The Covid Inquiry has come under fire for allocating over £3 million in contracts for emotional support services to prevent ‘retraumatising’ witnesses. The Telegraph has more.
Inquiry chiefs were accused of presiding over a waste of money which will run until the end of February 2026.
Although two contracts allocated to Health Assured Limited were terminated at the end of last month, all participants are still set to be offered emotional support as part of a commitment to remaining “trauma-informed” and a contract with Hestia Housing remains active.
A description of the support services on the Cabinet Office website said such an approach “means seeking to reduce the risk of retraumatisation to people who are engaging with the inquiry”.
It read: “Emotional support is one of the key ways of reducing retraumatisation by offering timely, sensitive, psychologically informed emotional support to people engaging with the inquiry’s work. Emotional support is not counselling or therapy.
“The focus is on facilitating the person’s engagement with the inquiry, creating support plans, facilitating stabilisation, providing psychological containment and facilitating the person’s journey through their engagement process.”
Sir Edward Leigh, a veteran Conservative MP who served as a minister under Margaret Thatcher, said: “It just all adds up to a fantastic waste of money.
“I think most people now recognise that the severity of lockdown was a huge mistake and has frankly traumatised generations of children, being kept away from school month after month.
“The inquiry really needs to focus on what most people want it to do, which is why we had to have successive lockdowns and severity of lockdowns. We know from the Swedish model it probably made very little difference to people’s long-term health.”
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.