Andy Burnham has said he felt like he was “shouting into the abyss” when calling for help for areas like Bolton during the pandemic.
The Greater Manchester Mayor has been speaking to the Covid-19 Inquiry this week and claimed he had repeatedly asked for more support for areas like Bolton that were hit by tiered restrictions and were already highly deprived.
He told the inquiry that the then health secretary Matt Hancock had shown more sympathy than other ministers but that appealing to the government had largely proved fruitless.
Mr Burnham said: “To be fair he was more sympathetic actually than other ministers that I spoke to about the matter.”
He added: “We had spent pretty much the best part of a year by now saying, ‘look what is happening here, help us’.
“We felt like we were shouting into the abyss.”
Bolton had already been cited in the Covid-19 Inquiry last week when Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific advisor from 2018 to 2023, claimed that the “example that Bolton worked” was not enough to claim that the government’s anti-Covid measures went far enough.
The borough was one of the worst hit areas by the pandemic that began in early 2020 and, like Leicester and Blackburn with Darwen was hit by controversial local lockdown measures to stop the spread of Covid at the height of the pandemic.
Speaking to The Bolton News in September 2021, Mr Burnham said he was opposed to any further local lockdown measures.
He said: “They created real impacts on people here that I don’t think were understood in Whitehall.”
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He added that the then leader of Bolton Council, the late Cllr David Greenhalgh, “spoke very passionately about the impact that it had on businesses locally” at the time.
Instead, Mr Burnham called in September 2021 for the government to move towards a more disciplined messaging system, emphasising the importance of wearing masks on public transport, hand washing and social distancing.
Mr Burnham’s fellow Mayors Sadiq Khan of London and Steve Rotherham of the Liverpool City Region will also be giving evidence.
The Covid-19 Inquiry continues.
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