"Schools was the single riskiest element" Sunak's Inquiry witness statement, August 2020
Despite this warning regarding the UK's autumn planning, the Treasury intervened against measures in schools
A single passage of Prime Minister Sunak’s witness statement to the UK Covid Inquiry has been released. The media focus has been on his comments about the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, Sunak says the government’s experts didn’t express concerns about the scheme, however during their hearings the government’s most senior advisers said they hadn’t been consulted on the scheme.
However in this section of Sunak’s witness statement there is reveal which is much more consequential than a scheme that ran for a month, and that’s the acknowledgement that Sunak was told that "Schools was the single riskiest element of the government’s plan.”
Official government messaging was that schools played an insignificant role in transmission, it would appear they lied. The government even spent public money on a propaganda campaign in August 2020 telling us schools were low risk and that they has ensured there were additional measures such as "smaller class sizes" and "improved ventilation."
Treasury intervened on school’s guidance for September 2020
SAGE, CMO and CSA said schools were likely to increase transmission, more measures were recommended than were implemented, and yet the government was telling the public the opposite. An FOI revealed the DfE were not involved in writing the June or September 2020 schools guidance, a source inside the DfE told me the Treasury had intervened and imposed a more reckless approach to schools returning.
More details below.
Sunak was told schools were the riskiest part of the government’s plans, and his decision was to push for as little mitigation in schools as possible. In an interview for the Spectator shortly before Sunak was beaten by Liz Truss in the Conservatie leadership election, Sunak described himself as a lone voice at the top of government fighting against measures.
He claimed no economic modelling had been done when the modelling he personally commissioned for the treasury in April 2020 has been publicly available for more than three years. Sunak also claims he had no influence on policy which clearly doesn’t appear to be the case.
In the interview Sunak also says he has been taking alternative advice from professors at his old university Stanford. It should be noted that Jay Bhattacharya, author of the Great Barrington Declaration is a professor at Stanford as are several others who made up the group of academics that lobbied and met with Trump to push for a herd immunity strategy.
More details below.
And when schools returned and cases began to rise with many schools struggling to stay open by October 2020, what did gov and media do? They tried to suppress information on the number of outbreaks in education.
For instance the BBCs Newnight missed out education on its graph of PHE outbreak data, this was over 28% of recorded outbreaks.
More details below.
The Impact
Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out added to transmission meaning community levels were higher when schools returned in September. They returned with less measures due to the Treasury's influence on schools guidance.
Cases rose quickly, SAGE suggested a circuit breaker and Sunak organised the meeting with Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and Anders Tegnell. Instead of a circuit breaker Johnson and Sunak opted for a tier system of restrictions, during the inquiry hearings the government’s senior advisers said the tier system wasn't supported by their advice and was described as “levelling up” infections around the country.
WhatsApp messages released by the inquiry
When lockdown was implemented in November education stayed open without even the consideration of introducing additional measures or giving Headteachers the option of moving to rotas when staffing became stretched. Besides the direct health consequences of infections, the result of these decisions was a collapse of contact tracing in schools and extreme disruption to education and a disordered chaotic move to enforced rotas due to a lack of teaching staff with large numbers of students being sent home because there simply weren’t enough adults left to provide a safe learning environment.
As further evidence that Sunak took a gung-ho approach to the pandemic, in February 2021 in setting out a plan to have all measures removed by the start of September, Boris Johnson referred to the Treasury as the “pro-death squad”.
