Kemi Badenoch gives evidence to Covid inquiry – UK politics live | Politics
Kemi Badenoch gives evidence to Covid inquiry
Kemi Badenoch has just started giving evidence to the Covid inquiry. She is being questioned by Hugo Keith KC, counsel for the inquiry.
Keith starts off by asking about the structure of government during the pandemic, and the fact that there was a minister for women, a minister for disabled people, and a minister for equalities (Badenoch).
Badenoch says the Government Equalities Office was set up “to deliver one policy, which was gay marriage”.
There is a live feed of the hearing here.
Key events
Badenoch is now being asked about the Traveller community
When it is put to her that the health authorities did not have enough data about GRT (Gypsy, Roma and Traveller) people, Badenoch says she thinks that local councils had good information about where Travellers were living in their area.
And that is the end of Badenoch’s evidence.
Badenoch is now being questioned by Leslie Thomas KC representing the Federation of Ethnic Minority Healthcare Organisations (FEMHO).
He asks if her concerns about the disproportionate impact of Covid on ethnic minorities were taken sufficiently she seriously when policy was being developed.
Badenoch says she thinks they were taken into account.
Thomas says that in her witness statement Badenoch says she expressed concern about hte proposal to make vaccines compulsory for care workers. He asks about those reservations being ignored.
Badenoch says government has to take a collective view. Just because an opinion has been accepted, that does not mean it was ignored, she says.
Badenoch suggests private WhatsApp groups can be more dangerous source of misinformation than public sites like X
Keith asks about misinformation and disinformation. He says the fourth report from the Race Disparity Unit that Kemi Badenoch oversaw spoke about the importance of this being tackled.
Q: Is there a limit to what government can do?
Badenoch says there is always a limit to what central government can do.
She goes on:
I think it’s probably worth explaining what it is that I mean by misinformation and disinformation. People often assume that it’s stuff on Twitter or X. I’m actually less worried about that sort of misinformation because it’s very public, and people who know can challenge it easily. So that’s an open sphere.
Badenoch says she is more worried about things like WhatsApp groups, “things that government has no insight into”.
Even the tech companies don’t really know what’s being shared. It’s all encrypted, and a lot of false information travels very quickly through those channels.
Badenoch says in some cases “reputable sources” were even spreading misinformation/ She claims there were people in the BMA who thought the government was trying to suppress information about what was happening to ethnic minorities.
She says government can respond by putting information into the public domain. She says she took part in vaccine trials to show the vaccines were safe.
Kemi Badenoch at the Covid inquiry Photograph: Covid inquiry
At the Covid inquiry the hearing has resumed. Hugo Keith, counsel for the inquiry, asks about a meeting Kemi Badenoch held with high commissioners from some countries linked to the minority communities were vaccine take-up was low. He says the meeting did not achieve much, because the high commissioners did not have much influence over these people.
Badenoch says high commission are not set up to run these sorts of publicity campaigns.
Q: Did you liaise with the National Pharmacy Association about what pharmacists could play?
Badenoch says she recalls one meeting with pharmacists – she cannot recall which group organised it. She says the government did use pharmacists effectively.
Keith shows minutes from the meeting. He says pharmacists operate particularly in deprived areas.
Q: It does not appear pharmacists were used as much as they might have been. They were not always open 12 hours a day.
Badenoch says she thinks pharmacists were used successfully for the rollout of the vacccine. She says Keith is showing her the agenda for a meeting, not minutes of the meeting.
Q: Do you think councils were used enough?
Badenoch says she was not working at the local government department at the height of the pandemic. By the time she started there as a minister, she says she thought a lot of work was being done with them.
Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP in charge of the private member’s bill on assisted dying, has written to MPs saying she has extended the time the bill committee will get to consider all the written submissions it has received, because there have been so many, Jessica Elgot says.
NEW - Kim Leadbeater writes to all MPs today, ahead of the assisted dying committee beginning public hearings tomorrow.
She says she has extended the time MPs can consider written submissions because of the volume that has been received. pic.twitter.com/Za2nUlwB7h
This is what Kemi Badenoch told the inquiry earlier when asked if there should have been a single secretary of state for equalities to ensure all departments could deal with ethnic disparities which emerged during the pandemic. (See 11.25am.)
I’m not sure that that would have worked.
We did have someone in cabinet with that responsibility. I was a junior minister at the time, but Liz Truss was in cabinet, so that would have been her job.
If what you’re saying is, ‘should we have had someone who is exclusively focused on that and nothing else?’ I think that the disadvantage would be they would have no levers, they would purely be in an advisory role.
