Boris Johnson to finally meet Covid bereaved families 400 days after promise to do so

Boris Johnson will finally meet the campaigning families who lost loved ones to Covid more than a year since he first promised to do so.

The prime minister will welcome members of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group to Downing Street on Tuesday – 398 days on from his promise to meet them.

Mr Johnson said last August that he would “of course” meet with families member who had lost loved ones to the virus.

But the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice accused the prime minister of being “heartless” after he initially ignored their repeated requests to meet.

The families – who successfully campaigned for public inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic – vowed to use the face-to-face meeting with Mr Johnson to demand the investigation is launched “immediately”.

Mr Johnson announced in May that a public inquiry into his government’s response to the crisis will begin in spring of 2022 – promising it would put “the state’s actions under the microscope”.

But the families fear it could be pushed back beyond the promised date. Lawyers representing the group recently met with the Cabinet Office officials to discuss the inquiry’s potential scope, and were told work has not yet begun on the basic terms of reference.

Mr Johnson is expected to be joined by senior civil servants from the Cabinet Office and government’s legal department to discuss the terms of the inquiry at Tuesday’s meeting. The families have asked for it to take place outdoors with social distancing.

Jo Goodman, co-founder of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said: “It has been over a year since the prime minister first said he would meet us and in that time over 100,000 people across the country have lost their lives with Covid.”

The campaigner, who lost her father Stuart to Covid last year, said it had been hard to see families go through “the same pain and grief that we’ve experienced” over the past 18 months.

“We first called for a rapid review last summer so that lessons could be learnt from the deaths of our loved ones to protect others, and we can’t help but feel that if we’d been listened to then, other lives might have been spared,” Ms Goodman said.

Elkan Abrahamson, director and head of major inquiries at the law firm Broudie Jackson Canter, will represent the group at the inquiry.

The lawyer, who will attend Tuesday’s meeting, said the PM will be asked for timings on when an inquiry chair and panel will be appointed and when hearings can start.

“It’s not impractical to suggest that oral hearings can start pretty soon. It might be impractical to suggest you can have the whole thing done and dusted in three months because you can’t,” said Mr Abrahamson.

“But it’s about saving lives, and if there was a particular area where lives could arguably be saved by a detailed analysis of the position, and hearing expert evidence, that would be the way to go.”

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