Thank you for joining our live coverage of today's evidence at the Covid inquiry - we're now closing this page.

For those of you interested in better understanding the ins and outs of the inquiry, we have a helpful guide that you can read here.

The inquiry will be back next week and on Monday we'll hear from Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham and the Mayor of Liverpool Steve Rotheram.

This live page was edited by Rob Corp and Paul Gribben, while updates were written by Tara Mewawalla, Simran Sohal, Jacqueline Howard, Oliver Slow and Malu Cursino.

‘The government cannot get into my family WhatsApp group’published at 17:03 GMT 23 November 2023

17:03 GMT 23 November 2023

Ashitha Nagesh
BBC News Community Affairs Correspondent

Kemi Badenoch covered a lot of ground today – but one of the key things that how much the government has struggled to get people in ethnic minority communities to trust them.

At no point was this perhaps more stark than during the pandemic – a time when, from lockdowns to vaccines, trust in the authorities was key.

Badenoch used her own family’s group chat as an example of how anti-government conspiracy theories were able to spread.

“I’m in a family WhatsApp group with members from across the world, from Africa to the US,” she said – adding that people share “a lot of conspiracy theories” in there.

“The government cannot get into my family WhatsApp group. There are some channels which you cannot break into in the information age that we live in.”

She added that in a lot of communities there are people who are first-generation migrants from countries where people really don’t trust governments.

And summing up her thoughts, she said: “I don't think government has got a handle on dealing with misinformation.”

Note her use of the present tense, there. It’s clear that that lack of trust is still a concern.

Image source, Getty Images

We've been listening to Kemi Badenoch giving evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry, as lawyers focused on her role as equalities minister during the pandemic.

• Badenoch told the inquiry that fear and conspiracy theories undermined many of the measures her team had put in place to identify risk
• On the spread of misinformation, Badenoch said the government does not yet have "a handle" on it, as she doesn't believe the UK has adapted to a social media age
• She said additional funding would not have stopped ethnic minority groups from being disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, as the equalities minister claimed the propensity for infection correlated with other health conditions rather than ethnic background
• In response to questions from Prof Leslie Thomas KC, Badenoch said there was "no silver bullet" to fight structural inequalities - "we can't remove poverty," she told the inquiry

• Having a record of ethnicity on death certificates was identified by Badenoch as something that should have been done to understand ethnic disparities. "If we had had that, we might, not certainly, but we might have been able to spot the disproportionate impact a little bit earlier," she added

Image source, PA Media

The Covid-19 inquiry is all wrapped up for this week, but some key players in British politics are taking the stand from Monday. They are:

• Matt Hancock, former health secretary
• Dominic Raab, former deputy prime minister
• Michael Gove, Levelling-Up Secretary who chaired the Covid-19 operations sub-committee
• Sadiq Khan, London mayor
• Andy Burnham, Manchester mayor
• Sajid Javid, former health secretary

Next week's proceedings will start on 27 November, and we'll bring you live coverage in text and streaming video throughout the week.

Ashitha Nagesh
BBC News Community Affairs Correspondent

Kemi Badenoch talked earlier about the problem with the term “BAME”, an acronym that stands for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic.

“BAME” was commonly used at the start of 2020 as an umbrella term for ethnic minority groups.

But by the end of 2021, most major organisations - including the BBC - had declared they would no longer use it.

One of the main criticisms of the term is that, as Ms Badenoch put it earlier, it “lumps people into one group”.

Covid is a good example of this. While people from all ethnic minority groups were more likely to get ill, and to die of the virus than white people, the extent of this depended on a person’s specific background.

Those from a Bangladeshi background were worse-hit than other South Asian communities, for example. Black-Caribbeans were impacted more severely than Black-Africans.

There were public calls later in 2020 to drop the term. A taskforce set up for UK Music, for example, said in October that year it was "outdated and offensive".

Six months later, in March 2021, the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities recommended the government drop ‘BAME’ too, and called it an “aggregated and unhelpful term”. Dropping it would allow the government “to better focus on understanding disparities and outcomes for specific ethnic groups”.

And in December 2021, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 all committed to not using the term any more in their broadcasts.

A little earlier Badenoch said it would not have been sensible for the government to spend time on things that were less viable, including financial support targeted at people from ethnic minority communities.

