6 March 2025

(9.59 am)

Lady Hallett: Mr Wald.

Mr Wald: My Lady. Our next witness and our first witness

this morning is Mr Max Cairnduff. Could the witness be

sworn, please.

Mr Max Cairnduff

MR MAX CAIRNDUFF (affirmed).

Questions From Lead Counsel to the Inquiry for Module 5

Mr Wald: Please state your full name for the Inquiry .

Mr Max Cairnduff: Maximillian Cairnduff but I use Max .

Lead 5: Thank you. Mr Cairnduff, we’re grateful for it, you have provided a witness statement to the Inquiry, it’s Inquiry number INQ000536351, can you confirm, and I believe you have done so by signing it, that it is true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Mr Max Cairnduff: It is.

Lead 5: All right. Thank you for that.

Can I start, please, by way of introduction of you a little bit about your background. You started as a solicitor for number of years at two City firms; is that right?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, technically, actually, I was an employed barrister rather than a solicitor, I’m not sure that matters. I started out at A&O – sorry, Allen & Overy, I’m very sorry. I moved then to Shearman & Sterling, which is a New York based term, but I was in London. But I spent the bulk of my career at Freshfields.

Lead 5: How many years were you in private practice there?

Mr Max Cairnduff: 15 or more.

Lead 5: 15, and you specialised – is it commercial law, procurement?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Not procurement, though I was an infrastructure lawyer, so I was a transactional lawyer. So largely I negotiated international and domestic project financings. The UK ones didn’t involve procurement but I had procurement law colleagues who would assist with the technicalities –

Lead 5: You went on to specialise into procurement and –

Mr Max Cairnduff: No, I was never a procurement lawyer, I’m sorry.

Lead 5: Sorry, you ceased to be a lawyer in July 2018, didn’t you?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, that’s correct.

Lead 5: You joined the Civil Service –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – and you joined the Government Commercial Organisation within the Cabinet Office?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, I did.

Lead 5: Yes. More specifically, you became a commercial specialist in the Complex Transactions Team?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Exactly, yes.

Lead 5: Understood. Then in 2019 you joined the senior

management team within CTT?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: CTT being?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Complex Transactions Team.

Lead 5: Yes. On 1 April 2020, you were brought into work on the

PPE Buy Cell, of which we’ve heard a bit in the last

couple of days?

Mr Max Cairnduff: That’s correct, I’d spent a few days previously helping build up a bench of contingent labour to assist with Covid-related activities, and then I was transferred over to the PPE Buy Cell and, as it’s now called, the HPL, the High Priority Lane, on 1 April.

Lead 5: You’re not the only witness to whom this has been asked and I doubt you’ll be the last but if we can try to keep the pace down it will help our stenographer enormously.

Mr Max Cairnduff: I’m sorry, yes.

Lead 5: So you became the High Priority Lane and Donations lead?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Those two areas were amalgamated, weren’t they, Donations and High Priority?

Mr Max Cairnduff: That’s correct because both of them would involve potentially politically sensitive topics or require greater handling.

Lead 5: Yes, we’ll come on to that. But you joined that team after it had already been set up?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, it was set up – well, I didn’t know at the time – sorry, I’ll try and slow down – I didn’t know at the time exactly when it had been set up but I believe it was in late March, mid-to-late March.

Lead 5: Nor do you know, you tell us in your witness statement, by whom it was set up?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I didn’t know at the time of my witness statement. I’ve read a lot of other evidence in preparation for today so I’ve seen evidence since where I think it is in Andy Wood’s statement where it suggests that Lord Agnew suggested it, for example. My impression, though, is that it was more of an organic response to the flood of offers we’d already received by that point and then the flood of chasers we were starting to get in relation to some of them.

Lead 5: You occupied your post at Deputy Director General level?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Deputy Director, not DG.

Lead 5: Deputy Director. You occupied that position until around 4 May 2020, so just over a month?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: But a busy month?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Very. I’d actually remembered it as much longer. It was only when I was preparing for this hearing that I realised it was that short. In memory, it’s several weeks.

Lead 5: Yes, understandably. Could we please have on the display – I don’t know whether you followed yesterday’s proceedings –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Only the start.

Lead 5: Excuse me?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I’m very sorry, only the start.

Lead 5: Could we please, it’s a PHT reference rather than an INQ one, it’s two parts of the transcript from yesterday’s proceedings. I don’t know whether it’s a part that you’ve seen. It’s PHT000000151. If we could start at pages 181 to 182.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Thank you.

Lead 5: You can see at the top of that page some of the evidence that Mr Marron gave.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: “… I’m trying to find the right word, some people said ‘noise’ [he’s referring here to the VIP Lane], I don’t want to use the word ‘noise’. There was legitimate interest in – so we needed to manage that. I think as we look back on how we did this, we didn’t do it in a good way at all. I mean, frankly, we’ve reviewed it several times, the Boardman Review said this wasn’t the right thing to do, and frankly, if we’d had a better process in terms of triaging the offers, as we talked about before the break, we probably would have needed this. I think that’s a very valid observation.”

Mr Marron goes on:

“We’ve been tested in the High Court on this particular process, actually, here, that the unfairness in this very first stage was found to be unlawful, although actually our justice found – generally found that actually we would have awarded – she thought the contracts would have been awarded –”

You understand what he’s referring to there?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, I do, that’s the Mrs Justice O’Farrell PestFix v Ayanda judgment.

Lead 5: It is indeed and, in particular, the finding of unequal treatment –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – albeit that, in that case, those particular contracts were found to have been ones that would have been awarded in any event?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Yes. Then if we could just move to the latter of the two parts of this transcript, it’s at page 225. This is towards the very end of proceedings yesterday, where our Chair comments as follows:

“… I’m extremely grateful [to Mr Marron] to your and your colleagues for the work that you did and, of course for the work that you’re doing helping the Inquiry. I know you probably have to arrange” –

Sorry. If we can go up a page. It spans over the two pages, 224 and 225. That’s it. 224:

“I appreciate how hard you and your colleagues must have worked during the pandemic and how distraught, I’m sure, many of you are – I think you’ve shown signs of it this afternoon – that all your hard work has been undermined by the creation of the VIP Lane. I hope you understand why we had to examine it.”

Mr Max Cairnduff: Mm-hmm.

Lead 5: So I start with those observations. I just want to remind you of parts of your own evidence that relate to the VIP Lane now, if I may.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, please.

Lead 5: Thank you.

The first of those is at page 6, paragraph 4.5. Which is INQ – the witness statement – 000536351, where you observe:

“I was also aware at the time that there was a believed that the contracts coming through the [High Priority Lane] would be of good quality and would lead to credible offers of PPE coming through in the otherwise chaotic market.”

Is that a belief that you held, that there is an inherent improved credibility of offer amongst those that came in through the High Priority Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: It depends when. So when I joined the HPL I was, as it says in that quote actually, highly sceptical of it. I thought it was unlikely it would be a better route. I thought the better offers would likely come in through the other route or just randomly.

What I found in practice once I was working there, and this happened through two ways, was many genuinely good high-quality offers came through. And there’s a couple of reasons for that, I think. One of them is there are individuals such as Lord Feldman who was actively tasked with going out and identifying offers. He did a very good job of it. And he would seek, for example, feedback on which referrals had worked, had been potentially productive, which hadn’t been, and so that improved the quality, that were coming through that route.

The other thing we found was some very credible suppliers, rather than just going through the portal, would go through minister directly. So, for example, Apple were making a big donation, they went directly to government ministers, so that would then get referred to us. Or they’d go through the portal, not hear back, and then they would escalate, and so they would still end up with us.

So I didn’t expect it to begin with but it did become true that amongst a lot of offers that weren’t very good, there was a substantial kernel of offers that were very good indeed.

Lead 5: So initial scepticism but eventual support for the HPL; is that fair?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Support to a point. Later on, towards the end of April, I think I recommend wrapping it up, because I felt it was done. We were part – in the very early stages of the crisis we had desperate shortages of HPL – sorry, of HPL, sorry – of PPE. Sorry. We were all very aware of that.

You mentioned, I think, to Gareth there’s two kinds of pressure: there’s the pressure that’s coming from ministers, but there’s also the greater pressure of just seeing what’s happening. So at that point we were really just focused on getting kit in the door. Later on, as it stabilises, it’s not the best way to do things – (overspeaking) –

Lead 5: When you say “[we] were done”, you meant that sufficient quantities had already been secured?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I mean that – sorry, as it stabilised and we could see more reliable offers – more reliable supply coming through, more contracts had been placed, you’re in a place where you’re no longer in absolute crisis where you’re about to run out tomorrow, hopefully. And at that point you need to start thinking about your structure.

And as we go into May, we then start thinking about what the future will look like and what the future of PPE procurement will look like during the remainder of the crisis.

Sorry, does that answer?

Lead 5: All right, let’s move on to some of your other observations in relation to the VIP Lane.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yeah.

Lead 5: Page 14, paragraph 6.2 of your evidence. You say:

“… I had almost expected us to be akin to sewage workers …”

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Then you say:

“… clearing noise out of the system. Once we realised that some of it was pretty good my confidence in the HPL increased …”

And I think that summarises what you’ve just told us.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, I think that’s right.

Lead 5: Yes. We then have at your paragraphs 7.16 to 7.17, at page 23, an account of correspondence that you had with Mr Moore. Do you recall?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I do, indeed.

Lead 5: Yeah. And you said there – is it fair to say that you and David Moore didn’t quite see eye to eye on the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, I think I say in my statement, actually, and David was correct.

Lead 5: Excuse me?

Mr Max Cairnduff: David was correct.

Lead 5: In what sense?

Mr Max Cairnduff: In that I pushed at the time. I was caught I think in tunnel vision. When you’re there you’ve got a mixture of good quality offers that are stuck in some technical assurance black hole, from our limited perspective, and some which are incredibly noisy and may or may not be good, you don’t know, but they’re good enough to be put through to technical assurance at any rate. They’re stuck in the system.

I said to David basically, “Could you please get these unstuck.” And by unstuck, by the way, that doesn’t necessarily mean pass; it means give a resolution to, which may be rejection. I – you might want to pull it up, I don’t remember my exact words, but –

Lead 5: From your statement or from the correspondence?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Sorry, either, it doesn’t matter, I think it’s quoted in my statement.

Lead 5: The statement, if you want to look at it, is paragraphs 16 to 17 –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Oh, yes, thank you.

Lead 5: Page 23.

Mr Max Cairnduff: And essentially David came back saying, “We will not prioritise anything because it’s in the VIP Lane.” Which is absolutely right.

Lead 5: You, by contrast, Mr Cairnduff, were saying:

“… an HPL case with merit should be given priority over a case of equal merit which came [in] from another route.”

Mr Max Cairnduff: All things being equal, I think I said as well, didn’t I?

Lead 5: Yes, you did. You did say that.

And you say further, which is a variation on that theme:

“… if two leads are otherwise equal priority and one is VIP, some weighting to the VIP is helpful.”

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Can I just understand from you why that should be the case.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Well, if you’re asking me today, I don’t think it should be the case.

Lead 5: No.

Mr Max Cairnduff: I think I was wrong. And David pushed back hard and I never raised the point again, because I was wrong.

At the time, I was absolutely buried in an ocean of cases, none of which seemed to be progressing. I had cases that were older than the team was, to put it in that perspective. I was trying my hardest to get my cases through, and I lost perspective in the wider system.

And that’s partly why you have a wider system. It’s precisely because when you’re there, up to your neck in the mud, as it were, you will sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture.

Lead 5: All right. Well, that’s, if I may say so, a very candid description of the experience that you had.

You have told us nonetheless that you started with scepticism?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: And you ended up with less scepticism, albeit there came a moment when you thought there should no longer be a VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Now, can I just understand more closely from you, when your scepticism subsided, what did you see – can we enumerate them – as the reasons or the advantages of a VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, I set this out in actually quite a detailed email at one point, I believe. We were get – there’s – let me try to break this down.

Firstly, there had been a call to arms on 10 April, which is after the VIP Lane is set up, of course, but prior to that there are two appeals, one in Parliament, for people to provide offers to government, the result of which is a vast on-pouring of offers. It’s not something a commercial person would have done.

So we’re in a world where we have –

Lead 5: You regard the call to arms as regrettable because it produced a deluge of offers when there were already too many to triage; is that fair?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Speaking personally, yes.

Lead 5: Yes. All right, thank you. Carry on, please.

Mr Max Cairnduff: I think they’d be better – sorry, okay. You can ask me about that if you want, what you prefer.

So we’ve got that problem, that we’re deluged with offers, so you need something to handle that problem. At that point people will have ministers, MPs and others, and other senior officials will have legitimate concerns where they hear a case which on its face looks good but which doesn’t appear to be progressing, and so they will start chasing. And some suppliers, often not the best ones, but sometimes good ones, will actually contact multiple people to raise their concerns. You get three or four different ministers or MPs, each of them saying “Why haven’t you responded to Acme Corps?”, or whoever.

So that’s a lot of noise. I know Jonathan doesn’t like the term but it is the term I used at the time and still do.

The other reason though –

Lead 5: Sorry, can I just –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Please, sorry.

Lead 5: – ask you in relation to that, so you see as an advantage of the VIP Lane the ability it offered to manage the expectations of those that were seeking feedback and progress reports as a matter, in effect, of PR, public relations?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I wouldn’t call it public relations, and also I would say it’s not the best way to do it, it’s the way we had available to do it. Which is a different thing. I say at the end of my statement I actually think there’s much better ways of doing something –

Lead 5: By allowing others that were not involved in the core task of procurement –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Precisely.

