla. Clearly, that was the policing structures that I set up to ensure that we had a command and control structure in the way that we would respond in policing to any issue. Our direct link was across into the Home Office team that were working and managing the response within the Home Office.

So we developed very close working relationships with them, and so I undertook the role as gold commander which was the sort of overall setting the strategy. My silver commander who was really – his role was to put my strategy into practice, worked very, very closely with the teams within the Home Office that were part of the crisis response infrastructure within the Home Office. So we worked closely in that way.

Counsel Inquiry: And we may come on to some examples of this, Mr Hewitt, but during the pandemic we know that information was fed from local forces into Operation Talla.

Mr Martin Qpm: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Would it be right, therefore, that Operation Talla would then maybe feed or raise concerns to the Home Office as to what you were seeing on the ground?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yeah, we would do that directly. That was precisely the purpose of the close working, and there were very regular silver-level conversations where we would go through, because the way Talla was arranged, I was running what I was running at a national level, but that operation was replicated in each one of the police forces where they themselves had their command and control structure. They would then feed into me at the centre, or my systems at the centre. We would then obviously link directly with the Home Office through the various groups that were established and then through the other opportunities that I would have to feed directly at a ministerial level as we worked through the pandemic.

Counsel Inquiry: Just finally, Mr Hewitt, before we move on to NPCC concerns, we know that policing is a fully devolved matter in both Scotland and Northern Ireland. Was there any difference between how the NPCC worked with police forces in England and Wales compared to police forces in Scotland and Northern Ireland?

Mr Martin Qpm: No. So whilst NPCC is an organisation that is – the members of that are all of the forces that you spoke about at the beginning, which includes Police Service of Northern Ireland and Police Scotland, and they were fully part of the structure that we produced, but politically, obviously Police Scotland were also facing inwards to the government in Scotland and likewise, too, in Northern Ireland.

Then the other complicating factor in Wales, whilst policing is devolved in Wales, the chief constables in Wales, the four chief constables in Wales, were very much part of Talla, were obviously under the 43 forces that come under the Home Office in central government but were also facing into the Welsh Government, as well.

So it was quite complex for a number of the chief police officers to manage the political governance that they had in their particular area, but all of those chief constables and all of those forces were very much part of the Op Talla response, and were integrated into all of the various processes that I ran to coordinate.

Counsel Inquiry: And so then in practice, Mr Hewitt, all NPCC guidance would be shared with all of the police forces that fell under the NPCC?

Mr Martin Qpm: It would. There were some amendments made in Scotland, some amendments in Northern Ireland, and in Wales we – the process was often slow because we did translations, as well, but all of that guidance was guidance that was shared across those forces.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, Mr Hewitt, I now want to move on to a new topic, and that is the NPCC concerns.

We know that, from 17 March 2020 the UK Government started to introduce measures to slow the spread of Covid-19.

Mr Martin Qpm: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: That included social distancing and self-isolation.

If we can have on screen, please, INQ000620975.

We can see on screen, Mr Hewitt, that this is a briefing note from the “NPCC Cross Vulnerabilities, COVID-19” group. The document isn’t dated but it was produced around the time of the lockdown restrictions.

And we can see at the bullet point on screen that:

“NPCC [had] a number of concerns around the potential for changes in the threat, harm and risk regarding the abuse/exploitation of our vulnerable individuals and groups as restrictions on daily life have been introduced to respond to COVID-19.”

In relation to children, was there a general concern that the risk of harm to them would increase significantly?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yeah, the concern was really, I guess, the one that I’ve already kind of identified. That a high – obviously always a real concern about – about child abuse, so physical child abuse and even, at that stage, the sort of online exploitation. So there was a real concern that the circumstances in which people were going to find themselves had the potential to increase the threat and risk in both of those circumstances, in the one that we were – that people were going to be confined more strictly than they would otherwise be confined, and in the second area, the fact that, equally, people were going to have much more time where they’re potentially operating in a virtual space.

So those who have the sort of expertise, and Chief Constable Simon Bailey’s referenced there, who was the lead for child abuse issues at that time, we were really concerned around that.

The other issue that was of a concern was the fact that there would potentially be – and we did see to some extent a drop-off in reporting as well, because again – and this was similar with domestic abuse, when you are confined in the space where potentially that abuse is – or that is taking place, it’s very difficult, then, to report. And also for children, oftentimes the place where children – where either – either a key individual is able to spot signs of abuse or where a child has the opportunity to disclose some abuse, loads of those opportunities were being closed down, because the children were not going to school, they were not in environments where other professionals might be observing that.

