The inevitability of a lockdown

¶4.225. It is wholly understandable that any government leader should wrestle with the profound decision as to whether to order a nationwide lockdown. Given the damaging societal, economic and educational consequences it is bound to bring, enforcing a mandatory lockdown should be a measure of last resort. All viable measures short of a lockdown should be tried first and implemented early enough to allow time to analyse their effectiveness before a lockdown is imposed.

¶4.226. Had the many steps short of a mandatory lockdown been taken earlier in the pandemic, a mandatory UK-wide lockdown might not have become necessary or it might have been possible to reduce its length. To that extent, all four governments can be rightly criticised.

¶4.227. However, the Inquiry rejects the criticism that the four governments were wrong – in principle – to impose a lockdown. Indeed, the Inquiry accepts the consensus of the evidence before it that a mandatory lockdown should have been imposed one week earlier.

¶4.228. The UK government and devolved administrations had received clear and compelling advice by this time that the exponential growth in transmission, in the absence of a mandatory lockdown, would be likely to lead to loss of life on a scale that was reasonably to be regarded as unconscionable and unacceptable. No government, acting in accordance with its overarching duty to preserve life, could ignore such advice or tolerate the number of deaths envisaged. The governments' laudable aim was therefore to minimise the numbers of deaths, particularly among the elderly and vulnerable, and to prevent the healthcare systems across the UK from collapsing at all costs. In this, they acted in common with many other countries.

¶4.229. It cannot be known whether – through their undoubted ability to expand at speed (including through the cancellation of elective care, the discharge of patients and the construction of Nightingale hospitals) and the incredible resourcefulness and commitment of their staff – the health services across the UK would have collapsed if there had been no lockdown. However, there was a serious risk, which the governments were reasonably entitled not to run, that exponential growth would lead to hospital cases of such a magnitude that, if the growth were not radically reduced, the point would inevitably be reached at which no health service would survive. At that point, the loss of life would be exacerbated by the collapse of the health system and the denial of care for Covid-19 cases, as well as for those suffering from serious, non-Covid-19 conditions.

¶4.230. No reasonable government could effectively gamble the lives of its citizens on its own assessment that the restrictions of 16, 18 and 20 March 2020 might, of themselves, be enough. There was no time to wait.

¶4.231. Through their own acts and omissions, the four governments had made lockdown inevitable.

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