Lead 5: – to deal with that. But let me just pick up the first half of your answer.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Please.

Lead 5: You wouldn’t call it public relations. It’s obviously not an activity that is central or that is core to proper, efficient, especially emergency, procurement, is it?

Mr Max Cairnduff: No, but it’s not just PR either. The example I had in mind on this, of where it’s really legitimate, I think, for ministers to get involved, because I know the professor was quite critical of this, my Lady, but we had a case where a Korean supplier contracted a Labour peer and said, “My case isn’t being progressed.” On its face it was a – I think it was – I can’t remember exactly what it was but it was a high-volume, credible looking case.

The Labour peer raises it with Lord Bethell, saying, “I don’t know if your team have dropped the ball on this at all. I don’t know if they have – if they’ve dropped the ball on just this one or I don’t know if it’s an example of a systematic failure by your team.”

Lord Bethell then raises that through officials, so it comes to my team. I think that is correct, because actually, that is politicians exercising legitimate oversight over official activity.

That’s why I don’t like PR. It is legitimate, I think, for a minister to say, “Official, are you doing your job?”

Lead 5: It placed additional stress on you and your team, didn’t it?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Very much so, yes.

Lead 5: And that team was under terrific amounts of stress as it was?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Yeah. All right. You were enumerating advantages of the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, thank you.

Lead 5: You’d identified that one. Do you have others?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, the better one is that – and, again, there are better ways of doing this, this is the means we had available to us at the time. The other one is that some genuinely really credible offers came to us and, I mean, I didn’t know this at the time, so this is based on reading, for example, the second corporate statement where Clare Gibbs goes into it, but most of the contracts placed, I understand, were with a relatively small number of large suppliers. We had some really good leads, people like Bunzl was one, Nine United(?) was another. I probably shouldn’t – should I be naming them or not? I don’t know.

Lead 5: Mr Cairnduff, can I just ask you there –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Please.

Lead 5: Sorry to cut across but I do want to pick up this point with you. You may have received good leads through the VIP Lane. Are you in a position to compare the prevalence of such leads within the High Priority Lane or VIP Lane to those obtained outside of it?

Mr Max Cairnduff: To an extent now. I couldn’t have at the time because at the time I had no sight of what was happening in the other lanes, particularly. I knew ours was sclerotic.

Lead 5: Let’s deal with those in parts, at the time and then now.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: At the time, your scepticism lifted, didn’t it?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: But it lifted without an ability to make that comparison in and out of the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: That’s true but there’s a couple of things there. One is we’re doing triage within the VIP Lane. So when the offers come in we look at them like other Opportunities teams and we say is it for what we want to buy? Is it volume? Is it a credible counterparty? We look at those things. We do triage. At that point, we progress it forward. The rest of the system – and I know this is being challenged but I do believe this bit worked – the rest of the system will then compare that to other offers, and kind of, you know, prioritise within that, but we’re prioritising within our own lane on the basis of things like volume, credibility, is it the right stuff?

Lead 5: Performance?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Performance of the contract?

Mr Max Cairnduff: No, sorry, no, not performance of the contract. I had no visibility of that. Most of them wouldn’t have been placed at that point.

Lead 5: Of course but there are various indicia by reference to which one can assess the quality of an offer as it comes in, and you’ve identified some of them?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, and at the opportunity stage it’s quite a limited thing and one of the things you’re looking at, for example, is it’s first a very basic check. Is it in English? Does it make natural language sense? Are the photos of what they purport to be? Really basic stuff. So that’s one of your first things, and then – sorry I don’t want to repeat myself – is it just we want to buy, volume, all that good stuff.

Lead 5: Mr Cairnduff, you said that at the time you didn’t have an ability to make a comparison in and out of the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: No.

Lead 5: You said that since then you have been able to do something towards achieving that –

Mr Max Cairnduff: I’ve seen various bits of evidence in preparation for today.

Lead 5: Yes, and on the basis of that evidence, can you form a view as to whether the High Priority Lane did yield a disproportionate number of what you describe as very good offers?

Mr Max Cairnduff: My impression to be honest is yes.

Lead 5: It’s only an impression?

Mr Max Cairnduff: It is only an impression and you will have greater data, so I may be wrong, but my impression, based in a couple of things. I looked at that on your opening, I think it was, which I did watch actually. There was a tornado diagram?

Lead 5: The funnels?

Mr Max Cairnduff: That’s it, the funnels, thank you, which shows why things drop out. And when you look at that, in the HPL, actually most things don’t drop out instantly. Most of the offers we got pass a kind of a minimum credibility test. With the non-HPL lanes, a lot of the offers aren’t even necessarily of PPE. They’re people who have filled in a web page. And, actually, they drop off really quite sharply, really quite fast. I hadn’t actually seen that before this week. But I think it did suggest that there were more credible offers.

Then the other thing is I looked at Clare Gibbs and the second corporate statement, where it talks about who the contracts were actually placed with, which I didn’t know before, I think, last week, maybe. And, actually, they’re placed with – 50% of them, I think, are placed with – I don’t have the exact stats to hand but, you know, 50% of them are placed with a handful of really big suppliers, 80% with, like, ten really big suppliers, I think it was. So the actually HPL things that have got contracts, none of which I knew at the time, went to a small subset of impressive looking suppliers.

Lead 5: Mr Cairnduff, you’re right that the Inquiry has assembled quite a lot of data about this and I’m going to invite you to comment on that in due course this morning. Before doing that, you’ve identified advantages as you saw it of the VIP Lane –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – what I described as PR, but you insisted is something slightly different to PR?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: You’ve mentioned the quality of offers that you perceived was coming in –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – or perhaps not at the time but with retrospect you understand to have been coming in to the High Priority Lane.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Anything else by way of advantage that you perceived either then – well, both then and now, on the basis of what you’ve been able to look at, of the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I’m trying to remember. I did send out quite a long email with a whole – which was called something like “Why do we have a VIP Lane”, I recall, at the time.

Lead 5: This was at the time?

Mr Max Cairnduff: This was at the time, yes –

Lead 5: So it won’t help us with making that comparison then and now.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Oh, yes, I see. Sorry. Could you repeat the question then, please?

Lead 5: I’m asking you to enumerate what advantages you saw and see in the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Ah, okay. So at the time I saw I think the ones I’ve chiefly set out, which is (a) handling noise and (b) you have some really good stuff coming in there and, you know, it then makes sense to handle it.

Lead 5: All right.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Other ways of doing that. Now, I would say handling noise, I genuinely don’t think it’s a PR task, that’s not semantics for me. It’s about your response to ministers who are keeping you to account. I don’t think that’s a PR thing but it’s better done by non-commercial professionals to my mind. But commercial professionals were who we had. In terms of the other piece, it would be vastly preferable, I think, if instead of starting with a vast sack of offers, you were then kind of looking in side trying to find things, to sit down and be much more targeted and think okay, well, SCCL has fallen over – well, I heard from somebody it may not have entirely but, as far as knew at the time, it had fallen over – how do we go out now and proactively target? And, eventually, of course the Rapid Response Teams were set up and that was a much better methodology.

Lead 5: I was going to ask you next about that. In what way was it better?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Firstly, the trouble with the multi-stage process – one of the good things about the multi-stage process is it insulates – it allows the VIP Lane to act as a lightning rod for all that political pressure so that the rest of the system isn’t really kind of damaged by it, and I think it largely did that. But it’s slow, it has multiple hand-offs and it leads to inefficiencies.

So, for example, I said we didn’t know what things were getting awarded contracts, so let’s say – and make up a supplier name, Acme Corps again, have come through again for a third time, and I don’t know in fact that they failed, that actually their pricing was unacceptable and they were reject. Well, I don’t know that, so I now spending time assessing them again, so there’s an inefficiency there. It’s also multiple hand-offs lead to delay and in this extraordinary fervid market, delay is fatal.

Lead 5: That’s absolutely right. Speed is vital.

Mr Max Cairnduff: So the RRT – sorry, if I can use the acronym, is that okay?

Lead 5: RRT.

Mr Max Cairnduff: The RRT, by contrast, it brings together the various stages of process and, by this point, we all are more sophisticated in what we’re doing. I think Andy Wood speaks to this.

Lead 5: Without referrals, without –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Okay, sorry, yes.

Lead 5: The RRT, the Rapid Response Team?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, the RRT brings together the relevant people in one place where they can look as a group at an offer and try and progress it really quickly.

Lead 5: And without referrals and without demands for updates?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Oh, sorry, I thought you were saying for me not to refer to things.

Lead 5: No, sorry. There isn’t the same –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Exactly, you take all of that out.

Lead 5: You take all of that out, you create a slick system –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – that doesn’t suffer from the problems of the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: And updates – yes, and updates become less necessary because you’ve moved through things so quickly that, actually, you’ve rejected it or accepted it within probably a couple of days.

Lead 5: Is it not a model which could and should have replaced or substituted for the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Well, “should”, perhaps; “could”, no, I would say. There were significant backlogs of opportunities. There were already people handling things and not everything was suitable for the RRT. The RRT was a limited resource. It made sense for the – sorry, I’m speaking quickly again – it made sense to use it for the very best of the opportunities regardless of lane.

Lead 5: Let’s just rewind a moment, if we may, Mr Cairnduff. This is no criticism of you: you arrived and the VIP Lane had already been set up, yes?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: For you personally to make a recommendation such as that it be replaced with the Rapid Response Team would have been quite a radical one to do because it was already functioning, wasn’t it?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Also the RRT didn’t exist then and Chris hadn’t thought of it yet.

Lead 5: It came to be created, didn’t it?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: It served a function akin to the VIP Lane but without some of the drawbacks of the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I think it’s a bit harsh to say it was akin to the VIP Lane. I think it was better.

Lead 5: It was better?

Mr Max Cairnduff: But I don’t think we could have done it straightaway.

Lead 5: Why not?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I’m not sure the organisation was mature enough yet. I mean, to put it in perspective, the whole cell of, like, 450 people was set up in a matter of days by people who were suddenly working from home with no prior warning and, back then, we weren’t all set up for home working the way we are now. We were volunteers from Cabinet Office, DfE – sorry, Department for Education, Ministry of Defence, our systems didn’t even talk to each other much at the time, we didn’t have a background in clinical buying, which, you know, is worth exploring in its own right. But at that point you’ve got to set up something which works and starts doing things and, actually, I think – I wasn’t involved in this, this was before my time, but I think the team did really pretty exceptionally actually, when you think of them scattered there, some of them working from their bedrooms, setting up this whole thing in days.

Lead 5: But the noise to which you and others refer, implicit in the word “noise” is unwanted sound?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Yes. Mr Rhys Williams described it as a distraction.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: You’d accept that –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – it was a distraction? To that extent, if not others, one would have preferred it not to have been there?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Yes. All right. Let’s move on. I’m conscious of the time.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Sorry.

Lead 5: Not your fault. I’ve been asking you questions that arise out of your answers. Just so we can situate or locate the VIP Lane within the procurement system more generally, it sat within the PPE Buy Cell?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: There were four routes by which an offer could be initiated: the online portal –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – existing suppliers, China Buy and then senior referrers through the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, and Make, whether you count it or not, was part of that.

Lead 5: We’ve heard about the eight individual workstreams, known as the Opportunities teams –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – to which you’ve made numerous references today, and the VIP Lane was one of the Opportunities teams?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: You, as you’ve made clear, were the VIP Lane team lead –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – in charge of its day-to-day running, having taken over from Hannah Bolton?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: All right. Staffing. Under Hannah Bolton, there were three full-time staff and one part-time member of staff?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Correct.

Lead 5: Once you arrived, that increased, did it not, initially to seven and then on to 12?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Seven, yes, 12 sounds right. If it’s in my statement it’ll be correct.

Lead 5: We understand from the evidence of Mr Rhys Williams that eventually it reached 38 individuals; 38 people working within the PPE Buy Cell?

Mr Max Cairnduff: It gets a little harder to measure because later on there are people – some of the work gets shared out with other Opportunities cells.

Lead 5: Is it something in the order of that?

Mr Max Cairnduff: It’s poss – it’s credible. Sorry, I genuinely don’t remember the exact size it got to by the end.

Lead 5: Okay, I hope it’s not necessary, it’s cited in Mr Rhys Williams’ third witness statement?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Okay.

Lead 5: That is when the PPE Buy Cell was at its peak at 580 staff – 508, I beg your pardon.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Okay.

Lead 5: By simple arithmetic, it therefore constituted 7.5% of the PPE Buy Cell, the VIP Lane, at its height?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Okay.

Lead 5: It’s fair to say, is it not, that VIP offers occupied, because of the noise to which you refer, because of the demands for feedback, because of the giving of feedback, because of the iterative process that sometimes occurred within that system, more time and resource than offers arriving by other means?

Mr Max Cairnduff: More time and resource for the Opportunities team dealing with them, for the VIP Lane, not for anyone else.

Lead 5: No, that’s what I’m referring to –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – for those individuals. It follows, does it not, that there was, to some degree, an opportunity cost therefore because the time, the effort, the resource that went into VIP offers was not spent on those offers that came in by other means?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, but I would say less opportunity cost than if we hadn’t had something to channel those offers because, otherwise, they would have popped up all across the system and more people would have been drawn into it.

Lead 5: All right. That’s fair. Just to put more numbers on it, there were approximately two more numbers in all, weren’t there?

Mr Max Cairnduff: It sounds credible, I don’t remember the exact number.