So we were concerned that all of those issues could lead to heightened levels of abuse, and lower levels of reporting.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, Mr Hewitt, if we can now turn to the issue of domestic abuse. We know that domestic abuse in the home can affect children in a number of different ways. And there is reference in your evidence provided to the Inquiry of increases in domestic abuse at Christmas and during the summer holidays. And the rationale for that relates to the increased amount of time, which you’ve outlined –

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – of family members spending together. You also set out that alcohol is also a significant driver. And given that it’s more likely to be consumed in the home rather than a public space, this is what also contributes to the rises?

But because of the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic – and what I mean by that is how long the pandemic would last, because we know, the Christmas period, when that’s going to come to an end and when rates may fall – how concerned were the NPCC in relation to that, and was that fed back to the Home Office?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes, so we were very concerned. You know, you have highlighted or I’ve highlighted those particular areas where we know these things are, and whilst that largely focuses on domestic abuse, what’s really important from my perspective is any domestic abuse that’s happening in any premises is having a very negative impact on the children that are present within that premises, and you’re starting to get the, sort of, you know, adverse childhood experiences.

So we were concerned and all of our groups that focus in those areas, these were not things that were set up because there was a pandemic coming; these are the groups, as I say, within our structure that look at these issues and work very closely with other professionals, with support groups, with other interested groups within – whether it be within the child abuse arena or be it within domestic abuse. So we were talking with all of those organisations, because they would be getting a different perspective, and they would be having access to different understanding, and it was about working together so that we could minimise the impact that we felt was inevitable when we were going to lock down.

And your point identifying the difference between the pandemic and Christmas or the summer is a really important point because that was a really significant issue for policing. We – you know, we can now look back and understand, but at the time we had no concept of when this pandemic was going to come to an end. It was not like most other critical incidents that I’ve dealt with where you could reasonably expect within however long a period this will be into a recovery phase.

We didn’t understand that so we were having to work really hard to try and understand what we needed to do with an indefinite endpoint.

Mr Lee: Thank you, Mr Hewitt.

My Lady, I think that takes us to the break.

Lady Hallett: Certainly.

We shall finish you today, I promise, Mr Hewitt, but remember we take breaks for the stenographer. I shall return at 3.50.

(3.35 pm)

(A short break)

(3.50 pm)

Lady Hallett: Mr Lee.

Mr Lee: Mr Hewitt, you’ll see on screen in a moment an article that was published by the Internet Watch Foundation on 20 March 2020, and we can see at the very top paragraph that:

“Experts are bracing themselves for a spike in public reports of child sex abuse on the Internet as more and more people stay at home during the coronavirus pandemic.”

And below, the Internet Watch Foundation explain why – and it relates to what you’ve already covered in your evidence, about the impact that schools may have on children’s increasing vulnerability, because they’ll be spending more time alone, online, and at home.

Did this therefore become a key area for the NPCC at the end of March?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes. I mean, as I’ve said, it was – for our people that were working in this particular area, this was something that we were really very focused on straight away in terms of understanding from, you know, individual forces what the level of – what the level of reporting was, and being in a position to identify what we understood around that as well.

So within the child abuse arena, there was a group, the Vulnerability Knowledge and Practice Programme, which were a bunch of analysts that were brought together to – in normal circumstances, to allow us to understand what the instance was of, particularly online, abuse.

So we used those groups repeatedly through the process to be able to understand what we thought was happening, what we could see happening and then working, obviously, with all the other organisations that we work with to try and – to try to manage that.

Counsel Inquiry: Would it be fair to say then, Mr Hewitt, that at the end of March 2020, that the increased risk to children of child sexual abuse, child online sexual offending, was at the forefront of your mind, because you were anticipating that there would be a surge once we were in the full swing of lockdown?

Mr Martin Qpm: It was very apparent to us that that was – that was a risk, and a heightened risk that existed because of the new circumstances.

Counsel Inquiry: If we can put on screen, please, INQ000231060, Mr Hewitt, we can see that this is a document which contains assumptions about whether crime during the Covid-19 pandemic would increase, decrease, or stay the same. And we can see in the section for sexual offences that it was anticipated there would be no change. But we can see in the highlighted section that:

“Given that [child sexual abuse] offences in general are underreported, and contact child sexual offences tent to happen in a [family] environment, any increase in prevalence may not filter through to recorded crime.”

And we’ll come back to that topic soon.

Mr Martin Qpm: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: But then it says:

“Police may also have less capacity to proactively target [indecent images of children] and online offending.”

Can you help us with what this document means when it says that the police have capacity concerns?

