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Government loses 18-month fight to keep ‘Covid lessons learnt’ review secret

Department of Health and Social Care officials battled openDemocracy to avoid releasing the internal document

By Jenna Corderoy
Government loses 18-month fight to keep ‘Covid lessons learnt’ review secret
Eat Out to Help Out, the government's scheme to encourage the public to return to high street restaurants and cafes in summer 2020. The Department of Health and Social Care has been sitting on a 'lessons learnt' review of the pandemic for 18 months | William Barton / Alamy Stock Photo
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The government has backed down in its fight to keep secret a “lessons learnt” review of the Covid pandemic, thanks to an appeal by openDemocracy to the information watchdog.

It means the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has 35 days to finally make the document public.

The DHSC originally refused openDemocracy’s Freedom of Information request for the review, whose existence was revealed by HuffPost UK last year, claiming that the release of information would be “likely to undermine the safe space for experts and government officials to debate live policy issues”.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0