Lead 5: If we’re talking about 7.5% occupied by the VIP Lane, that takes us to a figure of 1,800, approximately?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I don’t think we had that many offers in VIP.

Lead 5: No, 1,800 offers that could have been processed by those staff, had it not been for the High Priority Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Oh, I see your point. Yes, but, as I say, more people would have been having to deal with queries at that point, so I’m not sure it would have actually been helpful.

Lead 5: All right. It is a crude analysis?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yeah.

Lead 5: We certainly know anecdotally what you tell us about a distraction and about the opportunity cost and we know from the evidence. Perhaps we could show INQ000512297, page 4 of 11.

Lady Hallett: I think you mentioned that opportunity cost, I think Mr Cairnduff’s answer was that he thought there was one, bound to be, but it was lower than if – so I’m not sure he was accepting if there was an additional opportunity cost.

Mr Max Cairnduff: I think that’s right, my Lady, but I would say there is an opportunity cost, it would have been higher if we hadn’t had that but, if we’d had an alternative means of handling – I mean Jonathan is right, I shouldn’t really call it noise, but I’ll be consistent. If we’d had an alternative means of handling communications and updates, you’d have dealt with the noise and you wouldn’t have had quite the same opportunity cost.

Lady Hallett: That’s back to the point about the Rapid Response Team?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Or an alternative means of interfacing with seniors – stakeholders.

Mr Wald: Thank you. I think, given that additional exchange, it’s probably not necessary to go to this document.

I’m going to move on to the purpose of the High Priority Lane in a moment but I just want to ask, on the basis of the answers you’ve just given, you experienced a degree of discomfort initially about a system you inherited, so to speak, that you came into.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Is it one that you yourself would have invented, that you would have created?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I don’t think so but I now have hindsight. So it’s actually quite hard to answer.

Lead 5: We’re focused on that, the Inquiry generally is looking back and learning lessons from the experience of the past.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Oh, okay. No.

Lead 5: You wouldn’t?

Mr Max Cairnduff: The only wrinkle is, and I’ve alluded to this a couple of times, you have the resources you have so, because of the way the nature of the Civil Service works and the government commercial works, it’s really easy to reach out and get volunteers from central department commercial, it’s much harder to get volunteers from everywhere else, like NHS Commercial or comms teams or admins teams, or whatever, so that’s why, no, I don’t think it’s the best way to do it because you create a parallel procurement line within your parallel procurement, and get to equal treatment issues, as Mrs Justice O’Farrell found. But we had the resource we had.

Lead 5: Given that answer, are you in agreement with the comments that Mr Marron made yesterday that you were shown at the very outset of this morning, and he cites Mrs Justice O’Farrell’s judgment –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – he says that it shouldn’t have existed. He wouldn’t – you know, on a future occasion it shouldn’t be there; would you agree with that?

Mr Max Cairnduff: On a future occasion it shouldn’t be there. I think it was quite hard to avoid on this occasion. But on a future occasion, yes, I can’t see why you’d remotely want to do that again.

Lead 5: All right. In terms of the steps you took, Mr Cairnduff, upon arrival at the VIP Lane, you introduced a single email address, didn’t you?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: You did this because communications with senior so-called VIPs regarding offers was proving to be time consuming and a distraction for the Opportunities team’s focus from good sources?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, I was also concerned that, without a central mailbox – if you have a central mailbox, one person can do part of the case and hand it on to someone else seamlessly. If you don’t, if everything is flowing through me or Hannah, or someone else, and we fall over – which did happen to some people – you have suddenly got, you’ve just lost your continuity and you then potentially lose life-saving equipment.

Lead 5: You were also unhappy be about the name, weren’t you?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: You wanted to change the name?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Sadly, I failed, yes.

Lead 5: You failed to change it from what to what?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Well, it was originally called the, I think, High Priority and VIP team, “Lane” is a term that comes in later because it’s not really a lane. I thought the term “VIP” was really unhelpful and it gave the impression, and I think this has been proven since, that the fact someone is a VIP makes the offer special, which is wrong. The VIP status means that you have to do more handling, it doesn’t –

Lead 5: It’s wrong as a matter of impression or it’s wrong that it should have happened?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Wrong as a matter of fact.

Lead 5: Because you say it wasn’t occurring?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Ah no, sorry, I’m putting myself back in the time. I’ll restate. The problem with the term “VIP” is it implies why you’re prioritising is because they’re a VIP. But triage occurs within the lane, so within – the lane is just a way of handling offers that come through a particular route. Your actual prioritisation is still on the basis of volume, kit, quality, all of that stuff. It also is, I thought subsequently, it would just – well, we’ve seen what happened with it, actually.

You know, there is now a narrative, I think, that a key part of the response was effectively cronyism, which I genuinely don’t believe it was but I think the term “VIP” and calling it the VIP Lane hugely contributed to that.

Lead 5: So when you sought to change it, it was because of a matter of optics rather than your concern that some advantage was being conferred by dint of who it was that referred a particular offer into the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, but what I say there is I take you back to when you were asking me about some of my earlier comments.

This is at exactly the point in time when I am the most sceptical of the value of the lane, so I’m not expecting much of it to go to contract at this point. So yes, I’m seeing it then as a handling lane essentially. I’m highly sceptical that good stuff will come through, I don’t realise that until later, and so I’m concerned that the term itself is going to be – is just profoundly unhelpful, which I think it was.

I didn’t think of the term – Gareth mentions if you call it the “enquiry lane”, which would have been much better. He’s right. I didn’t think of it.

Lead 5: Tell me, you’ve cited, and I’ve asked you a little bit about it, the judgment of Mrs Justice O’Farrell, the PestFix –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – judicial review claim and the finding within it of unequal treatment?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: That reveals something more than optics, doesn’t it?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, it shows you’ve breached equal treatment requirements, which makes it unlawful.

Lead 5: Yes, so doesn’t that suggest to you that, in addition to the impression that was given by the use of the term “VIP Lane”, there was something else, something more fundamental, perhaps something more important, that was problematic about it?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I think there clearly is something more than problematic yes, I think that’s been well established but –

Lead 5: The reason I ask you about it – sorry.

Mr Max Cairnduff: On 1 April would I have thought of that, no, because I wasn’t expecting stuff to go through from it.

Lead 5: I’m asking you with the benefit of hindsight.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: You’ve told the Inquiry that you’re perhaps – perhaps you were referring to it at the time why you attempted a name change?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: But now, posing the same question, with the benefit of hindsight, there was more to be concerned about than optics –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – wasn’t there?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: All right, thank you.

In terms of the promotion of the VIP Lane, an email initially went out to officials, including Mr Rhys Williams and those working with him. You mentioned Lord Feldman –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – also the private offices of Lord Bethell, Mr Gove, and Lord Agnew, from all of whom we will be hearing in due course.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: They provided personal email addresses or their office email addresses –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – and they used their contacts.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: A particularly –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Sorry, if you’re talking there – Lord Feldman used his contacts, I don’t know what did particularly.

Lead 5: Well, I was going to say Lord Feldman was the –

Mr Max Cairnduff: He was an envoy essentially, I think.

Lead 5: Yes, he was quintessentially drawing upon his many years –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – of experience within the Conservative Government and the contacts he had acquired thereby?

Mr Max Cairnduff: And his business contacts, I think. I don’t know him, I’ve spoken to him once, I think, but he did have wider business contacts too.

Lead 5: Well, we can ask him. I think it’s next week, actually, that Lord Feldman will be joining us.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: That initial distribution clearly gave better opportunities for involvement in the VIP Lane to those who were affiliated with or had connections with the Conservative Party. That’s fair, isn’t it?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, but they were the government of the day.

Lead 5: Of course.

Mr Max Cairnduff: So who I was reaching out to was the government of the day. Had it been a Labour government or a government of another party, I would, at the time, have done the same thing because you were reaching out to people who are in ministerial offices who were the ones who were scrutinising your work and chasing for updates.

Lead 5: Had it been an alternative government, I would have been asking you the same question in mirror form.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: But my follow-up question to you is that it would be fairer, it would be more inclusive, if that initial distribution or that initial invitation to feed in to the VIP Lane be made more generally?

Mr Max Cairnduff: That’s true but, firstly, I wouldn’t have known at the time how to do that. I was already being – the people I reached out to were the people who were already chasing us regularly. That’s why they were on that distribution. They were the ones who were chasing constantly for enquiries.

I’m not sure, as a civil servant at the time, actually, I would have been – I’d have had to kind of find out how you reached out to the opposition. I actually still don’t understand today how you would communicate formally with His Majesty’s Opposition as a civil servant working for the Government. I actually don’t know how that would work. But, it was primarily that that was the people who were raising –

Lead 5: It’s not beyond the wit of man that you can do that?

Mr Max Cairnduff: No, you can do it. Oh, sorry, that was the other point I was going to make: it would have absolutely drowned us because what I was trying to do with that email was dampen down noise.

We’re back to that point. We were already massively overloaded, we have far more cases already than we can process, the team after working 14 to 16-hour days, seven days a week. Reaching out and saying, “Can you sent me more”, would have been a very odd thing to do. What I was trying to do was dampen down and kind of calm things. Saying, “Please send me lots more”, we wouldn’t have been able to do anything with it.

Lead 5: Save that a successful offer results in a very significant contract, doesn’t it?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Later but not at that point. At that point all that’s happening is that every offer that comes in, none of them were successful –

Lead 5: But you would have known that –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – by inclusion in the system you stand a chance of securing an important contract at the end of it?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: You will have known it and, for that reason, I understand what you’re saying about deluge, as a matter of fairness, inclusion in that process should be made more generally?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I think that’s right but I think if we’d done that, the whole thing would have fallen over.

Lead 5: All right. I now want to take you to some remarks made by Professor Sanchez-Graells. I think you may have heard his evidence.

Mr Max Cairnduff: I heard a fair chunk of his evidence, yes.

Lead 5: You heard a fair chunk of it. Could you display, please – I’m hoping you have the Inquiry document reference, because I’m not sure I do.

It’s – thank you – INQ000539153. And the first reference within it is page 104, paragraph 292.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, he says there:

“If this is representative of the more general understanding of the ‘VIP Lane’ …”

I’m not sure it was.

Lead 5: So, yes, I’m just going to invite your comment. We’ve touched on this, because you spoke earlier about the advantages, as you saw it, of the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: 292 – let’s just go back to 292.1, if we could.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: There we are:

“It has been stated that ‘VIP Lane’ offers were at the same time ‘route 2’ offers, in the sense that, according to [Cabinet Office], all companies referred by ministers, MPs or senior officials ‘had already applied via Route 2 or were told to complete the webform for Route 2 as part of processing their offers’.”

Do you agree with that?

Mr Max Cairnduff: No, I don’t think that – sorry, what is “Route 2” in this case? I don’t think that’s correct or they hadn’t – if they’d all been told – well, they may have been told to complete the webform; many did not complete the webform and some would have seen that as inappropriate.

It’s very difficult with an international global corporation to say – who has approached a Minister of State, to say, “Could you go, please, and fill in a webform?” It’s not realistic.

Lead 5: Route 2 is an accelerated route. We saw yesterday, during Mr Marron’s evidence, a slide that identified “(A + B) OR C”.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Where C – I don’t know whether you followed that?

Mr Max Cairnduff: No, I don’t remember that.

Lead 5: A plus B were references to the quantity – the size of the company offering or the quantity of PPE being offered, and C is VIP status, that would accelerate progress through the offer process.

Mr Max Cairnduff: I don’t know where that comes from but they certainly weren’t accelerated through because I was working there and it was very, very slow.

Lead 5: Let’s turn to 292.2.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Sorry, just on that though, that said, I do remember an email exchange with Darren where he is saying to someone –

Lead 5: Mr Blackburn?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I’m sorry, yes, Mr Blackburn – he was saying to somebody “Don’t put this over to the HPL, if it’s a high-quality offer, it will get picked up by the triage teams and whizzed through the system.” Might not be his exact words but it’s pretty close, I think.

That was my understanding. If it was a really good offer that hadn’t come to us, it would whizz through the system to be kicked up by the other cell’s triage, which was the same as our triage, of course.

Lead 5: All right. Let’s move down to 292.2, here we are.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: First bullet, end of:

“In my view [says Professor Sanchez-Graells], however, there is a clear difference between providing assurance that offers were being considered and progressed by communicating the organisational arrangements of the PPE Buy Cell, on the one hand, and providing specific updates on the progress of specific offers to the specific referrers on the other.”

You accept that, in many cases, what was fed back or provided was the latter?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, and there is a clear difference. I don’t agree with his next bullet however.

Lead 5: Let’s look at the next bullet:

“Rather than dedicating resources to answering these requests for updates, the PPE Buy Cell, DHSC or [Cabinet Office] could have sent general communications to referrers explaining those organisational arrangements and asking them to refrain from chasing, as well as setting up an automated response from the dedicated mailbox making clear that the offers were being processed and asking offerors and referrers to wait for a follow-up as part of the operating procedures.”

You’ve said you don’t agree. Why not?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Because I don’t think it’s appropriate that when a minister – potentially prompted, as in my example earlier, by a senior member of the Opposition – comes to their officials and says, “What is going on with this? I’ve heard you’re dropping the ball”, you give them an automated response or you say to them “Here’s our organisational structure, leave us to it.”

Let’s say, for example, in that Korean example – in fact that offer was not a good offer, or we went back and rejected it, but let’s say it had been a really good offer and actually we had dropped the ball, we had missed it, maybe we were systematically missing them, we’d have gone back and said, “No, no, minister, don’t worry, officials are on it, it’s not for you to look at it”, and we would have failed.

