Covid inquiry: Treasury had 'no estimated cost' for lockdown

"What I would say is there was no estimated cost of a lockdown, if you like. There was no way to basically say a lockdown will cost you X, or indeed a lockdown of this form will cost you X but of a different form will cost you Y.

"I think it's a bit too far to say there was no meaningful modelling done, there was a lot of useful modelling...

"But there wasn't was an estimate of, you know, the lockdown will cost X in terms of jobs or economic activity."

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Ms Lombardelli told the inquiry she does not know whether the risk of potentially increasing infections was considered in the rollout of the Eat Out To Help Out scheme.

She said: "The policy was conceived in the context that it was safe to lift restrictions and activity could return."

She said she was not aware of feedback that the scheme could be causing problems and was not "responsible for the policy side of the scheme".

Government-funded discounts were used to encourage the public back into the hospitality sector across the UK in the summer of 2020 (Image: Getty)

Ms Lombardelli rejected suggestions there was "optimism bias" in the Treasury during the summer and autumn of 2020 - prior to the second Covid wave - saying if anything the department is "normally accused of the opposite".

She said that policy decisions were "ultimately always for ministers", adding: "The economic analysis that we were producing was very clear that there were severe economic risks to this period and that the economy was suffering quite greatly in this period and ministers obviously wanted to know in what way they could support the economy through what was obviously a really challenging period for employers, businesses and the like."

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The second witness on Monday was Stuart Glassborow, the deputy principal private secretary to Boris Johnson during the pandemic.

He told the inquiry that Number 10 staff were aware scientists did not advise on the potential risks of the Eat Out to Help Out scheme.

The inquiry was also shown new diary excerpts penned by the former chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance.

In one entry dated January 25 2021 he wrote that the PM had joked that the "pro-death squad" from the Treasury should be brought in to push through the unlocking of restrictions in England by certain dates, including a lifting of all restrictions by September 2021. 

Mr Glassborow told the inquiry that he did not recall the PM using this terminology in his own discussions with him in Downing Street.

The inquiry also heard from Dr Ben Warner, a data scientist former special advisor at Number 10.

He told the inquiry that as late as March 13 the Government was "aiming for herd immunity by late autumn" with a plan to reduce the spread of Covid to manageable levels for the NHS.

However, in contemporaneous notes shown to the inquiry, he noted that "thousands would be dying every week" even under this scenario and that it was unclear whether immunity against Covid 19 was actually achievable.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announces lockdown on March 23 (Image: PA)

He told the inquiry that asymptomatic transmission was "always part of the conversations on Covid", and that he believed the UK should at an early stage have been preparing measures to enable it to change course to a suppression strategy if necessary.

He said: "Even if we felt mitigation was the right choice for the UK, we should have developed plans around suppression...in a mitigation strategy the problems that you have are horribly excess deaths.

"However in a suppression strategy you need time to bring in methods of control - test and trace, testing. These things take time to set up."

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Dr Warner also told the inquiry that he was concerned about a lack of scientific understanding within Cobra and the Cabinet Office during the coronavirus crisis.

He said: "Throughout the pandemic I thought that there was a lack of scientific capability within the different teams and groups that I was working with...let's call it sort of Cobra/Cabinet Office - that I was continually concerned about their understanding of what Sage were saying and how that was being translated into the documents that were produced for ministers."