Kemi Badenoch arriving at the Covid inquiry earlier. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
The hearing has stopped for a short break. Heather Hallett, the chair, tells Badenoch that her evidence will be finished by lunchtime.
Keith is now asking Badenoch about the fourth report produced by the Race Disparity Unit. It was produced in December 2021.
Keith highlights this recommendation.
Relevant health departments and agencies should review and action existing requests for health data, and undertake an independent strategic review of the dissemination of healthcare data and the publication of statistics and analysis.
He asks if this was an acknowledgment that data was not being properly collected.
Badenoch says this was about looking forward.
She is now making a more general point, claiming the public sector is not good at collecting this sort of information. She recalls working on an NHS IT project before she became an MP (when she was a computer engineer), and she says the project failed.
Government is not necessarily great at delivering these systems. They tend to be big boondoggles for the private sector, but there are private sector companies that can deliver this. There need to be caveats around that.
Badenoch says there is a debate going on about letting AI have access to health data. She says she personally has “no issues” with the ethical objections, but she says there are security factors that would have to be taken into account.
Keith is now asking Badenoch about vaccine hesitancy among black, asian and minority ethnic people. (Keith refers to this group as BAME people, saying that although the government does not use that term now, it did use it at the time.) He shows the inquiry the minute of a cabinet committee were the minister for vaccines, Nadhim Zahawi, discussed this.
Minutes from cabinet committee on 25 January 2021 Photograph: Covid inquiry
Keith asks Badenoch to comment on the vaccine take-up problem.
Badenoch says the government had a problem collecting good data. She says lots of data was available, but it was not necessarily good data.
Kemi Badenoch gives evidence to Covid inquiry
Kemi Badenoch has just started giving evidence to the Covid inquiry. She is being questioned by Hugo Keith KC, counsel for the inquiry.
Keith starts off by asking about the structure of government during the pandemic, and the fact that there was a minister for women, a minister for disabled people, and a minister for equalities (Badenoch).
Badenoch says the Government Equalities Office was set up “to deliver one policy, which was gay marriage”.
There is a live feed of the hearing here.
Kemi Badenoch is due to start giving evidence to the Covid inquiry soon. She is giving evidence in her capacity as minister for equalities during the pandemic. From February 2020 to September 2021 she combined being equalities minister with being a Treasury minister, and from September 2021 to July 2022 she combined being equalities minister with being a levelling up minister.
In November 2023 the inquiry published a 38-page witness statement from Badenoch covering what she did as equalities minister during the pandemic. She describes being responsible for quarterly reports and Covid and health inequalities.
In the witness statement Badenoch writes about being strongly committed to this work in part because of her Nigerian heritage (in the first wave of Covid, black African Britons were about three times as likely to die from the disease as white Britons). She says:
I was absolutely committed to reviewing the actions that government departments and their agencies had put in place to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19. I am of Nigerian heritage and the higher infection and mortality rates for ethnic minority groups was directly impacting me, my family, friends and community. This was a very personal issue, and it was clear to me that there was much good work underway, but I believed that departments needed to do more, and be more innovative, in their work to address the disparities.
But, in her witness statement, Badenoch also stresses that different racial groups were affected in different ways, and she says that referring to ethnic minority people as a single group could be misleading, and stigmatising.
In my work, I was always concerned about the overall risk groups faced, rather than that posed by Covid-19 infection alone. For example, issues such as the impact of stigmatisation from poor communications were also important to consider and keep under continuous review. This was something that I raised in my quarterly reports. This included the second report’s summary of the findings of research commissioned by RDU [race disparity unit] into a small group of ethnic minority people’s personal experiences of Covid-19. Participants in the research felt that communications tended to frame ethnic minorities as a homogeneous group that was vulnerable to Covid-19, which they found stigmatising. My final report also recommended that the government and health agencies ensure that public health communications do not stigmatise ethnic minorities when explaining that they may be more vulnerable or at higher risk. This recommendation was accepted by the prime minister.
Legislation has come into force bringing a long-delayed bottle deposit scheme closer to implementation in England and Northern Ireland.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the law is now in force to allow a deposit management organisation to be appointed in April. This will be in charge of administering the bottle deposit scheme, which is due to launch in October 2027.
Under the scheme, customers will be paid a small sum if they return plastic bottles and steel and aluminium cans. Glass bottles are not included.
Mary Creagh, the circular economy minister, said:
This government will clean up Britain and end the throwaway society.
This is a vital step as we stop the avalanche of rubbish that is filling up our streets, rivers and oceans and protect our treasured wildlife. Turning trash into cash also delivers on our Plan for Change by kickstarting clean growth, ensuring economic stability, more resilient supply chains, and new green jobs.