You know, ministerial oversight is part of the system, and yes, it’s some – I mean, I think all officials will say sometimes it’s easier if you don’t have ministers directing oversight; it’s still right.

Lead 5: You make the point yourself, Mr Cairnduff, that there’s no equivalent of the VIP Lane that you’ve come across in the past or abroad.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Well, abroad I only take from Professor Sanchez-Graells, his evidence. He does an international comparison where I think he finds –

Lead 5: Yes, which you’ve adopted, you’ve included in your evidence.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Oh, okay, I forgot that. But yes, I agree, it makes sense to me.

Lead 5: Yes. He says all of this is down to ministerial deference.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, I disagree with that.

Lead 5: You disagree with that?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes. I think what creates it is the call to arms, which isn’t what creates the VIP Lane, because it’s after, but it is symptomatic, then previously in March there are two basically public things saying: come in with all your offers. It’s kind of a – I think someone at the time called it the “Dunkirk spirit” or something. It’s like, you know, “Bring it all in.” I don’t think others did that.

No, I can’t know for certain, the professor will know better than I will, but that’s where, for me, things flow from, because then you’re drowning, then you have people chasing you up, then you need means to deal with people chasing you up or it slows down the whole system, and then you’re in this world.

And I think here the professor is right as a matter of kind of strict procurement practice, but procurement practice isn’t the only thing that’s important in these situations.

And, I mean, there’s a bit where the professor puts this list of things to take into account, and notably what it doesn’t include is saving lives, which is what we really cared about.

Lead 5: Mr Cairnduff, I just want to finally put to you a number of points that relate to your diminishing scepticism –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – your observation about the number of good offers that arrived via the VIP Lane –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Please.

Lead 5: – and what I understand within that to be your growing assumption that a disproportionate number of better or more credible offers would arrive by that means. Is that fair?

Mr Max Cairnduff: No, sorry, I wouldn’t say it was a growing assumption. It was a growing belief, I think based on what I was seeing at the time, that we were getting high-quality offers. At the time I had no way of comparing how many we were getting compared to others, but I knew we were getting very good offers that genuinely merited following up, and we provided – (overspeaking) –

Lead 5: But unable to compare them to those offers obtained elsewhere?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, so that’s why I was challenging – I wasn’t assuming they were better, I was believing, based on what I was seeing, that we had good offers worth pursuing.

Lead 5: Yes. Difficult, though, to perform that analysis at the time or even –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Impossible.

Lead 5: – or even since without the data –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – or the evidence that the Inquiry has.

You’ve observed that speed is vital.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: That the faster you can progress through the system, the better your chances of securing a contract?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes. I think in almost all cases. Gareth had a small exception but it would hardly – wouldn’t come up very often.

Lead 5: Okay, that’s helpful.

And that technical assurance is a bottleneck? It’s a point that Mr Blackburn and you both make?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes. When it’s necessary, but yes.

Lead 5: The VIP Lane had its own technical assurance didn’t it?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Partway through. And so I believe, from what I’ve seen from the org structures I’ve seen, did say the China team and some of the others, so I don’t think that was just us.

And that wasn’t something we asked for. I think what that was about was someone you could contact to say, “What’s going on? What’s happened to this? Is it being reviewed?” And I think – and again, this is based on what I’ve read preparing for this, because at the time I wouldn’t have known – I do believe that other cells and other routes also had their own means of doing that. I don’t believe we were unique in that.

Lead 5: Let’s move on, then.

Could we have INQ000475005.

Now this is – you’ve referred to the material that the Inquiry has available to it, that wasn’t then available to you?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Even more recently –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – hasn’t been available to you?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: That includes 36 witness statements from referrers.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: And we’ll move on to caseworkers in due course.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Of which you regarded yourself as one and included a response?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I didn’t regard myself as one but I thought it would be helpful to – I thought it would be unhelpful not to reply to the survey.

Lead 5: Indeed, we’re grateful for that response.

36 are the referrers. Of those 36 referrers, 67% of them, or two-thirds of them, had not conducted any due diligence?

Mr Max Cairnduff: No.

Lead 5: So two-thirds.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Nor would I have expected them to. It may be on that – (overspeaking) –

Lead 5: – (overspeaking) – figures 24, I know that the chair was keen to have that as numbers. That’s 24 individuals.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Okay.

Lead 5: Nor would you have expected them to, but nor would you therefore say that an arriving offer had any, on this basis at least, inherent improved credibility or solidity?

Mr Max Cairnduff: It may on two things – most will not. There are two exceptions, sorry. If someone has looked at it then it is probably English language, basically coherent, and it is for PPE. So that is an incredibly minimal threshold. But that’s only when someone looks at it. Now, many will have been flipped over with no one looking at it.

The other scenario where it will be more credible is if it comes through and it is, I don’t know, Amazon, which actually was a real example, then the fact it is Amazon, with their logistical reach, is inherently likely to be more credible, plus you already know they’re probably not going to struggle with the financial covenant.

So for the majority of offers, you’re absolutely correct. But there are two subsets where I think that’s not quite true.

Lead 5: All right, let’s move on. I’m conscious of the time, Mr Cairnduff.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Sorry.

Lead 5: I’m sorry, if I have to.

INQ000582366, page 4, paragraph 1.5.

I’m looking at another measure of the inherent credibility or solidity of an offer: performance. How did the contracts perform.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: In and out of the High Priority Lane.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yeah.

Lead 5: Within the same given period.

And this one, once it’s available, INQ000582366, will show that High Priority Lane offers experienced a higher rate of contractual performance issues than non-High Priority Lane ones.

I don’t know if you saw that slide yesterday?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I did see it. It was 50-something to 30-something or something like that?

Lead 5: Yes, 55 to 39. Well remembered.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Thank you. I didn’t think – well, there’s a couple of things there.

I wasn’t sure how useful this was, but you’ll form your own conclusions, of course, because it could be, for example, that the problems that arise in the non-HPL ones are all quite minor and the problems in the HPL one are all quite major, in which case it’s actually worse than you’re suggesting. It could be the opposite.

Lead 5: We simply don’t know that detail?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, so I wasn’t sure how much it actually told me.

Lead 5: Well, we went into this yesterday, but as I suggested then, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: We’re looking in general terms at HPL and non-HPL.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: Let’s move on to speed. One of the reasons why speed is crucial is the guidance that I think you had a hand in drafting that said if an offer is more than two weeks old, it should be rejected?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Correct, because if nobody has picked it up by two weeks in that market, it’s probably not very good.

Lead 5: Okay, fine. That deals with that point.

In terms of progressing offers, we’ve dealt with that.

Can we just go back to INQ000475005, and page 2, which shows another doughnut diagram of referrers seeking updates for High Priority Lane suppliers.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: And I don’t know whether you’re able to comment on this based on your experience within the VIP Lane, but we see here that 61% of those referrers did seek updates.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, I suspect this may be to do with your 36 group, because actually I would have expected the percentage to be smaller. A lot of people didn’t seek updates; it’s just that when people do, it creates quite a lot of noise. I was actually slightly surprised it was as high as it was.

Your greater problem is when people see multiple updates or a supplier contacts multiple points in the system so that five different people are all chasing at slightly different times.

Anyway, I’m sorry, I’m not really disagreeing with it.

Lead 5: Not disagreeing. If the cohort size was larger, you’re saying that you might have a different percentage there?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I’d guess it would fall a wee bit, personally.

Lead 5: All right.

Mr Max Cairnduff: But it’s still quite a lot of noise.

Lead 5: Let’s have a look at it through the other end of the telescope, from your point of view and your colleagues’ point of view.

As you know, the Inquiry was provided with the names of 20 VIP Lane caseworkers.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: And surveyed 17 of them.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: The results of that, if they could be displayed at INQ000581860.

I’m just going to look at two aspects of the results of that, if I may. Firstly, at page 9. From which we learn – when it comes up – that 53% – there it is – of HPL caseworkers were contacted by HPL referrers directly.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Okay.

Lead 5: Again, that presumably doesn’t come as a great deal –

Mr Max Cairnduff: No, that doesn’t surprise me.

Lead 5: Then I see we’ve got the second one up now.

Question:

“Do you consider contracts in the HPL were treated differently through the process to contracts awarded outside of the HPL?”

To which 66.7%, which is 10, in terms of individuals –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – said yes, 26.7, which is four, said no. And we didn’t get an answer from one of them.

You answered this, didn’t you, Mr Cairnduff?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: What did you understand speed, due diligence, assessments or value for money to mean in terms of different treatment of offers?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I actually can’t remember right now whether I said yes or no, but I can see you could answer it either. I think if you take the whole chain, I think it’s no, because they go through the same process steps at each stage, they go through the same triage process, they have to go through technical assurance, closing, all of that process. So overall I don’t think they were.

Within, however, that initial contact, clearly they are, because instead of going through a webform and having your details there and then having someone contact you based on the webform, instead you have an initial conversation with the caseworker, which is different.

I don’t think that made a difference, as it were, but it is a different form of treatment. And this is what takes us back to the judgment, I think.

Lead 5: So you, Mr Cairnduff, may have been amongst the four that said no to that. Can you help us in relation – because it’s your team –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – in relation to those that said yes, what was understood by speed, due diligence, assessment of value for money as different treatment?

Mr Max Cairnduff: I would guess people were talking about speed of the initial pick-up.

Lead 5: Ie, that an HPL offer would be handled more speedily?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Initially, the first contact – so that’s quite important. So obviously I don’t know what people had in mind, but the same due diligence steps applied, the same assessments of VFM applied, so if anyone said yes on that I think they were wrong.

If what they were thinking about was speed then the initial contact – you’re trying to get in touch ideally within 24 hours. We often failed but you’re tying to get in touch within 24 hours. And this is where you get to the – potentially an equal treatment problem, because you’ve got that initial contact, which is quite rapid, and that may then help you kind of get on the ladder, as it were.

That’s, I think, potentially what – if I were saying yes, that’s what I’d have in mind. I don’t think that then influenced the overall outcome but I’d guess that’s what they were thinking about.

Lead 5: Well, that might give you an initial speed advantage. Chasers or requests for feedback might chivvy an offer along?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Only if it had got stuck somehow. So, by the point it’s being chased and chivvied, it’s already getting delayed.

Lead 5: And a separate route for technical assurance might also offer some form of speed advantage?

Mr Max Cairnduff: There wasn’t a separate route for technical assurance. Sorry, that’s quite important. Early on it’s the same technical assurance thing for everyone, it’s the same team, it’s a group team. Later on we have a dedicated person who applies the same processes, so we have a point of contact so we can find out what’s going on. I don’t think that’s the same as a separate route.

Lead 5: All right.

Finally, I’m not going to go to a chart, and I’m going to pick this up in greater detail with Mr Hall, there is a concern about a figure of a 17 times conversion rate between offers and acceptance.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: You would accept a ten times conversion rate between offerer – comparing VIP Lane to non-VIP Lane –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Lead 5: – in terms of prospects of securing a contract after an offer being made?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes. And I think if you look at that funnel diagram, as you called it, I think that helps explain why. And I think also the evidence from – I’ve mentioned it before – the second corporate statement, which talks about 50% of them were with, like, five really big contractors is also why.

Mr Wald: Mr Cairnduff, those are all the questions I had for you, thank you very much. I know that there are some questions for you from Core Participants.

Lady Hallett: To start with, we’ve got Mr Weatherby, who is just there, Mr Cairnduff.

Questions From Mr Weatherby KC

Mr Weatherby: Thank you, my Lady.

Just this, Mr Cairnduff. I ask questions on behalf of the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice UK.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Mr Weatherby KC: You told us the VIP Lane was set up largely because of “noise” and that it was an organic response to need.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Mr Weatherby KC: Do you agree that the lack of structure or plan in relation to the VIP Lane at its creation meant that there was, therefore, no plan or guidance in place for consideration of how to deal with pressure from ministers, or indeed, the potential for conflicts of interest through the VIP Lane?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Sorry, I might need to unpack that just a little. Actually, sorry, could you break that down a little for me?

Mr Weatherby KC: Yes. So what I’m getting at is, you’ve described it being set up in the moment as a response –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Mr Weatherby KC: – to the situation that you had, because there was no other alternative way.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Ah, yes, I think –

Mr Weatherby KC: So what I’m putting to you is, does it follow from that that the lack of a structure or plan for the lane itself necessarily meant that there was no plan or guidance for the team in respect of how to deal with pressure from ministers or indeed the potential for conflicts of interest through this process?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Okay.

Mr Weatherby KC: And I’m picking that up largely from Professor –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, well, I think there’s a couple of things there –

Mr Weatherby KC: – Sanchez-Graells.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.

We were the plan in that sense, but if you’re looking at future crises, then it is worth thinking about – in peacetime – what the plan is for circumstances like that, and how you deal with that. I’ve addressed this at the back of my statement, actually, in part. So it’s worth thinking about that.

I think it’s a bit unfair on the team who set it up to say there was no plan, because this was them thinking about it and putting something in place. It may not have been the best thing that could have been done but in the circumstances I don’t think there was much better.

In terms of conflicts of interest, that would be picked up later in the process.

Mr Weatherby KC: Yes.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Sorry, does that answer?

Mr Weatherby KC: Well, I mean, I’m not actually wanting to be critical in this question –

Mr Max Cairnduff: No, no –

Mr Weatherby KC: – I’m just trying to elicit the point that it was set up in the moment.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Mr Weatherby KC: Was there, in fact, guidance of pressure and conflict of interest for your team?

