RISHI SUNAK will come under pressure on Friday to explain why he ignored expert warnings during the pandemic, after the Covid inquiry heard politics drove government’s public messaging about the virus.

TUC assistant general secretary Kate Bell is giving evidence to the hearing this morning and has said the Prime Minister has “serious questions to answer” after the Treasury “massively undermined” Britain’s public health effort.

“It pushed up infection rates, put a huge strain on our public services and ballooned the cost of Test and Trace,” she said.

“The Prime Minister must come clean about why these decisions were taken, especially when senior government advisers were warning that people couldn’t afford to stay home when sick.

“And he must explain why he saw fit to spend more on Eat Out to Help Out than on helping people to self-isolate.

“The failure to provide proper financial support was an act of self-sabotage that left millions brutally exposed to the pandemic.”

This week the inquiry heard that Mr Sunak blocked chief medical officer Chris Whitty’s calls in May of 2020 for “an accessible offer of financial support” to help reduce the risk of “no adherence” to Covid rules.

The British Medical Association (BMA) also said Mr Sunak’s flagship Eat Out to Help Out scheme was “confusing” for the public and put lives at risk, with the government failing to “provide clear, consistent public health messaging” throughout the pandemic.

Speaking at the inquiry today, BMA general council chairman Philip Banfield said “politics” drove the government’s public messaging about the virus.

He said from the outset of the Covid outbreak in China it was “very quickly apparent to the profession the seriousness of what was going to happen” and that the “biggest issue … was our lack of understanding as to why the government was apparently abandoning basic public health protection measures.”

Prof Banfield said there was a “disconnect” between the central government and local public health teams who would only learn of Covid guidance through No 10’s televised press briefings.

He said the BMA had urged the government to involve public health protection teams early “so we couldn’t understand the decision they made to abandon contact tracing” in mid-March.

“Our local public health doctors were prepared for a pandemic — this is their bread-and-butter subject,” he said, adding they “felt deeply disrespected in that their views and expertise was being ignored.

“It was felt that decisions were being made at governmental level and were not seeking the expert views and opinions of people on the front line with local and contemporary public health expertise.”

He said local public health teams would have been better at challenging governmental decisions. After the public responded to lockdown measures “very well,” he said, “I think some of the messaging became confused.

“It seemed to be based on what was a political imperative to engage with the public rather than a public health narrative, a public health narrative seemed to be lacking across the pandemic.

“I’m suggesting that there were economic and other factors that lay outside public health necessities in deciding what the messaging to the public was.”

The TUC will urge Mr Sunak on Friday to answer why he didn’t provide better statutory sick pay (SSP) than just £94 a week, which left the average worker facing a £418 drop in earnings if they had to self-isolate.

The government had been warned at the start of the pandemic that two million workers had no sick pay protection at all, it added, noting that 23 per cent of the country’s workforce had to rely on SSP if they needed to self-isolate during the pandemic, rising to three in 10 for the lowest paid.

Meanwhile freedom of information requests showed the then-chancellor spent more than £800 million on Eat Out to Help Out than the £385m on funding the self-isolation scheme.

Ms Bell added: “It is vital that we learn the lessons of what went wrong.

“Never again must the UK be in a situation where workers are plunged into financial hardship for following public health advice.

“It beggars belief that despite everything working people have been through, Rishi Sunak’s government are still refusing to fix Britain’s broken sick pay system.”