Sir Keir Starmer renewed calls for a public inquiry into the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as the nation marked the anniversary of the first national lockdown.
The Labour leader said on Tuesday that NHS staff and bereaved families are owed answers about what went wrong in the last year so the mistakes never happen again.
During a visit to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Sir Keir accused ministers of being “very slow to react” early in the crisis and then of repeating their errors in the autumn.
Boris Johnson has insisted there will be “a time when we must learn the lessons of what has happened” but said that “I don’t think that moment is now”, as the official UK death toll passed 100,000 in January.
Sir Keir told reporters: “We owe both the NHS staff and those on the frontline and all the families of those who have died to learn the lessons of the last 12 months, to have an inquiry and to learn what went wrong to make sure we never repeat that.
“I think the government was very slow to react. They were slow in the first wave, slow to go into lockdown, very slow with protective equipment to the front line.
“But then we went into the second wave and instead of learning the lessons they repeated the mistakes: too slow, not getting communications right and in the end in the second wave we had more deaths than in the first wave and I think there are some very, very important lessons there.”
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