Mr Max Cairnduff: No, but there was a senior civil servant, ie me, put in charge of it.

Mr Weatherby KC: Yes.

Mr Max Cairnduff: So in that sense, you know, I was able to give guidance to my team and I was that buffer.

Mr Weatherby KC: Yes, so there was supervision, but –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Mr Weatherby: Thank you.

That’s all I ask.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Mr Weatherby. Professor Thomas. Oh no, it’s not, it’s Mr Dayle. Sorry, Mr Dayle.

Questions From Mr Dayle

Mr Dayle: Mr Cairnduff, I represent the Federation of Ethnic Minority Healthcare Organisations or FEMHO and, just by way of context, I should say that, in times of crisis, such as the pandemic, we understand you to be saying in your evidence that the urgency to deliver solutions often requires rethinking traditional procedures and protocols.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Mr Dayle: The establishment of the High Priority Lane, or HPL, is one such example, which requires an adaptive response, designed to expedite procurement processes during what is described as a public health emergency?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Mm-hm.

Mr Dayle: However, the rapid implementation of these measures raises questions about the balance between expedience and adherence to established standards –

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Mr Dayle: – particularly concerning equality and inclusivity. So given these reflections, FEMHO and similar organisations would like to know how considerations like the Public Sector Equality Duty were integrated into these expedited procurement processes, if at all. So my precise question is: you observe that the circumstances leading to the setting up of the HPL were not normal, and you observe this at paragraph 4.5 of your witness statement.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes.

Mr Dayle: Assuming you did consider that public emergency conditions existed, did you take this to mean that the HPL team need not have had regard to the Public Sector Equality Duty, and/or other equality duties in PPE procurement?

Mr Max Cairnduff: No, I’m not – well, I could be wrong on this but I’m not aware of any exception from Public Sector Equality Duty obligations by virtue of an emergency. Now, I could be wrong on that but I’m not aware of one. I would expect it, however, to become more manifest when you come to choices about the distribution of PPE rather than the buying of it. The PPE is itself, I think, I may be wrong, relatively agnostic: a mask is a mask. How you then distribute, I think, then becomes very much a question of who is being impacted, you know, and issues like that. For example, bus drivers were an at-risk group at the time because they had to deal with the public still, the buses were still operating.

I don’t know about the public’s – you know, the equality kind of diversity make-up of bus drivers as a population but, you know, that’s where you’d have to think: bus drivers are exposed, how does that measure against nurses? That’s way beyond my competency but that’s where you’d expect it to come in.

Lady Hallett: I think the problem that Mr Dayle is probably getting at is that a mask isn’t a mask. Unfortunately, we’ve heard evidence that not all masks fit all faces.

Mr Max Cairnduff: No, that’s true. It’s also an issue with gowns, where, for example, with a large gown won’t fit a lot of people.

Mr Dayle: Precisely, as my Lady says, the question is really getting at how were these considerations managed or integrated into what we now know as the accelerated procurement processes?

Mr Max Cairnduff: Got you. I think this is an area where there is room for improvement. One of the things I say in my statement is we didn’t have access to people who were experts on PPE, so that meant, in that sense, we’re buying kit by reference to guidelines we’ve been given. I think, if it had been possible, which I don’t know if it was at the time, I wasn’t very sighted on in this part of the structure, to build in knowledge of the equipment and how it’s used, and ideally clinicians, to be honest, who’d have that lived knowledge, I think then that would probably better address the point I think you’re making.

I’m not sure that we were equipped to do that because we simply had specs and we went out to buy those specs, and I think it’s the point of are the specs the right specs and are they comprehensive, is probably where the differential impact would come in. Does that make sense?

Mr Dayle: Directionally, yes, but I think we might pick up with that line with other witnesses.

Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Mr Dayle.

Mr Cairnduff, those are all the questions we have at the time being, although I think I’m going to be seeing you again later in this module.

Mr Max Cairnduff: Yes, I’m coming back.

Lady Hallett: Even those who criticise various aspects of the procurement process, I don’t think I’ve heard anybody doubt the extraordinary commitment and dedication that people like you and your team had in trying to get the necessary PPE, so thank you for all that you did in that respect during the pandemic, and thank you for your help to date in relation to the Inquiry.

The Witness: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Very well. I shall return at 11.30.

(11.14 am)

(A short break)

(11.30 am)

Lady Hallett: Mr Sharma.

Mr Sharma: My Lady, the next witness is Darren Blackburn.

Mr Darren Blackburn

MR DARREN BLACKBURN (sworn).

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Lady Hallett: I hope we haven’t kept you waiting, Mr Blackburn.

The Witness: No, that’s fine. Thank you.

Mr Sharma: Would you be kind enough to state your full name for the Inquiry?

Mr Darren Blackburn: It’s Darren Blackburn.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Blackburn, you have provided of the Inquiry with one witness statement. I wonder if you’d be good enough to confirm that the content of that statement is true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Mr Darren Blackburn: I can confirm that.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Blackburn, you have a long career in procurement in the private sector between 1999 and 2019 working for BAE Systems and PwC, amongst other companies in the private sector, and then you joined the Civil Service in September 2019; is that correct?

Mr Darren Blackburn: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: You joined, then, as a Deputy Director in the Cabinet Office Commercial Function Complex Transactions Team; is that right?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes, correct.

Counsel Inquiry: On 19 March 2020, you were deployed from the Cabinet Office to the PPE Cell?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Then in April 2020 to July 2020, you were the Head of the New Supplier Team?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes, that’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Subsequent to that, you have returned to the private sector; is that right?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Blackburn, we heard yesterday from Mr Marron about the experience of people such as yourself working in the PPE Cell, the stress and the strain and the hours that were worked. Could you help us with that, please? At the beginning and during the tenure, what was it like?

Mr Darren Blackburn: I mean, in the very first week we were deployed, I was actually taken ill and had to isolate myself, so I was – I would do a lot of Teams calls, et cetera, and it wasn’t until the second week that I was fully deployed and so I missed some of the set-up, but even from the isolation of our own sort of bedrooms or offices or wherever we were working, you could see the sort of intensity and chaos of what was going on around us, the pure need to get PPE, vital PPE into the NHS was sort of paramount.

We were working long hours under intense pressure, with a lot of scrutiny, just trying to do the best that we could to try to get that vital PPE.

Counsel Inquiry: You have referred in your witness statement to two of your roles being solving problems and unblocking bottlenecks in the PPE Cell. Could I take each of those in turn, please. From your vantage point in the New Suppliers Team, what were the key problems that you encountered or that you could see from the processing of offers?

Mr Darren Blackburn: I mean, one of the key issues was identifying those good offers with which to take forwards. If I can put into context what we were getting, of the 15,000 to 16,000 supplier offers in the system, of which there were multiple offers, you know, they fell into three categories: one category being, you know, a little old lady who had offered to make masks and drop them off at her local hospital; we’d got organisations, factories, if you like, who closed down and had furloughed, who were offering to provide excess stock of PPE in its thousands; and then you’d got the intermediaries where, you know, we were offered the quantities that we wanted. We had to find them in and amongst the 15,000, and one of the areas that we were criticised for early on was the speed of which we were getting contracts in place. So that was one of the key issues.

Counsel Inquiry: Secondly, in terms of the bottlenecks, in the process by which those contracts were being considered by you and your team, where were the principal bottlenecks that you identified?

Mr Darren Blackburn: So I think I’d set it out in my witness statement and Max confirmed it earlier in his statement also, was predominantly around the technical assurance, validating the offers and the certificates that we received to make sure they were fit for purpose and met the specification and standards.

Counsel Inquiry: From your vantage point as the Head of the New Suppliers Team you could see offers being processed through what I might call the general route and also via what has become known as the High Priority Lane. Could I touch, please, first of all on the High Priority Lane. What did you understand was the purpose of the High Priority Lane?

Mr Darren Blackburn: The point of the High Priority Lane was to address some of the criticism that we had around not processing and getting contracts quick enough to get high quality, valuable PPE into those trusts. So the point of the High Priority Lane was a way of expediting those good, credible offers.

Counsel Inquiry: You refer in your witness statement to another purpose to the High Priority Lane to be to deal with noise. Is that what you’re referring to just now or is that something different?

Mr Darren Blackburn: That’s another aspect of it, and I – yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Forgive me. Carry on.

Mr Darren Blackburn: No, that’s another aspect of it, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: When you refer to “noise” what exactly are you referring to?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Requests for updates and an understanding of where offers were within the process.

Counsel Inquiry: So the High Priority Lane is serving two functions: it’s looking at the most credible offers, on the one hand, and it’s also considering the noise or the feedback requests which are being generated?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Are those two concerns, are they competing concerns? Are they competing for time?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes, of course. If you’re responding to a request for updates, you’re not dealing with the supplier and trying to progress their offer.

Counsel Inquiry: Turning, please, to guidance about which offers were and were not referred into the High Priority Lane, was there any guidance which was available to you and your team as to which offers to refer into the HPL?

Mr Darren Blackburn: At the time, I don’t believe there was.

Counsel Inquiry: Given that there wasn’t any guidance, what criteria, if any, was applied by you and your team to decide as to whether an offer would go into the HPL or not?

Mr Darren Blackburn: So I can only speak for myself, rather than my team. But in my mind, those offers to go into the High Priority Lane were offers that were credible, offers of an in-demand product and offers that were of large volumes.

Counsel Inquiry: What about that second category, the offers for which updates were being sought? Was that another factor that contributed into whether an offer would go into the High Priority Lane or not?

Mr Darren Blackburn: From my own perspective, no.

Counsel Inquiry: Were there, in effect, gatekeepers to the High Priority Lane: people whose job it was to decide whether or not it would be referred in?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Well, ultimately, Max would have been the gatekeeper to what went in and then how that was prioritised or allocated amongst the team.

Counsel Inquiry: You speak in your witness statement about the speed at which offers in the High Priority Lane were processed. Do you have anything to tell the Inquiry, from your vantage point, looking at the New Opportunities Team as a whole and the High Priority Lane in particular, as to whether there was an advantage of speed in the HPL?

Mr Darren Blackburn: I can’t say categorically yes or no. We didn’t do any analysis at that time to record at the time at which processing started in either lane to get in a contract. So we just didn’t have that data or measure that.

Counsel Inquiry: Was there any way that you perceived that High Priority Lane offers were treated differently within the New Suppliers Team?

Mr Darren Blackburn: So in terms of the process that they went through and the due diligence that they went through, it was all exactly the same. I guess the difference would have been in the handling and the more direct communication and the fact that they were, I guess, prioritised over some of the other offers.

Counsel Inquiry: What do you mean by the handling and the direct communication?

Mr Darren Blackburn: As in the individual caseworker may have given them more face time, if you like.

Counsel Inquiry: Of course, is it right that that individual face time that the caseworker was giving to those offers in the High Priority Lane were resources which were not being devoted to other offers, which were otherwise being considered by the New Suppliers Team?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Well, there were other caseworkers that would have been handling those other cases.

Counsel Inquiry: So a specialist team of caseworkers, simply to deal with –

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – the handling aspect?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Did offers in the High Priority Lane have a dedicated caseworker attributed to them and was that something which was available in the general lane?

Mr Darren Blackburn: In the High Priority Lane there was a dedicated caseworker that would have overseen the case as it went through the process, as I understand it.

Counsel Inquiry: Was that the case in the general Opportunities team as well, or not?

Mr Darren Blackburn: I couldn’t say for sure. I don’t think so. I think there were multiple – more hand-offs in the general case team.

Counsel Inquiry: What do you mean by “hand-offs”?

Mr Darren Blackburn: So if you lump the processes into three areas you’ve got opportunities, technical assurance and then closing, where the contract was formed. Between those three elements there were hand-offs.

Counsel Inquiry: I want to ask you some questions, please, setting aside the High Priority Lane and just focusing in on one contract, which is the contract with Ayanda. I wonder if we could bring up, by way of introduction, INQ000575086. This is a schedule which has been produced by the Department of Health and Social Care. I wonder if we could have a look, please, at row 18.

This is the information about the Ayanda contract, reading from left to right, Ayanda Capital. I wonder if we could move to right. 29 April 2020 for face masks, the original contract value £252.5 million, New Buy. Keep scrolling across. High Priority Lane, yes. Then source of referral, NHS Shared Business Services. But the person who received the referral, you’re named there as the person who received the referral in; is that right?

Mr Darren Blackburn: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Could we continue to scroll to the right, please.

Just underneath there, under “Explanation of Issue” with the contract:

“DHSC Rejected Goods.”

Can I take you through a little bit of the chronology behind Ayanda Capital. When the offer first came to your attention, it was under the name Prospermill, wasn’t it?

Mr Darren Blackburn: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: When the offer came in, you took an interest in that contract. What was the reason for that?

Mr Darren Blackburn: It had been referred to me by an ex-colleague from BAE Systems, who was now working in the NHS in Manchester.

Counsel Inquiry: What did you think about the terms of the offer, about the goods which were being offered, about the price at which it was being offered? What attention did you pay to that?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Not a huge amount of attention. That was part of the process of checking the offer and the credibility of the offer. It was part of the wider due diligence, not something I would have done.

Counsel Inquiry: The offer was being made by Mr Andrew Mills, who was a senior adviser at Ayanda. Could you help the Inquiry with this, please: who was Mr Mills?

Mr Darren Blackburn: He was the person that was referred to me by my ex-colleague from the Manchester Trusts.

