The appointment of Trevor Phillips to an inquiry into why black, Asian and minority ethnic people are being disproportionately affected by Covid-19 has undermined its credibility among those it is seeking to serve, according to two leading BAME campaigners.

Phillips, who previously chaired the Equality and Human Rights Commission, was selected despite being suspended from the Labour party last month for alleged Islamophobia, including a reference to UK Muslims as being “a nation within a nation”. The first four UK doctors with Covid-19 known to have died were all Muslim.

Writing in the Guardian, Sayeeda Warsi, who has long campaigned against Islamophobia in the Conservative party which she formerly chaired, and Simon Woolley, the director of Operation Black Vote, write: “The biggest challenge for the review will be credibility. Public Health England has given Trevor Phillips and his company, Webber Phillips, a prominent role. Yet a growing number of BAME groups and individuals are struggling to find the trust and confidence in him that is needed for this review to be taken seriously.”

Referring to an open letter signed by 100 black women that describes Phillips as being famous for “discarding the very real issues and consequences of structural racism” and another letter from representatives of thousands of BAME healthcare workers calling for his removal from the inquiry, Lord Woolley and Lady Warsi write: “Philips and PHE will have a huge task in building the requisite trust for this review to be accepted by the very people it is seeking to serve.”

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Phillips’s appointment has also been criticised by the Muslim Council of Britain – the umbrella group for leading mosques and other Islamic institutions – and the Muslim Labour backbenchers Naz Shah and Khalid Mahmood.

The government announced the inquiry after being urged to do so by Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the head of the British Medical Association, in an interview with the Guardian.

Nagpaul made his comments after early figures showed approximately a third of people in critical care with Covid-19 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were BAME – even though minority ethnic people make up just 14% of the population of England and Wales – while the first 10 doctors whose deaths were made public were also BAME.

Since then, NHS England data for the first 12,600 deaths from the virus in English hospitals has shown that while black people account for 3.4% of the population, they make up 6.4% of the deaths so far. The majority of healthcare workers dying continue to be from a BAME background.

A number of possible reasons have been suggested for the disparities but Warsi and Woolley warned against overplaying genetic and cultural factors at the expense of “inequalities in health, employment, housing, and poverty”.

PHE has defended Phillips’s involvement, saying his consultancy “has the right skills and experience”.