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

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 24 October 2026.

The edition

• Source: Volume I of the report on core decision-making and political governance (HC 1436-I, ISBN 978-1-5286-5449-4), Introduction and key events from January 2020 to May 2022, by the Chair of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, the Rt Hon the Baroness Hallett DBE, ordered to be printed on 20 November 2025. We use the version the Inquiry re-issued in February 2026 "with post-publication amends" (Version 1.1), as linked from the Inquiry's report page: 460 A4 pages, SHA-256 af1ca2d8…1bae, kept in the report's repository. It is the canonical citation target.
• 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 the imprint on the PDF's third page states.
• Covers: Volume I only: 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 (Key themes, lessons and recommendations, Chapters 9 to 14 and the appendices, with the full list of recommendations) is not here yet.
• Size: about 178,000 words including the notes; 3,236 notes; 1,422 numbered paragraphs.
• Not used: the November 2025 PDF (superseded by the corrections above), the In Brief summary and the Easy Read edition (separate publications).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 the front matter (the Introduction opens at xiii), arabic from the Executive summary. A printed body page is the PDF page less 20.
• Paragraphs. The report numbers its paragraphs in each chapter ("3.98."); each is one citable paragraph, with its number. All 1,422 are present, once each, in order. 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. The sub-headings here match the PDF's own tagged structure in number at every level (69, 74 and 18).
• Notes. The report's notes are printed at the page feet and numbered afresh in each chapter; 3,236 of the 3,241 the PDF tags are linked to their markers here.
• One correction. Paragraph 6.95 (p.292) follows a paragraph ending "reduction in R.", which the reading took for an unfinished initial; the two were separated by a recorded correction, checked against the page.
• Checked against the Inquiry's HTML edition. The Inquiry also publishes each volume as a web page, with the amended text. 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 (it prints one of them, 3.83, as a second 3.82).

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.
• Five notes are not linked. 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.
• 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. The text opens with the cover's and title page's words, the correction slip and the contents (which also list Volume II), as the PDF does; some of their lines (the volume's title, "Chapter 4" and "Appendix 1" in the contents) are set as headings.
• 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). 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.

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.