Analysis: If Matt Hancock is more transparent than the government, we’re all damned

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For obvious reasons, I’m not in the habit of picking holes in openDemocracy’s journalism, writes Ramzy Alwakeel.

But I can hear the questions some will probably ask about our latest revelation regarding the official Covid inquiry.

If Matt Hancock has already voluntarily submitted his own diaries to the inquiry, these people might say, what does it matter that openDemocracy doesn’t have them? Do we think we’re more important than the inquiry that bereaved families fought to secure, an inquiry that will sit for years and hear thousands of hours of evidence and that has the legal power to compel disclosure?

What does it matter so long as the truth of what ministers did during the pandemic comes out one way or another? What does it matter if the Department for Health and Social Care, whose handling of Covid-19 played such a pivotal role in determining who lived and died and got sick, has spent taxpayers’ money on legal advice and administrative work in order to hold onto a document that may well not even reveal anything interesting?

It matters because there will not always be a public inquiry, or a former minister with very little left to lose who is no longer answerable to the party line.

It matters because the 74,000 Brits whose deaths have been linked to Covid since my colleague Jenna Corderoy submitted her initial Freedom of Information request did not have the luxury of waiting for the inquiry to begin.

And it matters because of what it tells us about the importance of accountability to the people who hold our lives in their hands.

Even at a time when the government’s refusal to play ball with the official Covid inquiry is making headlines, the Department for Health and Social Care is so unrepentant about information transparency that it would rather put itself in contempt of court than hand over the documents.

If an order by the information watchdog means nothing even in these most exceptional of circumstances, the public has lost – perhaps never had – the ability to hold the government to account through its rulings and hearings. If health chiefs will cover up something that is going to come out anyway, how can we trust their handling of more sensitive documents?

It is crucial that the Information Commissioner’s Office retains the trust of the public. It must show the DHSC, and other departments, that there are consequences for disregarding its orders.

And the inquiry, for its own part, should be scrutinising the government’s information handling as part of its official investigations. That, too, is part of the story of the pandemic.