A long-awaited investigation into the Covid pandemic is set to become the most expensive in history – costing an estimated £136,907 a day over the last year.
Taxpayers shelled out almost £70m in the last financial year and the inquiry is not expected to report its findings until the end of 2026, so the final cost is likely to be around £200m.
That would dwarf the £195 million spent on the 12-year investigation into the deaths of 13 people on Bloody Sunday.
More than half of the £94m already spent on the Covid inquiry, chaired by retired Court of Appeal judge Baroness Hallett, has gone towards legal costs.
Another £100,000 a day has been spent on a team of 265 civil servants working full time to provide the inquiry with government documents and witnesses, according to separate figures published this week.
The long-awaited Covid inquiry is chaired by retired Court of Appeal judge Baroness Hallett.
Professor Carl Heneghan, of the center for evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford, who gave evidence at the inquiry, said The times: ‘This is an exorbitant amount of money, but the way the research has been structured is designed to be expensive.
‘You are preparing to take sides with a legalistic approach which is not the best way to learn lessons. It would be a lot cheaper and more effective if you really took the medicine approach and said let’s accept that mistakes were made and look at how we should do things differently in the future.’
Lord Saville of Newdigate, who carried out the Bloody Sunday inquiry, defended the high cost. “It has to be thorough and fair,” he said. “That takes time and experience, which is expensive.”
John O’Connell, chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which compiled the cost analysis, said: “The Covid investigation must be short, sharp and decisive, not an expensive political pantomime.”
A spokesperson for the Covid inquiry said: “It was the government’s decision to set up this public inquiry with very broad terms of reference. The scope of the inquiry is exceptionally broad and affects the work of many government departments across all four countries of the UK. It is forced to collect evidence from many organisations, especially those at the center of the pandemic response.’
A government spokesperson said: ‘To ensure transparency, the government is committed to publishing its costs in response to the investigation. This is in line with the inquiry’s own quarterly financial reports.’