Speaking about broader financial support during the pandemic she told the inquiry: "I remember standing at the despatch box and explaining how we came to devise the packages.

"There always has to be a cut-off, and there is a cost to everything," Badenoch said.

She says many of the cost-of-living pressures we are witnessing now - including high interest rates and inflation - are a consequence of "the furlough and a lot of the quantitative easing and money printing which we did then".

Badenoch says regardless of where the boundary was drawn on support, "there will always be people who feel that they're on the wrong side".

The inquiry has now finished for the day - and indeed the week - before hearings resume next Monday.

Stay with us as we go back through Kemi Badenoch's evidence and recap what she said.

We're also aiming to bring you some analysis of what she said from our correspondents at the hearing.

The final question relates to the impact Covid had on victims of domestic violence, and Badenoch is asked why responsibility for this issue is spread across various departments, rather than being the focus of one minister.

Badenoch – who is women and equalities minister - says she doesn’t believe that to be true, and highlights that there are other officials working on this issue.

“I think this is something that is covered by one minister but loads of others actually provide support in that space,” she says.

Brian Stanton from the British Medical Association (BMA) asks whether the government published a Public Health England report too soon.

Badenoch says it was "absolutely not the case that anything was withheld", attributing the reason for two separate reports to different commissions from the government, which were then conflated.

BMA's Stanton tells the inquiry that among the doctors who had died in the early months of the pandemic, "94% were from a BAME background".

He asks Badenoch why a separate report was needed.

To which she says that matters discussed in the 69-page report were qualitative rather than quantitative.

"I did care about this issue," she adds.

Asked about the safety of doctors and healthcare workers during the pandemic, she recognises that some PPE equipment was not fit for purpose but those matters did not fall under her remit.

Dermot Keating finishes his questions to Badenoch, giving way to Prof Leslie Thomas KC, who represents the Federation of Ethnic Minority Healthcare Organisations.

He reminds Badenoch of a comment she made earlier in the inquiry: "Being an ethnic minority was not the cause of being disproportionately impacted - it correlated with what the causes were.

"So you have to tackle the actual cause - not the thing that comes in common with it."

Thomas argues that "structural inequalities" could be considered one of these causes, and lists poverty and discrimination as examples.

Badenoch says structural inequalities were not found in the research her team undertook

"In terms of the issues around deprivation, poverty - a lot of work was done to look at what we could do to fix that but we can't cure diabetes, we can't remove poverty.

"So saying that structural inequalities had an impact on incidents - yes, that is true - but that doesn't mean that there is a silver bullet to resolve them," she adds.

During the second wave of Covid, inquiry counsel Dermot Keating shows us that British Bangladeshis and British Pakistanis were substantially at risk groups. He then asks if Badenoch had done any work looking into the long-term Covid effects on these minority groups.

"Long Covid" describes signs and symptoms that continue or develop after the getting the virus. White ethnic groups had the highest rate of long Covid according to the Office for National Statistics.

Badenoch then says that she did not look into this as it would have been more "front-line analysis" whereas her work is more "statistical".

She mentioned that it was worth highlighting this as she saw that health and social workers had more exposure to the virus.

On vaccines, she said they were the "most significant measure to protect ethnic minorities", she added.

When questioned whether there was any targeted protocols in order to protect minorities, she said that this "often has other unintended consequences".

There was a "large belief that it was ethnic minorities spreading the virus" so she did not treat them any differently.

Badenoch is then asked about what some of the wider lessons might be in relation to ethnic minorities and coronavirus.

She cites the importance of not treating ethnic minorities as “a homogenous group”.

Badenoch then discusses the “unintended consequences” of well-meaning approaches, for example what she calls the “positive discrimination” of ethnic minority groups.

She says that one of these was a belief held by some that because ethnic minorities were more likely to get Covid, they were more likely to spread it as well.

“It was important that we don’t let good intentions take us down a path that is counter-productive,” she says.

"There was a lot of fear at this point," Badenoch says in response to questions about mistrust across some communities in the UK about vaccinations.

She says a lot of the work being done by her team was being undermined by conspiracy theories and mistrust from communities.

"There was a fear that a lot of the communication about disproportionate impact was actually secret conspiracy to scare ethnic minorities into taking vaccines, which was a way of the government 'culling the population'," she told the inquiry.

Badenoch says she was "particularly concerned" about how these conspiracies were affecting the uptake of vaccines.