Mr Martin Qpm: Well, apart from anything, it kind of comes back to the very original point in terms of what we were now being asked to do and were expected to do. There were all sorts of additional requirements that were being placed on policing because we were now policing in a – in a health security environment. So that was having an impact on our resourcing, and our capabilities. And one of the things that I had to look at, at the very beginning, one of the – we were projecting at the very beginning, because of course the pandemic affected police officers and police staff as much as it affected any other member of the public, so we were really concerned at the outset about the staffing numbers that we may reduce to.

As it transpired, that didn’t become as much of an issue, but then it was also about how you can work with all the other organisations. Everybody was now in a locked-down situation, so your ability to work collectively with other organisations was inevitably going to be limited.

Counsel Inquiry: And Mr Hewitt, finally on this topic, you’ve obviously already briefly outlined the feedback you had provided to the Home Office about the NPCC concerns.

Mr Martin Qpm: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: Are you able to help us with whether that was fed back into the wider decisions to lock down and impose restrictions? And what I mean by that, not that that in any way am I suggesting would have prevented lockdowns, but to set out what the consequences would be higher up government, so mitigations could be considered and potentially imposed?

Mr Martin Qpm: So we had, as I say, through the workings that we had with the officials within the Home Office there, we were constantly feeding in anything – as – and indeed as the pandemic progressed, where we felt there were particular implications that police were having to bear in relation to – in relation to regulations and the rules that were being imposed.

We were not directly consulted in any way prior to the initial lockdown, and that emerged and we then had to work through how we were going to cope with that from a day-to-day policing perspective.

I think it is fair to say that as the pandemic progressed and the relationships and the working relationships that we had developed, particularly with the Home Office, and then latterly our involvement with some of the work that was going on within the DHSC, as well, we were able to give slightly more input. But certainly at the early stages, we had not had the opportunity to give any input into the way the regulations were formed, and obviously that created a significant number of consequences for the day-to-day delivery of policing on the ground.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Hewitt, we’ll come back to your feedback in relation to the regulations, but just as to the challenges for policing as a whole that you’ve already set out, when you were feeding that back to the Home Office, what was the response?

Mr Martin Qpm: I think it would be fair to say that there was a real sympathy and understanding within the Home Office officials, and certainly good understanding, I think, on the part of the Police Minister at the time and the Home Secretary at the time, and I had very regular engagement with them where we would meet with other senior law enforcement officials on a very regular basis to ensure that everybody understood the implications of what was going on.

I guess the challenge then was how that Home Office perspective, and therefore the element of the policing perspective, was then finding its place within the broader central government view as things were moving forward.

And so certainly, I think it would be fair to say that the Home Office understood our challenges, and understood the problems that we were putting forward, and were supportive in trying to help us manage those, but the question, I guess, would be how much that was influencing ultimately the decisions that were being taken in the Cabinet Office and at Number 10.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Hewitt, I’m not going to be asking you about what the Home Office went about doing after those concerns were raised, but I do want to ask about what the NPCC were doing towards the end of March, the beginning of April, having identified those concerns. What steps were the NPCC taking to address the hidden harms and to protect children from that risk you were so concerned about?

Mr Martin Qpm: So we were working again very much through our coordinating committees that lead on child-related issues. So there was work going on among those groups to really identify not only the specific concerns that we were worried about, but then also to be monitoring. And as I say, the group, the analytical groups that were pulling the information together very regularly so that we could understand how that situation was going forward.

I was then sitting at the middle, we were engaging very clearly with all the individual forces, and as information came through, as we understood a phenomenon more as the situation moved, as the various regulations and Covid restrictions changed, we would be feeding that out, very regularly, out to chief constables. On a daily basis information would be going out into forces.

And one of the other things we set up at the very outset was a learning element within what we were doing. It was patently clear from the outset that we were going to end up in territory that we had never been in before in policing, certainly since the Second World War. And so it was really important for us that we were taking all of that learning through and that was being fed out, very quickly, out to forces.

Then the point – to repeat the point, those chief constable – chief officers that led around, be that around child and young person strategies, around child abuse, whether it’s child sexual exploitation, child sexual abuse, all of those groups worked absolutely routinely with the various other organisations, public bodies, charities, support groups that operate in those spaces. So we were working very closely with them through our normal channels to try – to make sure that we could share information, to make sure we could understand what was being understood by those other groups who necessarily will have different lines of communication and will be told things in a different way than policing are told. But it was about working together collectively to try to see what we needed to do in the way that we were operating to mitigate the impacts as best we could.