The scheme will cover England and Northern Ireland. Scotland and Wales are working on their own plans.
When Rachel Reeves gives a heavily trailed speech on growth on Wednesday, she is due to back plans for a third runway at Heathrow – a proposal that various governments have been floating for at least 20 years.
According to the Financial Times, as part of its growth strategy the government is reviving another plan from the past; it wants to develop the “Oxford-Cambridge Arc” as an area for high-productivity development.
In his story Peter Foster reports:
Science secretary Peter Kyle on Monday said the government wanted to double the economic output of the science-rich region that stretches between Britain’s two best-known universities, with the manufacturing and logistics hub of Milton Keynes in between.
“The Oxford-Cambridge Arc is already an engine of prosperity, but we can go even further. We are determined to unleash research and development as a driving force in our mission to grow the economy in every corner of the country,” he said.
No new money was announced for the Arc on Monday. But the government committed in the October budget to deliver the East West Rail project that will revive the “Varsity” railway, which connected Oxford and Cambridge until it was closed in 1967.
Boris Johnson’s government published plans for the “Oxford-Cambridge Arc” four years ago.
A persistent slowdown in activity among private sector firms could weigh on economic growth over the coming months, with businesses set to cut staff and raise prices, according to a CBI survey. PA Media reports:
The upcoming increase to national insurance contributions has prompted firms to assess their budgets urgently, the CBI said.
Output across the private sector is expected to drop over the next three months, having fallen over the previous three-month period, the survey found.
Activity has been flat or falling since the middle of 2022, reflecting a prolonged period of stagnation.
The CBI, a membership organisation which represents large chains through to small businesses, surveyed 990 firms between December and January.
The survey suggested that sentiment among businesses dipped in the aftermath of the Government’s autumn budget.
Some respondents highlighted that the tax rises had resulted in them reviewing their budgets at short notice and taking steps to mitigate higher costs.
Plans include raising prices to pass on additional costs to clients, trimming investment plans and cutting staff to reduce business expenses.
Alpesh Paleja, interim deputy chief economist for the CBI, said: “After a grim lead-up to Christmas, the New Year hasn’t brought any sense of renewal, with businesses still expecting a significant fall in activity.
Responding to the survey, Andrew Griffith, the shadow business secretary, said: “Businesses are clear that the real blocker to growth is Rachel Reeves and the mistakes being made by this government.”
52% of Gen Z think UK would be better with 'strong leader' not worrying about 'parliament or elections', finds poll
Good morning. It is Holocaust memorial day, and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and the Westminster politics news is relatively light this morning because broadcasters have been focusing on these events. No 10 did not even have a minister doing a morning interview round. Jakub Krupa, who recently took over writing the Guadian Europe live blog, is covering all the relevant events here.
The big Westminster news yesterday was the fact that Keir Starmer and Donald Trump have had their first conversation since the inauguration. They spoke for 45 minutes, after Trump gave a peculiar “very good person” (for a liberal) endorsement of Starmer to reporters on Air Force One. (It was slightly patronising – “he’s done a very good job thus far” – but, from the No 10 point of view, a lot more welcome than what gets said when the president is in ‘bad Trump’ mode.) Eleni Courea has the story here.
And this morning the Times is reporting some fascinating polling that will alarm anyone who thinks that that the election of Trump is evidence of a global shift in political thinking with worrying consequences for democracy. It suggests young people think authoritarianism is preferable.
Recently we reported on polling suggesting that one in five Britons between the ages of 18 and 45 “prefer strong leaders without elections to democracy”. The new poll is a more extreme version of the same trend.
In his Times story, Alex Farber reports:
Most young people are in favour of turning the UK into a dictatorship, according to a “deeply worrying” study, which has revealed an acceptance of authoritarianism and radicalism among Generation Z.
Fifty-two per cent of Gen Z – people aged between 13 and 27 – said they thought “the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”.
Thirty-three per cent suggested the UK would be better off “if the army was in charge”.
Forty-seven per cent agreed that “the entire way our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution” – compared with 33 per cent of 45 to 65-year-olds.
The polling was carried out by Craft for a Channel 4 report, Gen Z: trends, truth and trust, being released later this week.
Here is the agenda for the day.
After 10.30am: Kemi Badenoch gives evidence to the Covid inquiry, in its module on vaccines and therapeutics, in her capacity as a former equalities minister.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Bridget Phillipson, education secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
Afternoon: Nadhim Zahawi, the former vaccines minister, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry.
4.30pm: Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, gives evidence to the environmenal audit committee on the outcome of the Cop29 climate conference.
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