One of the recommendations published in a report from Badenoch's department was to record ethnicity on death certificates.

"I don't know why it wasn't recorded, but if we had that we might - not certainly - but we might have been able to spot the disproportionate impact a little bit earlier," Badenoch says.

"This was certainly reasonable speculation on that basis for that problem, but it seemed an odd place to not capture it seeing given that we capture it on all kinds of data sets."

Moving onto successes, Badenoch says she is proud of her team.

"I think the work that they did was rigorous, very carefully done, very sensitive," she says.

She says greater vaccine uptake, including the family jabbing initiative, was due to the work they did.

Badenoch says she is still concerned about the issue of misinformation. She says people approach her in the street and tell her she is part of a conspiracy. The economic impact of lockdown is another area she thinks there was not enough of an analysis of.

Vaccines were safe and proven to be effective against Covid-19, Badenoch says, therefore it would not have made sense for the government to spend time on things that were less viable.

"To deal with the emotional feelings of people who didn't like vaccines or wanted other levels of support would have been wrong," she says.

She says she remembers reading reports and recommendations that suggested ethic groups be a priority for vaccines or financial support. "What people were suggesting was racial segregation," she says.

The way forward was to target households, Badenoch tells the inquiry: "Ethnic minorities don't just exist as communities of segregated people. We are part and parcel of this country, we are related to people who don't come from our background."

Counsel to the inquiry, Dermot Keating, is now asking Kemi Badenoch whether the report quoted recognises that more needed to be done to address disparities in coronavirus infection rates among Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities.

Yes, she replies.

Asked about her request for metrics to be established to assess disparities in Covid infections, and whether they were set up, Badenoch says she believes they were but she does not expand further on this.

"I believe they were but I cannot recall what exactly they would have been," she adds.

"In terms of metrics, not off the top of my head, no," Badenoch explains, as she says the context in which her request was put through as then-equalities minister was amid several religious festivities among different groups.

Badenoch is then asked about the government’s “community champions programme”, which saw local people promoting government messaging around coronavirus.

She says this was focussed on communities that were worst affected by the virus, and involved finding individuals who were well respected and could communicate effectively.

Asked if it could have been introduced earlier, she said it takes time to put these programmes together, including ensuring funding and finding the relevant people to work with.

“You can’t just press go and start a project,” she says.

She says the idea was based on her own experience, in particular being in family Whatsapp groups – which included people not in the UK – where people didn’t trust government information.

“The government can’t get into my family Whatsapp group,” she says, but hopes that these community champions could be effective in passing on relevant information.

The inquiry's lawyer moves on to ask Badenoch about the impact of Covid on different ethnic minority communities.

He says the impact on different ethnic groups changed between the first and second stages of the pandemic

Badenoch recalls this, confirming that the disparities in mortality rates between black African men and white men, and Pakistani and Bangladeshi men were roughly equal, she says.

But, in the second wave there was "no disparity" between black and white men and a "much greater impact" on South Asian groups.

She says that originally, mortality rate disparities were thought to be due to prejudice and discrimination.

But, at the start of the second wave, she "realised this was wrong" and the correlation eventually spotted, which she describes as a "huge causation", was the prevalence of multi-generational households in South Asian communities.

"The big difference between those two groups which were before roughly equally impacted was how many had grandparents effectively living with the family and exposure to young children.," she says.

Badenoch is then asked about a number of recommendations made in a report by the government's Race Disparity Unit, acknowledging that many of those recommendations were “quite broad”.

She says the aim was to ensure there was accountability across different departments, and said her team was tasked with asking departments to report back on what actions they had taken.

She says that, in some paragraphs, it was important to “read between the lines”, because the report didn’t want to be overly critical of some departments, but that “we knew people weren’t moving as quickly as we would have liked”.

Badenoch says she doesn't think there was any way the government could have had enough capacity over the summer of 2020 to prepare for a second wave

"A pandemic like that, and the amount that we were doing, I'm not sure there would ever have been enough capacity," she says.

"On the one hand, the government is doing everything it can to support those who are dealing with the disease, but even we - officials, civil servants - are impacted ourselves."

She says it's not a case of people "slacking off", but of people dealing with the pandemic on a personal level.

"You can't skill up quickly for a pandemic and you can't have [a] pandemic-sized response sitting there waiting all the time," she adds.