Samantha Edwards was ready for a change in 2022 when she spotted an ad for the role of director of communications and engagement for the UK Covid-19 Inquiry. She’d been working on Brexit for five years, which she describes as “the hardest thing I’ve ever done… just a really, really challenging time”. So she liked the idea of stepping away from central government to try something a bit different.
“I didn’t have much idea of what an inquiry really did,” she admits, although she knew it would be a big task. The enormity of it struck her fully once she was in post: “It was daunting,” she says, recalling her first day. “You walk in the doors and go, ‘Right, okay, so this is huge.’”
She was not wrong. The Covid-19 Inquiry is hugely ambitious in scope, divided into 10 different modules which aim to cover every aspect of the UK’s response to the pandemic, and its impact. What makes it unique in the world of public inquiries is the simple fact that Covid affected absolutely everyone. And as the foreword to the report into the healthcare element of the inquiry points out: “For many people, the impacts of those years, and the years since, were far reaching. In some cases, they were and are extremely painful, and for some almost too painful to talk about.”
But talking about the pandemic – or rather, encouraging others to talk – is what Edwards has been doing since that daunting first day in post. The decision was made to build a public feedback element into the inquiry, known as Every Story Matters, which enabled the team to ask the public: “What was it like for you?”
“We’ve got reams and reams of evidence from government departments and from the former governments that tell us what they did in each situation,” Edwards says. “And so what you do is you go, ‘This is the decision that was taken. And this is what it was like for people.’”
“We’re a bunch of civil servants. Most of us have never done anything like this in our lives”
A public feedback element to an inquiry has never been attempted on this scale before. The Truth Project – which gathered the stories of child sexual abuse victims for the independent inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay – is the closest comparison. “We took a lot of learning from that,” Edwards says, referring to the “inquiries hub” that relevant officials have access to. But Every Story Matters is a considerably bigger project. Where The Truth Project gathered a dataset of 6,000 personal accounts from victims and survivors of sexual abuse, to date, Every Story Matters has gathered 58,450 individual experiences.
How do you orchestrate something so enormous? And how do you make sure it really does reach out to everyone? Edwards takes a deep breath before replying. This was something she was determined to get right, she explains, but it wasn’t immediately obvious what the best approach would be. “We tested and trialled things like phone lines for people who are older or partially sighted,” she says, but there didn’t turn out to be a real demand. And although the digital route was ultimately the most popular option overall, she didn’t want to miss the people for whom this wasn’t ideal. So she hit on a more old-school solution: “What did work was actually going out to people in their towns and cities and regions... and giving them a safe space to come and share their story.”
This approach shaped the job into something very different from Edwards’s desk-based Brexit years. “We did about 25 locations across the UK,” she says. “I can’t tell you the number of local radio interviews I’ve done, and actually, that’s when people will pick things up. If you can get on the BBC breakfast news or the ITV breakfast news… the number of people who turned up and said, ‘I saw you on the news this morning and I felt I had to come and talk to you’ [was remarkable].”
And people came in their thousands. “We made sure we went everywhere,” she says. “Experiences in a rural community are so different to people in a city – the stories about how you could access vaccination centres or testing centres are completely different if you’re in a rural setting.” Some people just popped in and said hi, or they took a form away, or they filled it out there and then. “We had little tablets, and they would sit there and share their story,” she says. But it turned out that paper forms and tablets were rarely the first choice. “Most people just wanted to talk to a human being.”
And so the project became an interactive one. This brought in a set of considerations around making sure participants were able to share their stories “in a safe way that ensured they were able to get some help if they needed to”. And it meant that resources were spent on “making sure we’d got enough people to give someone that time”.
Not only did Edwards need people to sit down and listen – she also needed them to be equipped to deal with what they might hear: “We have heard some really, really traumatic things.” The whole team was trained in being trauma informed, she says. “Your job is to sit there and take down their story, almost word for word… They’re trusting you with the experience they went through, and then trusting that you will use it for good in the future.”
Despite the training, Edwards says that “90% of those stories were challenging and harrowing, and you really had to steel yourself”. She feels incredibly proud of her team, who stepped up to the challenge admirably. “You know, we’re a bunch of civil servants. We’ve come from a bunch of different departments and most of us have never done anything like this in our lives,” she says.
Not everyone they wanted to hear from came forward immediately. “There were certain parts of society during the pandemic who felt forgotten and left behind. It’s a common thread for people who are disabled or from certain ethnic communities and backgrounds,” she says. But those people and their stories are a vital component to the inquiry. How did she reach them?