Counsel Inquiry: On 13 April, Mr Mills contacted you by LinkedIn, didn’t he?

Mr Darren Blackburn: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Did you respond to that contact?

Mr Darren Blackburn: No, I didn’t.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Mills followed up with you in three other communications on 14 April 2020, 15 April 2020, and then 16 April 2020; is that right?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Um …

Counsel Inquiry: You can take it from me that the dates are accurate, they’re taken from your statement.

Mr Darren Blackburn: Oh, okay then, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: I wonder if, please, we could bring up INQ000534943. Scroll to the bottom of this email chain, so that we can read upwards. Next page, please. These are the initial communications between you and Mr Mills. Mr Mills has provided the details of the manufacturer, a summary of the offer and various other documents.

When you receive a referral such as this, are you making any assessment at all about the material which he’s showing to you before it goes elsewhere?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Me personally?

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Darren Blackburn: No, I’m not.

Counsel Inquiry: Scroll upwards, please. Then at the top here, on 14 April, Mr Mills says to you:

“I’d like to make sure that I have got through to the right place as this is an opportunity for HMG to get exclusive access to the entire manufacturing capacity of Zhende Medical Co for an initial period of 12 weeks …”

This is an email, forgive me, from Mr Mills to Martin Kent. Who is Martin Kent, please?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Martin Kent was a senior official in the Department for International Trade, with which, I think, Andrew had got connections with.

Counsel Inquiry: It’s right, isn’t it, that Mr Mills was previously an adviser to the Department for International Trade?

Mr Darren Blackburn: That’s right yes.

Counsel Inquiry: He’s referring, I think, to communications he’s had with you and then he’s also making Mr Kent aware that both the French and the US Government are circling, so there was a risk, wasn’t there, that this offer might go elsewhere?

Mr Darren Blackburn: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: If we scroll up, please. There it’s confirmed by Mr Kent, third line down that:

“Andrew is a former Advisor to the Board of Trade when it sat under the former [Secretary of State].”

Can we scroll up, please. This email then reaches your inbox about the fact that the company, Ayanda, and Mr Mills have been, it seems to be, vouched for by somebody at the Department for International Trade.

What factor or what role, if any, did that play in your decision to refer this contract into the HPL?

Mr Darren Blackburn: From my perspective, it gave confidence that this was a person or an organisation that was used to dealing with HMG and, therefore, was trustworthy. I think for wider context, if I may, you know, I’d worked on another case with one of the other caseworkers over a period of two weeks that we ended up rejecting because of the credibility of the deal and the fact that that person in question wanted payment into their personal bank account. They were operating from a flat in Knightsbridge, et cetera, so we’d spent two weeks dealing with that opportunity for it to go nowhere.

In this instance, you know, we were keen to find credible offers with people that could be trustworthy and this gave confidence to that. In normal times, during a procurement process, you would look for evidence of – you know, if you were running a procurement you would look for evidence from the organisations that were bidding of their history and experience in working with and around government and delivering what it is you need them to deliver, and that is what played out here, in that background and history of working with and being credible in government.

Counsel Inquiry: Could we please put up INQ000536359. This is your witness statement, Mr Blackburn, page 30, please, paragraph 85:

“On 27 April, Andrew emailed saying that while he had submitted the offer under Prospermill, he would be using Ayanda Capital [and that was a company of which he was a director] because they had the infrastructure for international payments already set up. [He] was a Board Advisor for Ayanda … Due diligence was undertaken on Prospermill, which returned an amber rating, and on Ayanda, which returned a red rating.”

Then you go on to say:

“A red rating did not mean that a contract with Ayanda could not go ahead, but it did mean that careful thought had to be given to contractual terms to minimise the risk.”

Then you refer there to the demand for Type IIR masks at the time and the value of the Ayanda contract, and so it was progressed.

I appreciate it’s difficult, sometime after the event but a number of factors are being weighed up, I assume, in your mind and in the mind of others about whether this contract progresses.

On the one hand, you have the Ayanda offer being vouched for by the Department for International Trade, you have the fact that masks are in demand and then you have this red rating. Could you talk us through how those three factors were weighed up by you when the contract was referred in to the HPL?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Well, we didn’t know it was a red rating until after it had started through the process, and so the red rating came much later on, rather than at the time of me referring it.

Counsel Inquiry: Of course. So that’s because of the due diligence was conducted much later on?

Mr Darren Blackburn: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Right but given those three factors, that it’s been vouched for by the Department for International Trade, the red rating but the demand for masks being critical, could you talk us through what would have gone through your mind as an experienced procurement professional weighing up those three factors?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Well, let me just talk to the red rating, which I think is probably the most important part of the question, what you’re looking for.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes.

Mr Darren Blackburn: The red rating was an indication of there being risks in the commercial deal. These risks were around the size of Ayanda and, I guess, its P&L and its accounts, versus the size of the order that we were looking to place through it and so that red rating was around its ability to handle that size of contract.

And therefore, there was an element of risk in there and, in those situations, what you have to do is weigh up those risks, determine any mitigation and whether those mitigation points would give assurance that you could effectively put the contract forward, and that’s the same in normal times and what we were dealing with here.

Counsel Inquiry: What effect, if any, did the fact of the emergency play on these kinds of decisions being made? Because unlike, of course, in business-as-usual procurement when you may have the benefit of time –

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – in these circumstances choices and decisions have to be made very quickly. What effect did that have?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Well, that’s correct. I mean, two aspects, I think you just raised, is we needed to get critical PPE into the NHS, and time was of the essence. So we did have to make decisions rather quickly. Again, we looked at the risks, determined what the risks were, and quickly put mechanisms in place to address those risks, and that’s what we did here.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, the contract was entered into but, as we’ve seen on the DHSC schedule, as it happens, the goods were rejected, and the reason that they were rejected was because they had ear loops rather than head loops and I think you’ve set that out in your statement.

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: So it had been approved through the eight-stage process, it had received technical assurance, the contract had been paid, I think about £252 million, and it’s an example, isn’t it, of a contract apparently being complied with but the goods not meeting the specification?

Mr Darren Blackburn: I think the goods did meet the specification but the specifications changed over time, so the goods did meet the specification for which there they were contracted against but, as we learnt more, those ear loops, I think, were uncomfortable and so then the requirement changed to a different type of mask.

Counsel Inquiry: Could I ask you, please, taking what you know about the Ayanda contract and what I’ve been asking you questions about, I appreciate hindsight being 20/20, what reflections do you have, having been at the Head of the New Suppliers Team and looking at how the Ayanda contract turned out about what could and should have been done differently?

Mr Darren Blackburn: I mean, at the time, I’m not sure anything could have been done too differently from what we did. You know, time was of the essence, we needed to get PPE into the NHS. We were doing all that we could. Things were set up quickly, people were working long hours, trying to get deals in place and I think, as Max alluded to and I even say in my witness statement, it felt like we were doing it for years, not three or four months. It felt like a very long period.

And as we learnt more, we reacted to those things, and you’ll see in my witness statement and in the supporting documentation, ie the handover document that we produced, of how we learnt and changed things and tried to respond to sort of external factors. Of course, if we were starting from scratch today, and hopefully what we set out in the handover report helps the Inquiry with that, we may have set up things differently and done things differently.

I think, given that we’ve got the deluge of offers, 15,000 suppliers, we did what we could to try to filter and get contracts in place. I’m not going to question whether the call to arms was the right thing to do, but I think, going forward, we might not have done that, and we might have had a different strategy and a different structure around that procurement activity.

Counsel Inquiry: We’ll come on to that and the handover document that you’ve very helpfully referred to in your witness statement.

Just before I leave Ayanda, to focus in on one aspect of it, the vouching for of Mr Mills by another official within the Department for International Trade, do you think that appropriate weight or too much weight was given to that, or do you think, again, drawing on your experience as a procurement professional, whether that was the right thing to take into account?

Mr Darren Blackburn: I think it was appropriate weight. I think it was a good thing to take that into account but it wasn’t the only factor with which – or why the contract was awarded.

Mr Mills and Ayanda didn’t get a contract because of their links to DIT. That was a factor as part of the wider due diligence process which included going through Opportunities, Technical Assurance and Closing, and, ultimately, the Clearance Board.

Counsel Inquiry: Of course, that is one of the findings of the High Court, which you’ve referred to in your witness statement?

Mr Blackburn, just to look at the High Priority Lane before I leave it, just for one or two more questions, it might be very easy for lawyers, such as myself, to step back from the emergency that you were dealing with at the time and apply and ask for these principles about transparency and governance, and so on, but we might be forgetting the extreme pressure that you were under at the time.

Do you think it’s possible, again, drawing on your experience as a procurement professional, to comply with those principles of fairness, equal treatment, and so on, even during an emergency?

Mr Darren Blackburn: As a procurement professional then, and speaking on behalf of, you know, my wider team, it was something that we were all aware of and we were trying to do, but I guess the nature and the way that it was set up, someone somewhere was going to have more of an advantage over someone else because of the number of offers that we’d got. So you had to apply some form of prioritisation to find those offers. That prioritisation could have been alphabetically, in which case Ayanda may have still come out sort of top, versus a company called D, or whatever – or down to volumes.

There would have been some prioritisation and someone would have got a contract quicker than others and, therefore, been deemed to have been at an advantage. That was the nature of what we’d set up.

Counsel Inquiry: If you were designing a procurement system for an emergency in the future, an emergency which, I, by its nature, can’t describe, but if you were, would you include the same features of the High Priority Lane as we had in this country during the pandemic, or not?

Mr Darren Blackburn: It’s difficult to say exactly. It’s difficult to say absolutely not but, ideally, you wouldn’t, and I think it would depend on the sort of the wider structure of the operating model that you were looking to put in place. And as I say, we might have done a different operating model, one akin to what we set up from July onwards for a more category-based solution –

Counsel Inquiry: When you say category –

Mr Darren Blackburn: – and more targeted.

Counsel Inquiry: Forgive me when you say “category-based”, do you mean category by category of PPE?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes, so subcategory so, in this instance, the subcategory of PPE, so masks, gowns, gloves, et cetera.

Counsel Inquiry: So there was a moment in your answer in which you paused before you decided. What is it? What’s the deciding factor, in your mind, that causes you not to rule out a High Priority Lane in its entirety? What feature does it have, in your mind, that is required in an emergency?

Mr Darren Blackburn: I think at that point in time, you know, that High Priority Lane was just another form of prioritisation. So where I talked about, you know, you’re going to have to prioritise, if you’ve got 15,000 offers in a system, you have to do some form of prioritisation and, in my mind, that High Priority Lane was a form of prioritisation and trying to get that PPE into the hospitals.

Lady Hallett: Otherwise you place the emphasis on the High Priority Lane not the VIP Lane?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Exactly, yes. For me, the VIP bit was sort of the handling of ministers, et cetera, as opposed to the handling of the case.

Mr Sharma: In your experience, has there ever been a time at which the market was as volatile as it was during the Covid-19 pandemic – forgive me, and I mean any procurement market?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Not that I recall, no, not in any of my sort of dealings. Over the years that I’ve been in procurement, the things that I’ve sort of focused on has changing over time. I’d see PPE as a commodity item. There are different facets of procurement, so there’s directs and indirects and, typically, PPE would be considered an indirect, a commodity item, if you like, and I don’t have deep expertise in procurement of commodity items in such a way.

So if you look at my career history I’ve bought stuff like, you know, propulsors and things for submarines, so there was never an issue or a market as volatile as that, so no, not in my experience.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Blackburn, you refer very helpfully in your evidence to a handover document, which I think you describe as the beginnings of an emergency procurement playbook, something which you didn’t have in the New Suppliers Team, or elsewhere, at the time the pandemic struck. I wonder if we could bring that up, please. Thank you. You were one of a number of contributors to this document. Page 28.

Thank you. There are a number of recommendations and observations which you and others have made based on your experience in the PPE Cell and, in particular, in the New Suppliers Team. The first, if I can touch on, please, is under IT, the “Initial webform design”. You’ve referred already to the effect of the call to arms on the way in which it was possible to analyse and triage the offers that were coming into your team.

Could you help us, please, with how you would have reformed that process or how you could reform that process. In the event that a call to arms was necessary, what would you do to change that webform process?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Again, putting it into context of where we were at the time, we were tying to set up systems, processes and procure PPE all at the same time. Some of the difficulties that you would have in preparing for such an eventuality in the future is – and some of the things that we had to change – was having those fields that weren’t free flow text but were sort of pre-populated, that you can pick from, that allowed interrogation of the data.

That would be difficult to pre-empt, going forward. You know, the next emergency situation might not be about PPE; it might be – ooh, I don’t know, you know, something completely different. It could be about sanitisation and, actually, it’s less about PPE but, you know, just keeping everywhere clean. So you would need a different set of cells, et cetera, within your webform or within your portal in order to address some of the things we’ve got here.

So I think having a system ready to go is a good starting point and having the ability to make rapid design and changes to any such input forms that would allow you to do the data interrogation that has been spoken about.

Counsel Inquiry: I think what you’re referring to, if I may, is a structured data approach?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: So the way in which the data is structured, which Professor Sanchez-Graells referred to in his report –

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – that having an approach to that, which is not too prescriptive because as you say, you can’t predict what the next emergency may be –

Mr Darren Blackburn: But consistency of input. So, you know, I don’t put in “10m”, someone puts in “1,000,000”, et cetera, so consistency of data.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, rather than being free flow, there’s some structure to it.

