Covid Inquiry spends £200k asking public whether it is any good
The Covid Inquiry is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on polling on its own reputation, The Telegraph can reveal.
The inquiry handed a polling firm a contract for £275,000 for research on the 'public perception' of its work, before later revising the budget down to £180,000.
Ipsos, the market research giant, has been asked to carry out monthly surveys on the public's view of proceedings – research which will not be published by the inquiry.
The independent inquiry was set up after the pandemic and designed to examine the UK's response to it and learn lessons for the future.
It is currently on its fifth module examining procurement during the pandemic and will not complete all of its investigations until 2026, having already cost more than £144million.
It is expected to become the most expensive inquiry in British history and at one point was costing £200,000 a day.
It can now be revealed that last August it signed a contract with Ipsos for up to £275,000 for polling services until August 2026.
A notice published on a government website states that the purpose of the contract was 'to deliver monthly polling including targeted monthly online and/or telephone interviews to track and evaluate the inquiry's public reputation'.
The notice said the contract was for monitoring the 'public perception tracking for the UK Covid-19 Inquiry'.
It is understood that the inquiry has found about £95,000 in savings on the original contract by reducing the polling frequency and the total cost will now be no more than £180,924.98.
The polling was in support of Every Story Matters, the inquiry's listening exercise to hear stories of members of the public during the pandemic.
It has processes in place to help it deliver value for money and publishes its expenditure. However MPs said it was yet further evidence of poor value for money.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, said he believed the inquiry was a 'waste of time' and was taking too long.
'Well, I don't quite see what the point of it is,' he said. 'I think the Covid inquiry is a complete waste of time. It is literally a waste of time because it is taking so long. Every other inquiry in other countries began and ended in the time that this has taken.'
He added: 'Everything they do now appears to me to be a total waste of space. They spent ages trying to figure out who did what or said what to whom, which was also a complete waste of time.
'The Swedish, who had a more successful lockdown than we did, a more successful Covid than any country in Europe, has done their review and ended it about eight months after they started it. We have just meandered on in this overly lawyered inquiry which is costing the Earth, and I think is now out of date and out of time.'
Sir Iain said that if the inquiry had to spend money on polling about its public perception it suggested its team, led by Baroness Hallett, had its own questions about its purpose.
'And so if they're spending now £200,000 to find out whether anybody thinks they're any good, then that tells you that they themselves obviously question whether or not they've got any purpose at all. If the Government had any sense, they would shut the inquiry down now.'
Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform UK, said the spending was a waste of public money and an example of the wider costs of the inquiry.
'This is a total waste of taxpayers' funds,' he said. 'It's completely unnecessary and is just the tip of the inquiry iceberg of excessive cost.'
A spokesman for the UK Covid-19 Inquiry said its listening exercise had heard the views of thousands of people.
'Since September 2024, the inquiry has received 11,000 stories of life during the pandemic from members of the public as part of Every Story Matters, the largest public engagement exercise ever undertaken by a public inquiry.
'In this time, 15 days of public events have taken place in locations as diverse as Inverness, Oban, Southampton and Swansea, with thousands of visitors in attendance. Stories can still be submitted online. So far we have received more than 56,000 in total, enabling us to record the impact the pandemic had on the people of the UK.'
The inquiry added that polling was an 'important tool' to measure public understanding.
A spokesman added: 'Polling is an important tool used to measure public understanding and expectations of a public inquiry. In this case, it has informed the successful UK-wide delivery of Every Story Matters as well as the inquiry's investigations, with ongoing modules exploring the impact of the pandemic on the economy, healthcare systems, children and young people, the care sector and more besides.'
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