Counsel Inquiry: So Mr Hewitt, if we break that down, you’ve explained Operation Talla people were bringing information –

Mr Martin Qpm: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – into Talla. You’ve set out your concerns. Were you then saying to the chief constables or the individual forces “There is going to be a surge in domestic abuse, there is going to be a surge in child sexual offending, we need to take action and this is what we need to do”?

Mr Martin Qpm: Absolutely, that would be one of our focus – but it is really important to say that would have been coming up from the chief constables undoubtedly as well. There is – you know, there is and was no chief constable who would not be fundamentally concerned about, you know, be it domestic abuse and the impact on children or child abuse in its various forms. That is day-to-day priority areas for them to focus on. So they would have all been aware of that in their own context.

My role was to make sure that that was absolutely clear from the national operation, that we were bringing together all of the information, the understanding, the learning, that we could, and then sharing that subsequently with them, that we were using the various coordinating committees and other groups that we had within NPCC already in existence, and then that I was – I was feeding that through and very clearly into – into – through the Home Office, into government, as part of the sort of broader understanding of the pandemic response.

Counsel Inquiry: And Mr Hewitt, I want now to turn, please, to actual harm to children during the pandemic. So we’ve set out the concerns.

If we can have on screen, please, INQ000651552.

This is your witness statement you’ve provided to the Inquiry.

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And we can see at paragraph 173 that:

“The COVID-19 restrictions meant that those crimes that occurred in the home and online appeared to increase.”

So you’ve had the concerns, you thought what was going to happen was in fact now happening.

And if we can now first deal with domestic abuse, please.

If we can have on screen INQ000651887.

This is a witness statement from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the NSPCC, and we can see that – at paragraph 75 – their helplines saw a 53% increase in contacts from people with concerns about children experiencing physical abuse, and that was between March to July 2020.

And if we can move on, please, to INQ000620981, I think you’ve referred to this already, haven’t you, Mr Hewitt, about knowledge-sharing events?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And we can see that this is the Operation Talla knowledge-sharing event that took place on

We know that individual police forces at this point were asked about their experiences as to what was happening locally and the threats and the risks that were posed to children during the lockdown.

So is that another good example of how the national coordination had come together –

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – and the information was found from the ground that was filtered into Operation Talla, and that knowledge was then shared across the country?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes. The process of knowledge-sharing events – which, as it happens, it now continues to this day within NPCC as a means of being able to share that, but I think the other really important point there is linking and working across the previous point that you made around NSPCC, that was a good example of how we were trying to manage a very unusual, if not unique, situation. Because, clearly, other organisations would be in possession of information and understanding, and those helplines, whether it was in the child abuse world or in domestic abuse, we were constantly linked in to be able

to understand what – so, what was coming through to us

would be very different in reported crime, but also

understanding what was going through to the various August 2020, a specific focus on children. 4 helplines for those organisations where people who were

concerned would necessarily reach out to.

Counsel Inquiry: And if we can turn to page 3 of this document we can see

that there was an entry from Hampshire. And at the very

bottom of the page we can see that:

“Domestic abuse has seen an overall increase of 12%

which is also reflected in high risk cases. The number

of children involved in domestic abuse cases has risen

by 14% and social care are saying that they have an

increase in demand of 15% …”

And at the very bottom:

“There has been a big reduction in the numbers of

children as victims of crime …”

And you alluded to a moment ago, Mr Hewitt, that the

picture the police were seeing, in terms of reported

figures, was very different compared to what the third

sector were maybe coming to you with, because already,

from the NSPCC, we’re seeing –

Mr Martin Qpm: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – quite significant increases in their reported calls

and referrals relating to both child sexual offending

and domestic violence.

We can see from the last paragraph on screen that there was a big reduction in Hampshire, so this is an example in August 2020. Throughout policing and policing figures and statistics during the pandemic, do we therefore have to apply some caution to maybe what was reported? Because that may not actually show the true picture.

Mr Martin Qpm: Well, I mean, I would personally say that that’s worth applying at all times, really. And particularly when, I think, we’re talking about domestic abuse, sexual offending, child abuse, there is – it is, you know, very well known, I think, that you will always have a degree of under reporting.

I think what this is reflecting here, of course, was the point that I alluded to earlier, is we were really concerned that this was likely to happen, because in many senses a lot of the environments in which a child may have the opportunity to disclose a concern or an allegation were being closed down by the fact that they weren’t in contact with the, sort of, other adults that they would be in contact with or the other environments where it might be spotted. So there – we were very alive to this.

And I think what this document demonstrates is the fact that we were trying to approach this from as many angles as we could to have the clearest picture of what we thought was actually happening.