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Next, if I can consider with you, please, “System linkages and interfaces”. It says there:

“… there were no direct interfaces between the various systems in use: Mendix, DHSC, Finance, Uniserve’s OneWorld”, which is a supply chain software.

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: “… and so manual workarounds needed to be created to ensure information was available to all teams.”

Then on the right-hand side:

“We needed a clearer understanding of the end-to-end data needs at an early stage in the programme rather than working through each stage in a linear fashion (ie understanding Opportunities and Technical Assurance needs before clarifying the needs of Closing and Logistics teams).”

That’s a bit of a mouthful but could you help us, please, with that. What problems were there with the way in which data was being accumulated and shared and processed as between the various teams in the New Suppliers Team but also making up part of China Buy and UK Make?

Mr Darren Blackburn: So, yeah – and again, for wider context, a lot of organisations, even in the private sector, today still grapple with this, with – you know, numerous systems as their organisations evolved and they bought different systems to suit different problems and then getting those systems to talk each other. That’s not unique just to this, it – you know, that still applies to private sector today.

A lot of organisations, they – as I’ve talked about, they evolve, the organisation evolves, so they buy a system to meet a current need. In this instance, you know, we would have – because opportunities and technical assurance were the first part of the process, we would have been looking at what does the system need to do to get us through those hoops rather than thinking about the end goal and what is the information we would need at the end, and making sure that at those early stages everything was covered, so all of the information that was asked for was covered at the end.

Also, you’ve got, as we talk about, the different systems for different stages of the process. So you’d got the Mendix system, which, if you like, is your source to contract system. So identifying opportunities and taking them through to get a contract.

Then you’ve got the DHSC system, which is the purchase to pay, so once the contract is in place you raise a purchase order and then the supplier is allowed to invoice and you do your three-way matching.

Then there’s the Uniserve tracking, so when the item is being produced it leaves the factory where it is in the world, be it shipped, or what have you, where it is in the UK, so that tracking of those items through.

And sometimes it’s difficult to match and marry up. So if you take Ayanda, for example, I don’t know if there was a unique reference number that allows Ayanda to be tracked from contracts through to the purchase to pay, through to DHSC, other than the word “Ayanda”.

Counsel Inquiry: So, forgive me, what you’re saying is there needs to a system which, at least in some way, matches up all of those three systems together so that they interlock and they talk to each other?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes, you’ve got some form of ability of tracking the data and the data flow through the different systems, whether that be an overriding, overarching system, or some form of unique identifiers, and commonality of data through them.

Counsel Inquiry: Now I’m going to mention something that was mentioned by the New Opportunities Team, which was the Excel spreadsheet into which lots of the offers were being entered. And at the beginning of the pandemic that was the way in which data was being processed, wasn’t it?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: And that Excel spreadsheet, I wonder if we could bring it up, please. It’s INQ000534813.

I won’t go through each of the categories here, but if I can just demonstrate how large this spreadsheet became.

Row 1 – I wonder if we could scroll all the way down to row – I think it goes up to 55,215 rows of information.

Lady Hallett: I’ve got the point, Mr Sharma.

Mr Sharma: And if we could scroll the other way, please, 25 columns.

Just in this single spreadsheet alone – and again, placing this in the context of the emergency and the pressure that everyone was under – this amounts to nearly 1.4 million individual pieces of data, which are being accumulated and managed and triaged. And it wasn’t until some time in April, I think mid-April, that access to Mendix was obtained.

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes, 9 April.

Counsel Inquiry: 9 April.

Using this must have caused you and your team enormous stress, inputting data into this on a daily basis and trying to keep up with the information that was coming in?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Certainly for the team, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: It was, at the very least, suboptimal, until Mendix came

online. What did Mendix do?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Mendix was more of a case management system, so designed

to handle cases and keeping it all consistent in, sort

of, one place. It was easy to interrogate and get

information from. You know, you’re sharing spreadsheets

around, you’ve got a risk of data integrity and things

being incorrect, whereas at least in Mendix people are

accessing it and the data integrity should be better and

a more consistent completion of the data required.

Counsel Inquiry: And then much later on, or a little later on, in the summer of 2020, after Mendix, the case management system, it moved on to another system called Atamis.

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Could we bring up, please, INQ000477254.

This a screenshot of what a more advanced data management system than both Mendix and, of course, the Excel spreadsheet that we started with.

You, of course, didn’t have this at the beginning of the pandemic. What effect would it have had if you had this sort of data and analysis available to you at the beginning?

Mr Darren Blackburn: So I’d need to look at the sort of data, et cetera, that this is showing and how you would interrogate it, but it would have given us – if this was capturing all of the offers made, it would have allowed us to have better visibility of those offers and the volumes of those offers to help with the prioritisation, avoiding out category 2 and 3. By category 2 and 3 I mean old lady offering to make masks out of ex-husband’s shirts and factories just providing excess stock.

So it would have allowed for better visibility of what the offers were.

Counsel Inquiry: This is, of course, only one screenshot from that system.

Mr Darren Blackburn: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And as you say, it presents the data at least in a graphical format, but you can at least see, in a simple, single picture, the volume, the volume by purchase status, the volume by type, the monthly volumes which are being accumulated, and so on?

Mr Darren Blackburn: Correct. I mean, you know, in the very first weeks it was just “buy gloves”, rather than nitrile gloves or any other sort or variant of glove.

Mr Sharma: Mr Blackburn, thank you. I don’t have any further questions.

The Witness: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: I don’t think there are any Core Participant – any Rule 10.

Mr Sharma: No, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Mr Blackburn.

Thank you for your help to the Inquiry and obviously

thank you for all that you did. I don’t know if you’ve

heard me thank your colleagues but whatever criticisms

have been made of the system generally, certainly you

and your colleagues can’t be criticised for your

dedication.

The Witness: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much.

Right, are we ready to go to the next witness, or do you want me to break early for lunch?

Mr Wald: Break early.

Lady Hallett: Break early for lunch.

Very well. I shall return at 1.25 pm.

(12.19 pm)

(The Short Adjournment)

(1.25 pm)

Lady Hallett: Mr Ward.

Mr Wald: My Lady our next witness today is Dr Chris Hall.

Dr Chris Hall

DR CHRIS HALL (sworn).

Questions From Lead Counsel to the Inquiry for Module 5

Lady Hallett: Dr Hall, I hope we didn’t interrupt your lunch by having a slightly different lunch break.

The Witness: Not at all, my Lady.

Mr Wald: Could you start by giving the Inquiry your full name please.

Dr Chris Hall: Christopher Hall, but I’d prefer if you called me Chris, if that’s possible.

Lead 5: I will probably resort to Mr Hall or Dr Hall, whichever you prefer.

Dr Chris Hall: As you wish.

Lead 5: Dr Hall, we are grateful to you for the provision of two statements, Inquiry document INQ000536369 and INQ000536421, both of which have been signed by you. Can you confirm, please, that they are true to the best of your knowledge and belief.

Dr Chris Hall: I can confirm it.

Lead 5: Thank you very much indeed. Can I start with a number of preliminary questions about your background, Dr Hall. You joined the Cabinet Office on secondment, did you not, in September 2012?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: You worked for the GCCO, the Government Commercial –

Dr Chris Hall: The Chief Commercial Officer, yes.

Lead 5: The Chief Commercial Officer. When that secondment ended you joined the Civil Service in the spring of 2014 as a Deputy Director leading the Complex Transactions Team?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Yes. Prior to joining the Cabinet Office you were the Practice Lead for IT Sourcing in Ernst & Young’s advisory unit.

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: You, at that point, had accumulated a very significant amount of experience in the IT industry; is that right?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, that’s right.

Lead 5: In fact, something in the order of 30 years?

Dr Chris Hall: I’m sorry, I’m older than I look!

Lead 5: Well, it wasn’t for that reason that I made the point.

I will be asking you some questions about data and IT handling and it’s relevant, for that purpose, to know that you have had that experience.

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Thank you. In addition to that, in common with some of the other witnesses that have given evidence in the course of this Inquiry, you have quite a lot of public sector experience?

Dr Chris Hall: Indeed, starting when I worked for IT companies, selling to the public sector, and then as a management consultant working for public sector entities, particularly on procurement projects.

Lead 5: Thank you. From about 20 April 2020, you took on a wider managerial role as part of the management team of the PPE Buy Cell and you were the most senior Cabinet Office Commercial representative within that team?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, that’s right.

Lead 5: In fact, you worked as Mr Rhys Williams’ deputy until July 2020, did you not?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: You have retired between then and now; you were retired in July 2022?

Dr Chris Hall: That’s correct.

Lead 5: Thank you. Rather like Mr Cairnduff, who gave evidence earlier today, you had a relatively short but no doubt very intense period within the PPE Buy Cell?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, that’s correct.

Lead 5: That period ran, it’s a little longer than Mr Cairnduff’s, from 2 April 2020 until 30 June 2020?

Dr Chris Hall: It’s actually a little bit shorter than Mr Cairnduff’s but your dates are correct.

Lead 5: Your experience within the VIP Lane, let’s just situate ourselves within that entity. It is, the VIP Lane was made up of civil servants and volunteers from across the government. Yes?

Dr Chris Hall: Correct.

Lead 5: There were a small number of consultants and there were caseworkers working from home, in the main?

Dr Chris Hall: As was I.

Lead 5: As was more or less everybody at that point.

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Each department had its own IT systems – is that right –

Dr Chris Hall: That’s correct.

Lead 5: – which we’ll come back to, but there was, in order to communicate, video conferencing and file sharing, which were difficult to manage at that time, weren’t they?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Information exchange was a challenge, to say the least?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, among other challenges, yes.

Lead 5: Those involved in the VIP Lane resorted to very large spreadsheets, we saw an example of that earlier today, and there were no live documents, were there?

Dr Chris Hall: You mean shared documents or –

Lead 5: Shared documents which could be updated periodically by whoever was in that document or inputting data into those documents?

Dr Chris Hall: That’s right because we couldn’t share those outside of departmental systems.

Lead 5: Yes, because of a siloing effect of each department having its own systems?

Dr Chris Hall: And different technology, yes.

Lead 5: And different technology. At this point, Mendix had not yet been introduced?

Dr Chris Hall: That is correct.

Lead 5: How much of a step forward was Mendix when it arrived?

Dr Chris Hall: Enormous.

Lead 5: Please tell us why.

Dr Chris Hall: So Mendix was a single, I believe, Cloud-based system, which most of the people inside the PPE Buy Cell could access, the sort of hackneyed phrase, which is a “single version of the truth”, but that’s, in many cases, what it represented so if you wanted to find out the status of a particular offer, what a particular offer consisted of, then that data was consistent and was held in Mendix once, rather than being in many different places in different people’s private storage areas or indeed in these multiple spreadsheets that you were referring to earlier.

Lead 5: So before the introduction of Mendix, most caseworkers had very limited information with which to work –

Dr Chris Hall: Mm-hm.

Lead 5: – including whether targets were being met or not?

Dr Chris Hall: I think that’s more of a communications issue than a data issue, and it was – for whatever reason, certain information was limited in circulation.

Lead 5: Well, whatever the reason, did that itself have an impact on morale and efficiency?

Dr Chris Hall: I mean, speaking as a caseworker at the time, it had an effect on my morale and my efficiency, yes.

Lead 5: All right. You were allocated cases by Mr Cairnduff, weren’t you?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: In fact, he wanted you to handle what he describes as the most difficult cases?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: By that, he meant those with the biggest stakeholder implications, we’re told?

Dr Chris Hall: By and large, yes.

Lead 5: So putting it in terms of the VIP Lane, we’re talking about those that were referring offers into the VIP Lane that expected responses to demands for feedback?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Why is it that it was you that was asked to handle those most difficult of cases?

Dr Chris Hall: If my Lady would permit, I just want to go back a little tiny bit and explain my personal situation. So why was I, as a director, a CS2, working as a caseworker alongside more junior staff in the front line of this enterprise?

Lead 5: Please do.

Dr Chris Hall: I was about to retire. So when Covid hit, I was about to retire for about the third time, and my successor as Deputy Chief Commercial Officer had already been appointed and I was cutting down my hours. I was working two days a week, and I was on a glide path to what I saw as a long and happy retirement tending my garden and indulging myself in my many hobbies.

When Covid hit, I was away from the Cabinet Office. I wasn’t in the office physically. I actually went to live with my mother in Derbyshire because she’s approaching 90 and I thought that was the only way to keep her safe. So I’m remote physically and, to a certain extent, organisationally from what might be considered my normal duties in the Cabinet Office.

And after a couple of weeks doing that, I saw – and was receiving regular bulletins about what my colleagues were doing, I saw that there was a grave need for people with my skill set and that I could make a serious contribution to what was going on and, as a consequence, I volunteered to come and work anywhere in the Covid-19 procurement effort and I spoke to Janette, who was the manager of the Complex Transactions Team at the time and she allocated me, she said, “There’s a job here, working for Max, in this PPE Buy Cell. It would suit your skill set. Max is looking for somebody who is used to dealing with ministers, who is used to handling C suite executives from – from outside corporations, and who has got the kind of network that you’ve got”.

Lead 5: Understood, and thank you for that explanation of background and how it came to be that you were working where you did work. You were allocated the most politically sensitive cases?

Dr Chris Hall: In Max’s description, yes.

Lead 5: Yes. And we see from your witness statement you say:

“To my mind, these were the offers which had the potential to cause reputational damage to the programme and to undermine public confidence if not handled appropriately.”

Dr Chris Hall: Certainly some of them were in that category, yes.

