Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollast, and in this week's episode, we're taking a look at the COVID Inquiry after this week's explosive evidence sessions,

discussing what this exposes about how Downing Street and Whitehall operate in a crisis, a look ahead to the big name still to appear in front of Baroness Hallett, and what value the hearings might have on

planning for future pandemics? With me to look at all that while maintaining our clean rating

for language on Apple Podcasts. I'm delighted to say we have Kath Haddon, Program Director at the Institute

for Government, Lord Bethel, a health minister during COVID-19, as well as Ruby Lott-Lavinia, a reporter for Open Democracy,

who has been covering the inquiry, and Steve Bryan, Conservative MP and Chair of the Health

and Social Care Committee, and host of the Prevention is the New Cure podcast.

So I'm going to start with you, Ruby, as I said, you've been covering all these kind of hearings

up until now for open democracy. Where, kind of in the process are we kind of how far along

are we the first modules kind of finish once to the second module and kind of what's still to

come then? So we are second module in to what could be a years long inquiry essentially.

Our first module which started in June of this year covered preparedness, which is a really weird word that I never say

other than in the context of this inquiry. And it kind of examined how prepared we were as a

country for this crisis. And now we're into the evidence hearing from the second module,

which is political decision making and governance. And we're currently focusing on England.

And next in the new year, we're going to look at the devolved nations. So that's kind of where

we're out at the moment. And so, yeah, we've heard from, obviously, senior figures in number

10 this week, Lee K. and Dominic Cummings, who worked for Boris Johnson, the prime minister at the

time. We are going to hear, I think, from the former Prime Minister and the current Prime Minister in the next few weeks, aren't we? Oh yeah. So we've got a lot to come. I think that's something

that we kind of need to remember right now. Like everyone was getting very excited about the evidence

we've heard this week from Dominic Cummings. But, you know, we've still got Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock, Boris Johnson to come and to respond to a lot of things that have been

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