Boris Johnson’s government has blocked a request for funding for another 10,000 hospital beds at the height of the Covid pandemic, the chief executive of NHS England has said.

Amanda Pritchard told the UK COVID-19 inquiry that the decision taken by the Treasury in July 2020 was “very disappointing”.

He said the additional beds and staff would have been used to cut waiting lists for planned care and “build resilience” in a second winter wave of the pandemic.

The government has said it cannot comment until the investigation is ongoing.

Health ministers at the time are expected to give evidence at the third section of the inquiry later this month looking at the impact of Covid on the NHS and health care systems across the UK.

Ms Pritchard served as chief operating officer of NHS England from 2019 until she was promoted to chief executive in August 2021.

In his evidence, he said a request was made to the government in July 2020 for 10,000 additional permanent, staffed hospital beds.

The demand was based on modeling of the spread of the virus as well as the need to deal with other pressures heading into the coming winter and resuming more planned, or elective, surgeries and other treatments for non-Covid patients.

But the investigation revealed that the Treasury and the Prime Minister’s private office had rejected the request, saying they wanted greater use of the private sector as well as temporary Nightingale hospitals.

And Ms Prichard was told the decision would be revisited as part of a wider spending review expected in autumn 2021.

He described the decision as “very disappointing”, saying that if additional funding had been agreed the waiting lists for planned NHS treatment in England would be in a “very different situation” today.

“If we had that capacity, we could certainly treat thousands more patients … as well as be more resilient through the second wave of the pandemic and into the winter,” Ms Prichard said.

In the summer of 2020, the NHS in England had a total permanent bed capacity to treat about 95,000 patients in acute hospitals.

This was to be increased by 4,000 from winter 2023, under a recovery plan agreed by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Later in her evidence, Ms Pritchard said the health service faced a period of “extreme pressure” in the winter of 2020-21 as another wave of Covid spread across the country.

By that time, new treatments had been discovered, including the cheaper steroid dexamethasone, and the first Covid vaccines were beginning to be administered in small numbers.

But the level of community transmission at the time meant that some intensive care units were still being pushed “to the brink” and were “right on the edge” of running out of bed space.

Ms Pritchard said that nationally, the health service had never had to “systematically limit” access to treatment because hospitals could not cope with demand.

“However, that does not mean that staff in those locations did not feel completely overburdened at this time – and it does not mean that the kind of care that was being provided was anything like normal,” he said.

Ms Pritchard was also asked about the seven temporary Nightingale hospitals quickly built in March and April 2020 to treat Covid patients across England.

Data seen by the inquiry shows that the total cost to the taxpayer, including installation and decommissioning, is now estimated at £358.5 million.

Hospitals in Birmingham, Bristol, Exeter, Harrogate, London, Manchester and Sunderland treated 141 Covid patients in the first wave of the virus and 1,097 Covid and other patients in the second wave.

In total, £50.4 million was spent on one site in Birmingham, which was never used by patients in the pandemic.

The Bristol site also carried out 6,554 assessments for patients at the city’s eye hospital.

Ms Pritchard told the inquiry the program was still “useful”, as the sites were envisaged at the time as “military field hospitals”.

“We thought we were doing this to avoid the situation in northern Italy,” he said, referring to scenes in Lombardy, where intensive care units were overwhelmed.