The government is seeking an order quashing the notice given under s 21 of the Inquiries Act 2005 (IA 2005), on the grounds the inquiry’s request for ‘unambiguously irrelevant material’ goes beyond its powers and breaches legitimate expectations of privacy and protection of personal information. Lady Hallett says all the information is potentially relevant since she needs to understand the wider context and that she should take the final decision on relevance.
At a preliminary hearing of the COVID Inquiry this week, Lady Hallett declined to comment on the JR but confirmed the Cabinet Office invited her to withdraw her s 21 notice requiring the production of certain documents.
Counsel for the inquiry, Hugo Keith KC, told Lady Hallett that former prime minister Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApps and notebooks would be compared with redacted copies provided by the Cabinet Office, to ‘allow your team to make its own assessment’.
Commenting for LexisNexis News, Sir Jonathan Jones KC of Linklaters, said: ‘It is a very unusual situation.
‘A government has previously sought JR against a public inquiry—Lord Saville’s Bloody Sunday Inquiry. But this is the first such challenge to an inquiry under the IA 2005. And it is the first to relate specifically to an inquiry’s information-gathering powers under that Act. In any case, it is pretty unusual for the government to be a claimant in a JR: it is normally the defendant.’
Sir Jonathan said: ‘The government would seem to have an uphill task in showing that Lady Hallett is acting unlawfully, given the breadth of the inquiry’s terms of reference and her powers under the IA 2005, and the importance of the function which the Inquiry is undertaking in the public interest.
‘There is also the complication that Boris Johnson has apparently already handed over some of the material direct to the Inquiry, potentially rendering the JR partly academic, and undermining aspects of the government’s arguments on privacy.’
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