Lady Hallett: Mr Hewitt, I’m sorry, maybe I’ve misunderstood that final sentence. I don’t know if you or Mr Lee can help me.

If you have a number of children involved in domestic abuse cases rising and a number of children the subject of sexual abuse rising, then, as victims of crimes, the numbers should be rising. So I read that final sentence as the numbers of children as victims of crime outside the home, but maybe I’ve got that wrong? It says “the numbers of children as victims of crime and as offenders”.

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes.

Lady Hallett: So I read it as – I don’t know –

Mr Martin Qpm: You may be – yeah, that may be correct. We certainly saw – for outside of the house, there were – certain crime types went down, where you would often have children as the victim and often as the offender. So we clearly saw – we clearly saw that.

But within, and I think the first paragraph there, it’s really talking about the impact on the children who would be – who were, by that stage, clearly locked into the domestic scenario, when you then get domestic abuse situations occurring that – whereas, in other circumstances, potentially that would be happening while the children were not present. So I think that’s – probably that’s correct.

Mr Lee: Now, Mr Hewitt, we know that in the early stages of the pandemic, a particular concern for the National Crime Agency was around the ability to detect abuse in the family home and in their view, they say it was likely to reduce.

If we could have on screen, please, INQ000648730, we can see that this is a document from the NPCC, and on screen it’s a disclosure made by a 9-year-old boy about what life was like under lockdown between March 2020 and August 2020. And we can see that the disclosure makes:

“My mum and dad hit me and my younger brother today. Since lockdown, my mum and have been getting angry with each other and then they end up hitting us. They have punched and hit us on our legs, arms, and sometimes on our faces. I have got some bruises and marks. It hardly ever happened before lockdown. Nobody else knows about it and my parents have threatened it will get worse if we tell anyone. I am finding it really hard. After they’ hit us there is a lot of shouting and I run to my room or out into the garden to get away from them.”

During a global pandemic, and in the context of people having to stay at home, did it become harder than ever to really understand what was going on and the increased risk that was potentially posed to children?

Mr Martin Qpm: Definitely. I mean, certainly those things that were happening in the domestic environment, it became – it was considerably harder. As I say, you know, because you’re not often in a pre-emptive opportunity to be in to those environments. You are reliant, or we are reliant, policing is reliant, on the child having an opportunity to report what has happened, or for some other adult to identify that they think there may have been those issues, which is exactly as the one just described there.

So this put it into a completely different place in terms of the ability for us to understand precisely what was going on.

Counsel Inquiry: And Mr Hewitt, we will return to reflections and lessons learned but I think it’s important at this point, can you help us with what can be done in the event of a future pandemic, whereby a pandemic results in people having to spend a significant amount of time at home in the family environment?

Mr Martin Qpm: I think the first thing would be for whatever regulations and however things are planned, there didn’t appear to me to be any consideration of the specific situation that children would find themselves in, and that comes into how we were having to police the regulations externally, as well. So I think you’ve got that.

It’s then also having much clearer routes through which anyone in a lockdown situation has the ability to report crime, not just children, but equally adults, as well, because this was true, again, for the domestic abuse scenario. So particularly in households where there are already pre-existing concerns about potential child abuse scenarios and/or domestic abuse scenarios, having mechanisms that are in place and can be explained to people as to how those that might be victims in those environments have a means of seeking help, I think would be – and I don’t underestimate how challenging that is.

And for some domestic abuse scenarios, there are ways that that can be done, but I’m not aware of that having been particularly considered around children.

Counsel Inquiry: I think that’s – Mr Hewitt, is it your view that that should be considered as – (overspeaking) –

Mr Martin Qpm: Yeah, if we are – if we were ever again in that situation, and this is, you know, we’re talking specifically about the – those, if you like, crime issues in the household, but it just seems to me more generally in terms of the impact that was going to have on children and young people, needs to be something factored in very clearly in the thought processes, both in the planning and then obviously in the implementation.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Hewitt, if we can now turn to child sexual abuse.

If we can have on screen INQ000231058.

This is a note from the Covid-19 resilience and preparedness meeting about the operational threat update on 24 March 2020. At the time we know people were staying at home. And Simon Bailey, who you’ve already referred to –

Mr Martin Qpm: I have.

Counsel Inquiry: – the police lead for child sexual abuse and exploitation explained that:

“… there [were] early signs that there [were] more people viewing indecent imagery of children in the last 2-3 days than in the last 2-3 months.”

If we can move, please, to the next document, which is INQ000651887.

Paragraph 77 of this statement from the NSPCC again highlights that they:

“… saw a threefold increase in the number of Childline counselling sessions about child sexual abuse within the family, from an average of 8 sessions per week before the pandemic restrictions were imposed so an average of 23 per week from March to May 2020.”

