Letters: we don’t need a Covid inquiry

Toothless inquiries

Sir: You rightly say that inquiries in Britain have become a form of cover-up (‘The politics of panic’, June 3). This is clear as we contemplate the delay in reporting on the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, the £200 million spent on the Bloody Sunday report published 38 years after the event, the seven-year delay in concluding the Chilcot inquiry, and the shaming fact that Sweden has reported on its handling of Covid before our inquiry has even begun. 

Instead of spending costly parliamentary and civil service time and astronomical sums on expensive lawyers and experts looking backwards and learning too little far too late from inquiries, our resources should be employed to focus on the future to resolve the long-term problems that are neglected by politicians who seek re-election every four or five years. Their priorities should include national security, stemming sewage and water leaks, fixing our broken justice system, social care, the NHS, potholed highways, cladding on tower blocks and asbestos in classrooms, instead of leaving these problems for future generations to deal with while parliamentarians kick the can down the road by setting up yet another useless and toothless inquiry to no productive purpose at unacceptable taxpayers’ expense.

Trevor Lyttleton

London NW11

Electric dreams

Sir: We do not need a protracted and futile post-Covid inquiry – Lionel Shriver has summed everything up in four pithy phrases in her latest article (‘Let’s rise up in our road rage’, 3 June). ‘Economically self-destructive, socially disastrous, politically despotic and medically idiotic regime’: case closed. Now let’s move on to deal with new items of idiocy, focusing on ‘net zero’. In the fixation with electric cars, has anyone considered how people dependent on secondhand cars are to remain mobile for work in future? I don’t anticipate a thriving market in secondhand electric cars.

I live in a care home in a delightful part of west Suffolk, where no public transport system exists.