‘Flawed analysis’, they called it. For years, we at the TaxPayers’ Alliance have been forecasting the ultimate cost of the Covid Inquiry. And on pretty much every occasion, the inquiry has completely dismissed our warnings, saying it was based on ‘hypothetical future expenditure and an imaginary end date’.
They’re right in one sense. We don’t know exactly when the inquiry will end, so we used the date when they expect to conclude taking evidence – June 2026. And on each occasion we’ve produced an estimate on the assumption that their future spending will increase at the same rate as their past spending.
Realistically, the inquiry will go on beyond June 2026, as it will take weeks or months to actually compile the final report, during which time costs will continue to climb. And in actuality, the inquiry’s spending has only accelerated since our first estimate in November 2023.
We first predicted that this would be the most expensive statutory public inquiry in history back in May 2024. The results are now in. To September 2025, the inquiry spent an astonishing £192 million, with its formal end not even in sight. It is likely to have spent around £230m by next summer, a daily spend of about £160,000.
The issues with the Covid Inquiry are a function, not a flaw of the system. It should have focused on one question and one question only. Namely, was the UK’s highly authoritarian response to the pandemic worth it? Did it save enough lives to be worth the enormous damage it did to the country? The businesses destroyed, the liberties suspended, the relationships ended, the developments stunted.
If tightly focused on this question, this could have all been wrapped up very quickly, like in the case of Sweden. It could have been done at low cost, and delivered genuinely useful answers. There are other facets to the Covid pandemic that are worth exploring, inevitably. And there would be nothing to prevent individual departments from holding similar, small scale exercises on relevant issues. But the broader the inquiry itself became, the more inevitable it was that costs would spiral. By the time we get the final report, the Covid pandemic will be a distant memory. It’s strongly reminiscent of the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war, which reported back a farcical 13 years after the invasion of Iraq.
What have we got for the £192m spent so far? Well, we’ve had one module on the impact of the pandemic on the health systems of the four nations of the UK, even though Scotland is holding its own inquiry (itself costing tens of millions of pounds). We’ve also been told that a ‘macho’ culture harmed the Covid response, including misogynistic language.
One of the biggest items of spending – almost £15m or nearly 10% of the total cost – has been ‘Every Story Matters’, described as the largest public engagement exercise ever undertaken by a UK public inquiry. It has led to 58,000 stories being shared with the inquiry. Which undoubtedly meant a lot to those telling them. But it’s difficult to see what value this has when it comes to answering the question: was the government’s approach to the pandemic the right one?
I would love to call this mission creep, but the almost unlimited remit was built into the inquiry from the start. It is yet another Frankenstein’s monster created by the British state. After the mess that was the state’s approach to Covid, our broken bureaucracy is now adding insult to injury with this shambles of an inquiry.
