Children will be living in the “long shadow” of the pandemic for the next two decades thanks to the government’s “indifference” to them during lockdown, England’s former children’s commissioner has told the Covid inquiry.
The long-term, “devastating impact” the pandemic had on children’s mental and physical health was compounded by government policies that had left millions of families struggling to survive even prior to February 2020, the inquiry heard.
It was, said Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner for England until February 2021, a “toxic mix” that should have flagged lockdown as an “obvious” risk to anyone familiar with the wide range of research done into the lives of children in England and Wales prior to the pandemic.
“There was clear concern, pre-pandemic, about child health, rising inequalities in infant mortality, rising inequalities in life expectancy – with life expectancy going backwards, particularly for women in disadvantaged areas,” she said.
“We were seeing more and more children being taken into the care system and rising inequalities in childhood obesity, which is one of the biggest public health challenges we face,” she said. “These all occurred at the same time as rising levels of child poverty across the UK and also cuts to services supporting the most vulnerable children.”
Longfield gave evidence that 2.3 million children – one in six – lived in vulnerable homes prior to the pandemic. During lockdown, she said, this meant these children were “essentially locked up in homes in unsafe environments.”