And finally, we know that the National Crime Agency disseminated more intelligence referrals relating to online child sexual abuse to police forces during the pandemic than they did in 2019.

Again, Mr Hewitt, you’ve already outlined in your evidence what the key factors were and what the key drivers were, in your view, as to why this type of offending would increase. Given you were worried about it, given we know that there was a surge, does that question the effectiveness of the mitigations put in by the police to try and limit harm to children?

Mr Martin Qpm: I mean, the reality, I think, from the outset that was – was that we were only ever going to be able to put in some mitigations, that were not going to be able to be comprehensive because of the situation that we were in and the situation that individual households were in.

I mean, the quote there about the number of individuals in households that were then, you know, viewing the images online, I mean, that was – there – I’m not sure how we could have controlled that in the – from the exterior in the way that we would obviously have wanted to. And so many of our routes for being able to directly intervene, in either the offending behaviour or in the vulnerability of the children, were restricted by the fact that the lockdown – the lockdown operated in the way that it did.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Hewitt, again, the same question in relation to domestic abuse. If we were to enter another lockdown, people were locked at home, people having more access to computers and the Internet, is there anything that the government could do or policing could do in the future to try to get on top of this before it gets out of hand?

Mr Martin Qpm: I think it – I think, as I said before, it’s about really considering that in a – in a deep way as you are working through, or as a government is working through, what are the restrictions that we need to put in place here.

In both of those cohorts, you will start – at any given point in time, you will start with a cohort of particularly vulnerable people, either particularly vulnerable people or, quite frankly, people who are more likely offending, in those areas.

So, for me, there is something about being able to plan through what are those additional safety nets and mitigations that you can put in place for either – for both the vulnerable group and the more likely offending group in advance. And as I say, some of those things were available around particularly domestic abuse, where there were already schemes in place to allow – you know, because domestic abuse victims can often be within the household and it’s dangerous for them to call police and so on.

So I think thinking through all of those mechanisms, and we are now in a different technological space than we were back in 2020 as well, so I think it’s about really looking and thinking what are those capabilities that can be there for someone who is potentially vulnerable, and also for how we can monitor those who are potentially more dangerous.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Hewitt, I now want to move on to a new topic and that is policing children. The Covid-19 regulations and children playing outside.

You refer to the term again in your statement as “public health policing”. Was it right, just to set the context, that the police were responsible to enforce Covid-19 regulations, which included – and I’ll stick to just some of the central and key regulations – the general public to remain at home unless they had a reasonable excuse, such as shopping, work or exercise, and also to enforce a requirement for people not to gather in public in groups of three or more, unless this was for work or if they’re in the same household.

And again, the Inquiry appreciates that the regulations were constantly changing.

Mr Martin Qpm: They were.

Counsel Inquiry: But are they really the central ones that the police were having to go out on the street to enforce?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes. I mean, those were the – and particularly the remaining at home was – in the first instance, was the primary one that caused, I think, the most significant challenges for policing.

Counsel Inquiry: And it’s right, isn’t it, that the regulations applied to children in the same way as the regulations applied to adults?

Mr Martin Qpm: There was no differentiation for – between children and adults in the regulations, which was very challenging from an operational policing perspective.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Hewitt – if we can have on screen, please, INQ000588036 – we can see at paragraphs 66(b) – and just to explain what this document., is, Mr Hewitt, it’s a witness statement from Ms Alice Ferguson, the founder and director of Playing Out. The Inquiry has also heard live evidence from Ms Ferguson. And in her statement she sets out why, in her opinion, the UK Government decisions did not consider or support children’s need for free play, outdoor time, social contracts and physical activity.

We can see as she sets out at 66(b):

“No clarity about outdoor play for the children in the rules or official messaging; no clear advice to [the] public, local authorities or [to the] police – resulting in confusion, vastly different misinterpretations and responses and ultimately many children being prevented or discouraged from playing outside.”

Would you agree with that analysis?

Mr Martin Qpm: I would agree very strongly with that analysis, and the – the reality – this – it was police officers on the ground in all of the forces that were having to undertake the role – the policing of – the health restriction policing. And as I know the Inquiry is familiar, we – we came out with a way of doing that which was about engaging people, encouraging them to follow the rules, engaging people, explaining the rules, encouraging them to follow, and then only at the end enforcing.

That was even harder. You were then relying on individual police officers to take discretion in the people that they met. You alluded to the rules. It was very indistinct about what was a legitimate reason to be outside or not.

