Tier system ‘didn’t work but was worth a try’, Johnson tells Covid inquiry

Former prime minister Boris Johnson has said that the tier system, introduced in a bid to stem cases of Covid-19 during the pandemic, did not work but insisted it was “worth a try”.

The policy saw some parts of the country placed under heavy restrictions in the autumn of 2020, while others regions enjoyed more freedom.

But Mr Johnson told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry that creating artificial boundaries based on evidence on where cases were highest caused “huge problems”, was “divisive and difficult to implement” and caused some politicians to become “paranoid”.

He acknowledged that the system led to people in one village being placed under strict curbs, while residents in the next village along, where cases were at the same level, had none.

Mr Johnson explained that the system was introduced in a bid to “crush the virus” and said that it may have worked if measures had been put in “harder and faster” in areas where cases were highest, and had it not been for the emergence of the highly infectious alpha variant of Covid-19.

But he told the inquiry that even in October 2020, there was still “continuing scientific corroboration of the rationale behind the regional approach”.

“What we wanted was of course to try to stamp on the virus to wallop it wherever it was most prevalent,” he said.

“The difficulty was that it was very laborious and involved some very difficult negotiations, understandably, with areas that have been in restrictions for a very long time and their leaders, understandably, wanted proper financial help, and to get the tougher measures put on was proving time consuming and costly.

“What we wanted out of the tiering system, and we’ve got to be clear we didn’t achieve it, was really to crush the virus where it was most prevalent.

“And I’ve explained that one of the difficulties was like getting local leaders to put in measures fast enough.

“I think it’s possible – and I think there’s even some evidence from Patrick (former chief scientific adviser to the government Sir Patrick Vallance), that we had a fighting chance of getting the R below one, if we’d been able to get some of those measures put in harder and faster in those areas. I think it might have worked, and there are other people who think that too.”

Counsel to the public inquiry Hugo Keith KC said: “In the event, the tiers as we know didn’t work.”

I don't think that (the tier system) in the end worked, but logically it appeared to be the right way to go as we came out of the first lockdown

Mr Johnson replied: “Well they didn’t and I’m very sad about that, but I think that they were logically, rationally – as we came out of the restrictions in the summer – they were, they were worth a try.

“The trouble was that they became very invidious as between areas, because one village would suddenly find itself in very heavy restrictions, the village next door was not, while the incidence of the virus was exactly the same.

“Politicians of all kinds became very worked up, sometimes quite paranoid about the the tiering approach. It clearly was proving divisive and difficult to implement.”

He said it was “clear” that by the end of October the tiering system was “running out of road”, adding: “I think one of the lessons of the whole experience, is that when you, when you set up these artificial boundaries between epidemiological areas in using council boundaries or whatever, you’re going to create huge problems and we ran into those.

“I don’t think that it in the end worked, but logically it appeared to be the right way to go as we came out of the first lockdown.”

Meanwhile, Mr Johnson said that he did not feel that the “pressure for a circuit breaker was particularly strong”.

Pressed on whether he should have introduced a circuit-breaker lockdown after calls for one in September 2020, Mr Johnson said: “I wanted to keep going with a regional approach.

“We had 10 million people in lockdown on September 22, it was not as though large parts of the country were not going through another lockdown.”

He said he was advised in October that a regional approach was still justified, adding: “I’m not going to pretend that this was an easy decision – it certainly wasn’t and it was one I agonised over – but I thought that a regional approach could still save us and could still help us.”

Mr Johnson added: “We’d learned a lot in that period, we’d seen the horrors of the first wave and the shock of what had happened, and it was appalling and we’d seen the suffering.

“But we’d also seen the impact of the pandemic, of the measures that we’ve taken. And our objective remains the same, which was to protect the NHS and save life.

“But, and our strategy was to use NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions), but it seemed to me, given the disparity in the, in the prevalence across the country, that a local approach was worth pursuing.

“And in justice and fairness, a lot of people thought that the same because they thought ‘the disease is not prevalent here, it is not circulating in my community. Why am I being locked down?’ And we had to address that issue as well.”

Mr Johnson said that the tier system was working before the alpha variant of coronavirus, also known as the Kent variant, was identified.

“I actually think that programme had a very good chance of working – if you look at where we were by November 22, the disease was starting to turn down, incidence was turning down, and the thing that really threw us off was of course, the Kent variant, the alpha variant,” he said.