“What has been most effective is when you build relationships and trust with influential people within communities,” Edwards says. “In particular, where we’ve made really good relationships with Muslim councils or Sikh and Hindu councils in Bradford, Leicester, those sorts of areas… Going along to speak to women from Muslim backgrounds, we took forms in various languages so they could share their story and be assured it was a confidential process.”
Confidentiality – while essential – was not the only concern. “Almost universally, people needed to feel that their information was protected but also that it was useful. That’s a really key thing. We’re not doing this just to gather lots of stories, we’re doing it so we truly understand the impact the pandemic had on people so we can make better recommendations, and so we will have a record of the pandemic that will live on in history.”
Edwards is passionate on this point – people’s stories will be drawn on in the future, as a record but also as a tool. The documents created by the inquiry will live in the National Archives and will eventually go on its website. “My absolute hope is they will be part of the school curriculum in the future, where people will be able to use them as a resource. Or future academics will be able to pull some of this anonymous data and look at patterns and trends in society.” And as much as government is focused on pandemic preparedness, Edwards says: “We can’t rely on the belief that these things apparently come in 100-year cycles.” It may also be possible to transfer the learning to other crises: “We should be thinking about what shocks could happen to our country, which might mean some of these lessons should be used.”
“There are stories about people who are unpaid carers; the nurses who laid down on the floor of a patient’s room so they didn’t die alone”
Edwards has noticed – as many of us have – that our memories of the pandemic are foggy. We might have one or two very clear recollections, but a lot of what happened in that period seems to have vanished from our heads. “It’s a natural thing to happen – in times of great trauma, our minds very sensibly start to archive, to protect us from reliving that trauma again and again,” she says.
Which is why the process of bringing those memories back to the surface can be unexpectedly painful. Edwards recalls one woman who came to tell her story as part of Every Story Matters on a “rainy, cold, freezing day in January or February, up in Scotland”. The woman had been a palliative care nurse. “And she was wound so tight that I was like: ‘You’re not okay.’ And she kept saying, ‘No, no, I’m only going to be here for five minutes. I’m just going to say my piece, and then I’ve got to go and get my kids.’ And she talked to me for an hour.”
This woman had “worked her socks off to make sure that people who were dying had care around them,” Edwards says. She’d been frustrated by a lot of things, such as PPE guidance. And she’d been afraid to hug her kids until she’d changed all her clothes when she came home from work. “I gently introduced her to our counsellor,” Edwards recalls, and she agreed to sit down for five minutes of decompression. “She was still there two hours later.”
Are a lot of people’s stories bringing up the same issues? Edwards says the last time she checked the stats, more than a third of the tick-boxes on the online form showed that people felt their mental health had been impacted in one way or another. Roughly another third relate to bereavement and healthcare, she says. And although the themes might be familiar, they do all have their own resonance. “There are stories about people who are unpaid carers; the nurses who laid down on the floor of a patient’s room so they didn’t die alone,” she says. “Or it might be that someone is still living with long Covid, like millions of people still are. It might be that they just felt completely forgotten about, and it’s quite hard for them to leave their front door now.” She says the stories of public sector workers “tell you a lot about resilience and grit, but it also tells you how close to breaking people were.”
Edwards is open about the fact that she’s found it hard at times to hear the things people have been through. “There are hundreds of stories somewhere at the back of my mind,” she says. She recalls sitting down with the counsellor after a series of very difficult sessions in which people came to her with stories about suicide. She remembers thinking that she probably didn’t want to say anything. “And then I just sort of let rip for 55 minutes about dealing with suicidal ideation. And occasionally, I sort of go, ‘I’m a civil servant. What am I doing?’”
But it’s clear that she doesn’t regret taking the job, despite the challenges. “I’ve always been a public servant my whole career, right from local government in parts of National Grid, and then into central government. That’s part of who I am, and I am resilient because I know that what we’re doing is for the public, and we are here to make sure that society keeps running along the tracks in a good way.”
Professionally, it’s made her appreciate how powerful it can be to ask people what they think “about how society should be or how something should change”. It’s something she wishes the civil service would do more of. “People are really willing to share their thoughts. It’s not about being angry or pointing fingers. People would sit there and really contemplate when we asked them: ‘What do you think could be learned? What do you think should have been done differently?’”
Ultimately, she hopes the stories she and her team have gathered will bring home the most crucial lessons from the pandemic: “The last thing we want is a situation whereby the future nurses who are in palliative care don’t know whether or not they should be wearing masks or PPE, because the guidance is unclear. We have to learn.”
Anyone feeling emotionally distressed or suicidal can call Samaritans for help on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find the nearest branch