But the other really important point for me is the pandemic was not experienced in the same way by the everybody, and particularly the lockdown situation.

If you lived in a three bedroomed house with your own garden, the concept of being locked indoors and having to self-teach your children or for your children to be on Zoom calls with their school was one experience. If you were with three children in a two-bedroomed flat on the ninth floor of a high-rise block with no outdoor space, your experience of Covid was considerably different.

There are social inequalities in everything, but I think the experience of the pandemic, and particularly the lockdown, really highlighted those. And so it became very difficult for our officers where someone in that latter circumstance just wants to allow those children to get out into some fresh air, in a kind of open space near where they were, but that was breaching the regulations. And you are then in the situation for the officers to have to deal with those circumstances, which was very, very challenging for them.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, Mr Hewitt, you explain in your statement that:

“As the pandemic progressed, that there was growing recognition of the importance of play for children’s mental health and development. Police forces were advised to use discretion and common sense when encountering children playing …”

And you say:

“This helped to maintain public trust and avoided unnecessary …”

Can I take it as read, then, from what you’ve told the Inquiry this afternoon that it was your view that you needed – an officer on the ground needed clearer guidance as to what children could be outside for and what they couldn’t be outside for?

Mr Martin Qpm: I think throughout, and with children definitely, but more broadly, the clarity of what was permissible and what was not permissible, where the regulations changed was a constant theme throughout the pandemic and increasingly, as regulations changed, just having the time and then coming with very clear parameters, because it then becomes quite unfair because you’re then – you are more and more relying on the individual discretion of the individual police officer, and we were having to go through the process of trying to explain to all of those individual police officers across the UK what we thought was the best way for them to interpret the regulations and enforce them.

Counsel Inquiry: And in terms of the type of notice that these officers were getting, so the officers that were going out on the ground, children were playing, they’ve then got to enact what the regulations say. How long were these officers getting to read the regulations to understand them?

Mr Martin Qpm: So we were – we produced – every time there was a regulation changed, we went through a process of producing briefings to go out to forces. The reality is, on – well, the worst occasion was when the regulation changed and it was 16 minutes before that became a regulation in law, and so clearly on that example, I refused for us to start enforcing that in 16 minutes later because it wasn’t possible. We had to go through a process legally to understand the regulation, then to produce some briefings that we could then share out to all the officers to give them, as best we could, our understanding of the right way, using discretion, for them to actually manage those regulations.

So we would then distribute those, and then, once I was satisfied that those had gone out to all forces, we would then start to actually police that particular regulation. But, of course, for individual officers, we are talking about officers who are – generally speaking, it would be response and patrol officers that would be interacting in this way. They would be on 24-hour shifts. So we would have processes to try to make sure that they were getting their briefings, and on occasion, these regulations changed quite quickly.

And the other thing that we do have to bear in mind is for police officers, the regulations for most of the pandemic were different in the four countries of the United Kingdom, and so in some senses not so much, but if you were in – working in a border area, that became quite a challenge for police officers, as well, where the regulations could literally be different on one side of the road to the other.

And then of course as we moved through and you started to get the more localised lockdowns, that again created some real challenges for police officers in making sure that they were interpreting the regulation appropriately for the place they were in, and then obviously having to deal with the members of the public who would be probably quite confused themselves, as well.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Hewitt, we know that in terms of enforcement a fixed penalty notice couldn’t be issued to a child.

Mr Martin Qpm: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: But would you accept that given the way the regulations were enforced or encouraged, that it had the practical effect of children being sent home from playing at the playground, building snowmen?

Mr Martin Qpm: It definitely did.

Counsel Inquiry: And again we heard, the Inquiry heard evidence from Ms Ferguson, and to summarise what she said, she provided an example about the impact on children having been stopped playing out by the police, and she said it was huge. She referred to what she called the snowman story.

Mr Martin Qpm: Mm.

Counsel Inquiry: There were two brothers who lived in a high-rise flat in central London. They had no garden, no access to outside space. They came out when it snowed and built a snowman together, and this was in January 2021. The police arrived and told them off. They were told to go back inside because they were breaking the law. She said she then spoke to their dad recently, and he explained what the impact was on the children.

He said one of his sons in particular hadn’t fully recovered, he was still socially anxious, he’d lost his confidence about going out and being social.

That’s an example from 2021, you’ve already explained that it was difficult for officers on the ground –

Mr Martin Qpm: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – to interpret the regulations. At any point were you going to the Home Secretary and saying, “We need more guidance, this what’s happening on the ground. You need to help”?

