Recommendation 6

We noted that the public inquiry into government’s handling of COVID-19 was due to start in the spring or summer of 2022, and that understanding how money was being spent was likely to be an important part of this inquiry. We therefore asked HM Treasury how it would ensure that this information was kept in good shape to allow for proper scrutiny and oversight about how government had handled the pandemic. HM Treasury explained that there were three elements to identifying the cost of COVID-19. The first is the direct public expenditure during the pandemic, which was captured by the cost tracker. Secondly, there would be ongoing costs to public services in the future which would not have happened were it not for the pandemic, which it told us was “easy to measure today … [but] gets harder to measure as time goes by”. It explained that the third element is the indirect cost due to the effect on the economy, jobs and businesses, and the effect of this on tax revenue, which it told us was much more difficult to answer.12