By Tony O’Reilly-
The Covid-19 public inquiry will cost a whopping £85m when the begin next year, after the government hired top legal and public relations firms.
Leading law firms have been placed on multimillion-pound contracts alongside specialist firms appointed with the challenge of examining millions of sensitive documents that would form key parts of the inquiry.
The Department of Health and Social Care, which presided over controversial policies on admissions of potentially infected hospital patients into care homes, has hired a number of reputable law firms including Pinsent Masons, who have been put on a £2.2m legal services contract. The Cabinet Office has also hired the same firm on a £7m “public inquiry response unit co-partnering contract”. It has also hired Burges Salmon, another law firm, on a £9.8m legal services deal.
The UK-wide inquiry into the impact of the pandemic, also examining accountability, is expected to be one of the most expensive statutory public inquiries ever to be conducted. Costs that exceed anticipated expenses will be borne by the taxpayer. Bereaved groups, the NHS, representatives of disproportionately affected minorities and town halls will also feature in costs.
The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group said: “If [inquiry chair] Baroness Hallett allows powerful institutions to run up the costs with eye-wateringly expensive lawyers just to protect their reputations then the inquiry would be a shocking waste of time and money.”
The Home Office has agreed a £500,000 “strategic communications” deal with Crest Advisory, an agency founded by a former Downing Street adviser, and the government is spending £64,000 on monitoring media coverage of the inquiry, beyond what its own press offices already do.
A spokesperson for the government legal department said the government required “significant legal support, which departments will procure at their own discretion from approved internal and external sources”. They added: “All appointments represent value for money and ensure that the inquiry can fulfil its remit.”
A spokesperson for the inquiry said: “Annual accounts for the UK Covid-19 inquiry will be published on the inquiry website.”
The Covid inquiry’s chair, Lady Heather Hallett, formally opened proceedings in July and said the sprawling investigation would be broken down into at least nine modules, which will run one after another. She said it would examine the “performance and effectiveness” of central government decision-making and its messaging – topics likely to expose current and former ministers.
Hallett said in her opening remarks in July that she wanted to move as “speedily as possible so lessons are learned before another pandemic strikes” and that inequalities would be “at the forefront” of the investigation
National firm Burges Salmon has secured a £9.8m contract with the Cabinet Office to provide legal services to the inquiry, which is chaired by former Court of Appeal judge Baroness Hallett and is due to hold its first preliminary hearing next month.
A senior solicitor or partner at the firm will act as solicitor to the inquiry and advise Hallett on ‘topics and witnesses for public hearings, the scheduling of such hearings and taking evidence and witness statements from relevant organisations and individuals’, according to the contract specification.
Listed firm DWF also secured a £5m contract with the Department for Education in June to ‘supplement capacity available from [the] Government Legal Department to support the Covid-19 inquiry’, according to a government database of public contracts.
International firm Gowling WLG won a £3.6m contract from the Department for International Trade while fellow international firm Pinsent Masons was awarded two contracts worth a total of nearly £10m from the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the Cabinet Office.
Pinsent Masons was given a £7m contract for ‘the provision of legal services to support the Cabinet Office response to the Covid-19 public inquiry’, as well as a £2.17m ten-month contract for providing legal advice to DHSC.
The government has also awarded three contracts worth just over £33m to Legastat, Epiq Systems and Anexsys for ‘e-disclosure and review services’ for a number of government departments in relation to the inquiry.
The inquiry will examined many aspects of the way the pandemic was handled by the government and the Nhs.