Mr Martin Qpm: We were – I mean, we were making the point around children very clearly, and that example is a, you know, a good and sort of sad example of the situation there, because again, from my perspective, I said at the very beginning, one of the – one of my priorities was that we weren’t – the pandemic, policing the pandemic was not going to manifestly impact on the public relationship with policing. And examples like that are exactly the kind of example that I was concerned about.

And we did, you know, I was repeatedly raising the issue that this was causing difficulty. And then, where it manifested itself later on was in the phenomenon of the unlicensed music events that started when things opened up a little bit further and of course a lot of the people that were trying to go to those unlicensed music events were teenagers because it was a chance for them to get out and be sociable and do all of the things that they would want to do.

And that, again, put the police very much in a kind of conflict situation with groups of young people, who felt that what they were doing was not unreasonable.

Lady Hallett: There have been a number of references to the Home Office but, of course, one of the problems you faced, as I recall from our discussion about this before, was that the regulations were coming from the DHSC.

Mr Martin Qpm: Correct.

Lady Hallett: And the Home Office had limited input.

Mr Martin Qpm: And I mean, I did try – I tried to sort of make that point in answer to the earlier question but that was right. I mean, I genuinely believe that the Home Office officials and ministers that we were engaged with absolutely understood the challenge that was being presented. And the Home Secretary and the Police Minister at the time were absolutely focused on: we cannot let all of this fundamentally damage the relationship between the police and various – you know, police in general, the public in general, particularly with particular communities, and I would argue young people are a really key community, where it is always challenging the relationship between policing and young people.

So they absolutely got that. I think the challenge was how much that – how much influence that was having when it got to the key decision-making being done at the centre.

Mr Lee: Mr Hewitt, I’m going to move on to my final topic, and it’s one question.

If we can have on screen, please, INQ000649420. We can see that this is a report “Policing the Pandemic”. It was a report commissioned by policing. It focused on

exploring young people’s experiences and

recommendations. The report is dated July 2020 and it

provides a snapshot of young people’s views and

experiences of policing during lockdown, between May and

June 2020, and the project gathered views of over 3,900

young people across England and Wales.

The report made 11 key recommendations, the general

theme being how the police can improve their

communication and engagement with children and young

people. How did these recommendations, which are on

page 13, feed into future work of the NPCC or the work

of other police forces?

Mr Martin Qpm: Yeah, so they, I mean, absolutely did, and obviously

worked through our children and young persons portfolio,

which is chaired, as I say by – well, it was the deputy

chief constable, now chaired by a chief constable. And

so that was absolutely key. We already had

a child-centred policing best practice framework which

actually had been published in January of 2020 and at

that stage quite clearly had not, in any sense,

envisaged a pandemic.

So working through with the recommendations from

that group and others, because we worked with – we also

worked with the National Youth – there was a National

Youth Agency report about – called Out of Sight which we supported again, which was looking at the impact that this had all had on children. So that feeds through.

We are currently – the updated version of the report that I just referred is to the Children and Young Persons Policing Strategy, which the latest version start – came out last year and takes us to 2027. And we’ve also now got, purely coincidentally, I think, either today, or very – if it hasn’t been this week, a children and young persons charter for 2025, which again picks up on the core issue which sits here, which is about that absolutely critical relationship between policing and young people.

And the fact of the matter is that what we had to do with policing the pandemic, and whilst accepting all of the health security issues and the requirements for that, and I entirely understand those, what really concerned us at the outset and throughout was the impact this was having on the relationship between young people and policing, and the potential, sort of, enduring issue that that would have.

Mr Lee: Thank you, Mr Hewitt.

My Lady, those are my questions. Do you have any questions?

Lady Hallett: I don’t.

Thank you very much indeed, Mr Hewitt. I’m sure

you’ll be pleased to know that’s the end of the demands

we’re going to make on your time.

I appreciate you’ve been asked questions about

matters at a high level, for obvious reasons, but please

reassure any of your former colleagues that in Module 10

we’ll be examining the impact on a number of key

workers, and I was recently looking at the roundtable

report, and that includes a number of police officers

who were on the ground trying to enforce these rather

confusing regulations.

The Witness: I think that will be appreciated. It is easy

to underestimate the challenge that that put in, and the

fact that, as I said earlier, whilst they were working

there and doing what they were doing professionally,

they were all still impacted in the same way as all of

us by the concerns that the pandemic had for yourself

and your family. So I think that will be much

appreciated.

Lady Hallett: Good.

Well, thank you again for all the help you’ve given,

very grateful.

The Witness: No, thank you.

Lady Hallett: Very well, I shall return at 10.00 tomorrow.

(4.35 pm)

(The hearing adjourned until 10.00 am the following day)