UK Covid-19 Inquiry, Modules 2, 2A, 2B, 2C: Core decision-making and political governance

How the text on Reports that Matter was made, and where it still falls short of the printed page. Nothing has been rewritten. Where we know the text differs from the published report, this page says so.

Last reviewed 12 November 2026, when Volume II was added.

The edition

• Source: the report on core decision-making and political governance (HC 1436), by the Chair of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, the Rt Hon the Baroness Hallett DBE, ordered to be printed on 20 November 2025, in its two volumes, as linked from the Inquiry's report page and kept in the report's repository. They are the canonical citation targets.
  • Volume I (HC 1436-I), Introduction and key events from January 2020 to May 2022: the version the Inquiry re-issued in February 2026 "with post-publication amends" (Version 1.1), 460 A4 pages, SHA-256 af1ca2d8…1bae.
  • Volume II (HC 1436-II), Key themes, lessons and recommendations: the November 2025 accessible PDF (Version 1, not re-issued), 336 A4 pages, SHA-256 08ab8adc…969a.
• The February 2026 amends. The re-issued volume adds a correction slip (dated 16 January 2026) and makes the two corrections it lists, both included here: in Chapter 2, paragraph 41, Ms Sturgeon's briefing of 24 January 2020 came from the Scottish Government's Health Protection Policy Team, not Health Protection Scotland; in Chapter 3, paragraph 16, Mr Pengelly's letter to the health and social care trusts was dated 26 March 2020, not 1 March. We compared the whole text of the November 2025 PDF with the re-issued one and found no other change to the report's words.
• Licence: Crown copyright 2025, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0, as each volume's imprint states (Volume I's third page, Volume II's fourth).
• Covers: both volumes. Volume I: the Chair's Introduction, Voices, the Executive summary (which summarises the whole report and lists its recommendations in brief), and Chapters 1 to 8, the account of key events from January 2020 to May 2022. Volume II: Voices, Chapters 9 to 15 (scientific and technical advice; vulnerabilities and inequalities; government decision-making; public health communications; legislation and enforcement; intergovernmental working; key lessons for future emergencies), Appendix 1 (the background to the module and the Inquiry's methodology), Appendix 2 (glossary) and Appendix 3, the full list of the report's 19 recommendations. Volume II was added on 12 November 2026; Volume I's text and paragraph links did not change.
• Size: about 320,000 words including the notes; 5,027 notes (3,236 in Volume I, 1,791 in Volume II); 2,426 numbered paragraphs (1,422 and 1,004).
• Not used: the November 2025 PDF (superseded by the corrections above), the In Brief summary and the Easy Read edition (separate publications).

How the text was read

• Born-digital, so the words are the PDF's own. The PDF was made from InDesign and its text layer is clean; no OCR of the report's text is involved. About 95% of the PDF's words are in the text here; the rest are the running heads, the contents' page numbers, and the words drawn inside figures and charts (see below).
• Page numbers are the printed ones: roman on each volume's front matter (Volume I's Introduction opens at xiii), arabic in the body, starting again at 1 in Volume II. A printed body page is the PDF page less 20 in Volume I and less 10 in Volume II. A page of Volume II is cited with its volume where the number alone would be ambiguous.
• Paragraphs. The report numbers its paragraphs in each chapter ("3.98.", and "A1.13." in Volume II's Appendix 1); each is one citable paragraph, with its number. All 2,426 are present, once each, in order (1,422 in Volume I, 1,004 in Volume II). The Introduction, Voices and the Executive summary are not numbered in the report and are not numbered here.
• Headings are set by typeface only, so they are read from the PDF's layout: the chapter title pages, then three levels of sub-heading. In Volume I the sub-headings match the PDF's own tagged structure in number at every level (69, 74 and 18).
• Recommendations. Volume II prints each recommendation in a box at the point in its chapter where it arises, and again, all 19 together, in Appendix 3. Each box's title ("Recommendation 1: Chief Medical Officer for Northern Ireland") is a heading here, over the recommendation's text, in both places.
• Notes. The report's notes are printed at the page feet and numbered afresh in each chapter. All of them are here: Volume I's 3,236 of the 3,241 its PDF tags (see below), and all 1,791 of Volume II's; 1,788 of Volume II's are linked to their markers.
• Three corrections, each recorded and checked against the page: paragraph 6.95 (p.292) and paragraph 11.194 (Volume II, p.150) each follow a paragraph ending on what the reading took for an initial ("reduction in R.", "in Volume I."), and were separated; and in 6.82 (p.289) "pre-determined", broken over a line, is restored as printed.
• Checked against the Inquiry's HTML edition. The Inquiry also publishes each volume as a web page. It has no page numbers, so it is not the source here, but we compared against it: it has the same 1,422 paragraph numbers in Volume I (it prints one of them, 3.83, as a second 3.82) and the same 1,004 in Volume II, in the same order.

Known limitations

• Figures, charts and tables are not shown. The report's figures (charts of cases and deaths, maps, message screenshots, a whiteboard, news graphics and tables) are drawn as pictures in the PDF; their captions and source lines remain, their contents do not. The February 2026 PDF lays a machine-read text layer over many of the images; it is unreliable and is left out. The PDF is the authority for every figure and table.
• Eight notes are not linked. In Volume I, notes 371 to 374 of Chapter 5 (p.257) and note 1 of Chapter 6 (p.267) are printed in the text as plain numbers, and note 1 of Chapter 6's text sits in the body of p.267. In Volume II, notes 64 and 65 of Chapter 11 (p.105) and note 59 of Chapter 13 (p.199) are defined but their markers are not linked: a bullet whose next line opens on a date ("4 June 2020", p.105) is cut in two there.
• Italics are not shown. The report sets quotations and the titles of documents in italic; the text here does not carry italics.
• The front matter is rough. Each volume opens with its cover's and title page's words and its contents (Volume I also its correction slip), as the PDF does; some of their lines (the volume's title, "Chapter 4" and "Appendix 1" in Volume I's contents) are set as headings, and Volume II's cover lines fall at the end of Volume I's last section.
• Chapter 3's heading reads "Chapter 3: The first 12 days of March", without "2020", as the contents line was read; the chapter's title page prints "March 2020".
• Some quotations break at a page turn. Where a quotation runs over a page, its two halves can come out as separate blocks, or the second half as ordinary text (about 70 places in Volume I, and some in Volume II). A few tables set as text (the strategies table, p.28; the options table, p.139) and some chart labels (pp.153, 348) come out as runs of words.
• Volume II's appendix tables and glossary are hard to read. The tables of Appendix 1 (core participants, evidence, expert witnesses, witnesses and counsel, Volume II pp.276-293) come out as runs of words, and the two-column glossary of Appendix 2 (pp.296-313) runs terms into their definitions, with some lines set as quotations; one glossary line, "(NICCMA)", is set as a heading. The PDF and the Inquiry's HTML edition have both as tables.
• Some paragraphs are cut mid-sentence in Volume II where a line opens on a number or a name: the end of 11.27 at the top of p.105 is in four pieces, and 13.16 breaks at "10 Downing Street…" over pp.195-196. Four sub-headings in Chapter 9 ("The devolved administrations' attendance at SAGE meetings" and three like it, pp.12-17), set in the typeface of the figure captions, are read as paragraphs.

Reporting a problem

If the text here differs from the published report, the PDF is the authority. Open an issue on the report's repository with the page number and the passage.