We are neglecting children again with this Covid inquiry

When the Met Office issued an edict to stay indoors in the blistering heat this week, it brought back memories of those terrible days of lockdown when a fearful nation was ordered home. It is one thing to tell the over-50s to hunker down with a book and the radio; forbidding children from the outside world is quite another. Yet a couple of days indoors in the blazing sun are as nothing to what months of Covid lockdown did to young minds.

That’s why it is infuriating and baffling that the Covid-19 public inquiry does not intend to prioritise the impact of lockdown on children in its first line of investigation. This week, Heather Hallett, the inquiry chairman, announced preliminary hearings for September, followed by main hearings in spring 2023. The announcement rings with technocratic buzzwords: modules, core participants, system and impact issues. But you don’t have to dig very far to see that children and young people are scarcely a top priority.

Instead, the inquiry will begin with pandemic preparedness, and how the Government responded to the virus’s initial threat. Once they have got through that, they will move on to examining what happened to the NHS, followed by vaccines and treatment, then social care. Only then will young people make their belated appearance.

Announcing her timetable, Lady Hallett said: “Our work must be swift.” Quite frankly, getting round to the suffering of children during lockdown and the long-term impact no earlier than 2024 just isn’t fast enough. By then it will be four years since the first all-encompassing lockdown of March 2020. Children who were then three or four, who missed out on months of vital socialising, play, exercise and venturing to school for the first time will be eight years old.

Those who were nine and 10 and spent all their days on mobiles and laptops, with their parents unable to

There is little point in learning lessons if those who will have to live with the long-term effects of our actions are not prioritised

prise them off their devices because it was the only way of connecting with teachers and friends, will be in senior school. Surely we need to hear now, not in four years time, about the consequences of all those lost years? Frightened children missed out on vital schooling and saw their development thwarted – not just by the virus but the Government’s heavy-handed reaction to it.

Many of us will know first-hand how children suffered under lockdown, but experts have long been aware of it too. As Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner, explained when I interviewed her for The Daily Telegraph on her appointment last year: “Children are the least likely to be affected by the virus, but they have taken the worst hit.” She pointed out that before lockdown, one in nine children were diagnosed with mental health problems. That is shocking enough, but after schools were closed for 19 weeks during the pandemic, that figure has risen to one in six.

There is even more alarming evidence about the harm to young lives. Schools found that when pupils finally returned after lockdown, previously potty-trained children, often from the most deprived backgrounds, had regressed into wearing nappies once again. Calls to the charity Childline from children reporting domestic violence rose by 50 per cent.

This is why what happened to children during lockdown must be a priority for the inquiry, not an afterthought. And given how long it takes for the results of inquiries to see the light of day and be implemented, we will probably be waiting until at least 2027 for any recommendations about improving children’s lives.

In its statement, the Covid-19 Inquiry describes its timetable as “ambitious”. But for vulnerable young people, this is nowhere near ambitious enough. We’re in danger of letting our children become a lost generation.