Lead 5: And you’re referring there to cases within the VIP Lane?

Dr Chris Hall: All the cases I saw were in the High Priority Lane, yes.

Lead 5: There’s a certain irony there, isn’t there, that you at the outset were concerned about the possibility that the handling of those cases would cause reputational damage. You’re aware, of course, that the High Priority Lane itself caused a degree of reputational damage?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, which I regret.

Lead 5: Yes. Should that handling of reputational damage be a task that is taken up by yourself or your colleagues in a time of crisis or emergency?

Dr Chris Hall: I think that’s quite a complex question to think about. I think it’s possibly naive to think that these programmes exist outside of a political context, and whole issue of the handling of the pandemic was the subject of intense media attention, and of course occupied many politicians for many hours, and it was a very intense period for the politicians, as it was for the officials.

Part of the job, I believe, was to maintain public confidence that the government could answer this particular challenge, could answer the challenge of setting up a test network that would adequately test people for the disease, that would keep people safe, buying the vaccines, and also the very, very important job of obtaining enough PPE for health and social care workers.

Lead 5: Let me put that question in a slightly different way in that case. In an ideal world, one wouldn’t be coping or managing that noise or that distraction, one would focus instead on the fundamental task of procuring as much as was needed and as effectively as possible?

Dr Chris Hall: In an ideal world, yes, you would. But we were not in an ideal world.

Lead 5: Particularly given, as you recount in some detail in your evidence, the volume of work and the stresses and the strains that were caused by that. You say that you yourself processed 40 cases in parallel?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, but others processed more.

Lead 5: Others processed more.

Your own recollection is that that volume of work was extremely demanding. You used a Trello board. Can you explain what that is?

Dr Chris Hall: I’m sorry, it’s a bit of jargon. It’s a network available – sorry, an Internet-available tool for handling information, and it’s the equivalent of an electronic pinboard, so you can put little notes saying, “I’ve called Mr So-and-so on this particular date and done this with him”, and I can organise that pin board so I can use it as a brought-forward file.

Lead 5: Thank you.

You tell us that following up a single lead could require dozens of telephone calls and emails?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: That’s within the deliverable. Yes?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Do you know what the experience was outside of the VIP Lane, are you able to compare the two?

Dr Chris Hall: Not directly, but I can’t imagine it’s very different.

Lead 5: You think a single lead might have required dozens of telephone calls and emails?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: At one point you tell us that you were sending an email every two minutes, either to a prospective supplier or to a colleague to try to progress an order?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: And in between those emails, presumably, you were processing, considering other emails – there was work to be done in between?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Yes. On top of all of that, threats were made, weren’t they? You tell us that it was quite common for suppliers to threaten that they would escalate their grievances to the press or to senior figures within government?

Dr Chris Hall: Not uncommon, I would say. Not uncommon.

Lead 5: Again, do you say that that is an experience that was not uncommon within the VIP Lane and elsewhere –

Dr Chris Hall: I can’t speak for elsewhere.

Lead 5: You can’t. In the answer you gave earlier, you couldn’t speak for elsewhere either? How much direct involvement, did you have with non-VIP Lane offers?

Dr Chris Hall: I did not have much involvement at the time but, as your colleagues might know, I’ve spent the last year and a half gathering evidence for the Inquiry and I’ve had access to very, very many documents.

Lead 5: Even that exercise, tell me if I’m wrong here, does not enable you to make a comparative analysis between the intensity of communications necessary within the High Priority Lane and outside of the High Priority Lane?

Dr Chris Hall: I can take some measure of the intensity by talking to people like Darren Blackburn, who was in here earlier, who did have that experience.

Lead 5: Have you done so?

Dr Chris Hall: I have talked to Darren many times about that.

Lead 5: Did you find that there was a roughly equivalent amount of need to feed back in both of those processes?

Dr Chris Hall: The need was to communicate with the supplier to get the offer to a point where we could actually process it sensibly.

Lead 5: Well, in the case of non-VIP Lane offers, it’s the supplier. In the case of VIP Lane offers, it’s often the referrer, isn’t it?

Dr Chris Hall: Ah, okay, I understand the distinction. So the amount of communication with the supplier I would estimate was comparable, but the non-VIP Lane case caseworkers, the non-HPL caseworkers did not have to communicate with a third party, the referrer, about the progress of offers.

Lead 5: Indeed, and that does make sense, doesn’t it –

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: – because if you’re getting close to concluding a contract, you may need to communicate directly with the supplier but, in the earlier stages of the process, that may not be necessary, or so necessary?

Dr Chris Hall: Well, I believe that other witnesses have explained to you the broad process for concluding contracts.

Lead 5: They have.

Dr Chris Hall: So the Opportunities teams, of which the HPL team was one, is just the first step, the initial step in that process. And I know Mr Blackburn talked to you about this this morning.

Then there’s a handover to Technical Assurance. Technical Assurance check the documentation to do with the product. Often, Technical Assurance hand back and say, “This is missing, that is missing, this doesn’t look quite right”, which provokes the Opportunities caseworker to have further discussions with the supplier to try to fill the gaps.

Lead 5: So I am focused on referrers now, and it’s in relation to those that you say in your witness statement:

“Ultimately, many of these complaints …”

We’re now talking about complaints made by referrers whose offer had not received a response or who were wondering what had happened with it, for example:

“… would be referred back to the HPL mailbox by the official or minister who had received the complaint. This simply added to our existing workload and required time to investigate and to explain to hard-pressed ministers what had in fact happened and why the offer had not proceeded further.”

Dr Chris Hall: That’s correct. I’ll just go back to my previous answer, which I didn’t manage to complete. Forgive me. So you talk about talking to suppliers when you’re getting close to contract. That was somebody else’s job. That was the job of the Closing team, it wasn’t the job of the people in the HPL team.

Lead 5: All right.

Could we display, please, INQ000527557.

It’s this page I wanted to look at, but it follows on from a string of emails from which you may be familiar, between yourself and Allan Nixon –

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: – in which you set out in a page-long email many of the stresses and strains that you’re experiencing as a result of various matters, including threats for those that have referred in offers to the High Priority Lane to go to the press. Here, specifically, someone had threatened to go to Piers Morgan with the story and there are a list of other matters.

Allan Nixon, who was Allan Nixon?

Dr Chris Hall: Allan was a special adviser to Matt Hancock.

Lead 5: Okay, and Allan Nixon says:

“Will keep trying to insulate you and your team from things like this unless absolutely necessary (problem was this one came direct from Matt …”

Dr Chris Hall: Mm-hm.

Lead 5: Presumably Matt Hancock?

Dr Chris Hall: Mm-hm.

Lead 5: “… and he’d asked for an answer on it!) I’ve spoken to him and he’s happy – as is the MP!”

So this sort of email would certainly have caused you and whoever else it might be that received a similar email to leave to one side whatever they were working on and to prioritise handling this sort of concern first; is that right?

Dr Chris Hall: That’s true. And if I can, I’ll give another example. So in late April 2020 the then Shadow Minister to the Cabinet Office, Rachel Reeves, wrote to Michael Gove saying, “Here’s 20 companies, I don’t think they’ve been contacted”. And at that point I and others had to do a lot of research to understand what had indeed happened with these companies and to assure Minister Gove that some had been contacted, some had not been contacted but, in any event, we thought there was one useful lead among the 20, and help Michael Gove’s private office formulate a response for Rachel Reeves, which is a lot of work.

Lead 5: Of course.

Dr Chris Hall: But it’s an appropriate thing to do, because that’s how the Parliamentary process works.

Lead 5: With hindsight, might it have been preferable that if it was necessary to do that, if one couldn’t simply ask such requests or such individuals requesting updates to hold off until the offers had been properly considered, for others to be engaged in that task, others who were not directly involved in the procurement exercise?

Dr Chris Hall: To a certain extent, but senior commercial officials answer – help answer Parliamentary Questions, FOI requests and other requests all the time. It’s a normal part of the job, yeah? And if you have a third party who are a different official without necessarily the background or the technical knowledge preparing an answer like that, they’re going to take longer and they’re just going to ask you a lot of questions. So in many cases it’s quicker to do the work yourself.

Lead 5: There was, of course, in due course, a rapid response team –

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: – that handled offers in a different way, that hadn’t come in from VIPs. Is that not a way of avoiding the burden, the noise, the distraction?

Dr Chris Hall: That’s an interesting hypothesis, but I originated the rapid response teams so I’ve got a slightly different view, if I might explain.

So the rapid response teams were there to do the processing side, they weren’t there to do the – tell the referrer what’s going on with this offer. They’re there to process an offer as quickly as possible, from inception through to the point where a contract can be formed and passed to the accounting officer for consideration.

Those offers came from the High Priority Lane team, as well as the non-High Priority Lane team.

Lead 5: Yes.

Dr Chris Hall: So the only consideration about going into the rapid response team process was that it was a good, viable offer that we thought we could process quickly.

Lead 5: With no regard to who had referred it in –

Dr Chris Hall: No.

Lead 5: – if it hadn’t come in through the VIP route?

Dr Chris Hall: No, it – and purely on: this one’s good to cook, this is ready to go, we can execute this quickly.

The handling back to the referrer, if at all necessary, would have been handled by somebody in the High Priority Lane team.

Lead 5: Dr Hall, you were the originator of the rapid response team process?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: It sounds, from what you and others have said, that it was a process that might have obviated the need for the VIP Lane, given that there was no shortage of offers already coming in – and we’ll come on to the call for arms and the effect that that had – with an efficient method of triage. And with your IT experience, you may have ideas of how one might achieve that efficiency.

Dr Chris Hall: Mm-hm.

Lead 5: But isn’t there, between the rapid response team and live data with offers providing all the necessary elements of an offer to be considered upfront, a method of just not having a VIP Lane at all?

Dr Chris Hall: No, I’m afraid that’s not the case.

Lead 5: When you came into the VIP Lane, it had already existed?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, that’s right –

Lead 5: But does it follow –

Dr Chris Hall: Only for a couple of weeks.

Lead 5: Only by couple of weeks. But does it follow from your previous answer that you would invent it again in the event of an emergency and the need to procure in an emergency?

Dr Chris Hall: Not in the form that it came to be. I don’t think that the mere fact of being referred by a senior figure, in particular by a politician, is an adequate means of prioritisation – (overspeaking) –

Lead 5: So how would you – if you were reinventing it, how would you change it?

Dr Chris Hall: I wouldn’t adopt a passive approach in the first place. I would proactively go out and look for people that can supply PPE.

Lead 5: Wouldn’t that obviate the need for referrals at all?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: It would?

Dr Chris Hall: It would.

Lead 5: Okay. So I may have misunderstood your earlier answer, but you seemed to be defending the VIP Lane as something that inevitably had to happen. You’re now saying that if we were in the difficult, to put it mildly, circumstances of a pandemic again, and the need to emergency procure, you would dispense with it altogether and have a different system in place?

Dr Chris Hall: I would take an approach which is closer to the one taken by the Ventilator Challenge. The Ventilator Challenge proactively went out and found people that they thought could design and build ventilators in a hurry.

Lead 5: And to the extent that it is harder to do that with more commodified products –

Dr Chris Hall: Yeah.

Lead 5: – that problem could be overcome by the use of IT, by triaging, either automatically or semi-automatically, with human involvement at one point or another; is that right?

Dr Chris Hall: I wish I had as much faith in IT as you seem to have. I’m afraid 40 years in the industry have disabused me of that.

So I go back to evidence that you heard on the first day from your expert witness, and he talked about, in his report, certainly the use of structured data in order to obtain information from the market, sort that information, sift it, “Okay, this is the best offer in this particular information set”, and process that.

That requires a lot of work, you know. And even so, it requires iterations. You wouldn’t get something like that right first time. You probably wouldn’t even attempt it in the middle of a crisis.

Lead 5: Okay.

Dr Hall, I said I’d touch on the call to arms. Presumably you agree with previous witnesses that it didn’t make matters any better?

Dr Chris Hall: It made matters a lot worse.

Lead 5: Yes, all right.

I want to take you briefly to an email that we’ve seen, because you’re its author.

Dr Chris Hall: Fine.

Lead 5: It’s the one you headed “I dream about this stuff”, you may recall.

Could we have INQ000527547.

And I really want to ask you in relation to the first line:

“We have designed the least efficient process possible.”

You set out a little bit what you meant by that. Do you want to add anything to that?

Dr Chris Hall: I’ll just give you two words of context, if I can.

Lead 5: Yes.

Dr Chris Hall: So I’d had a sleepless night worrying about this, and I think I woke up at 6.00 and typed this e-mail. And initially, I was only going to send it to Max, who was my immediate superior within the team, for discussion, but at a later point I blind copied Gareth as well, and “I dream about this stuff” is because it had kept me awake all night.

“We have designed the least efficient process possible.”

I’m possibly using a bit of hyperbole there, but all the same I stand by that. I believe we had designed an inefficient process.

Lead 5: Okay.

Dr Chris Hall: Possibly for good reasons, because at the beginning of processing this enormous backlog of offers, we had a newly formed team that were not used to buying PPE. Many people, we didn’t know them, they came from all over government, and we needed to segment – my colleagues needed to segment the task into smaller elements that could be quickly taught to new caseworkers and to new administrators.

Lead 5: Thank you very much, that can go down.

In terms of how the process, the VIP Lane process, might have been improved, you express this at paragraph 5.2 of your witness statement, where you say this:

“It seemed to me that there was a need to differentiate more clearly between VIP offers which merited being given priority because they were viable and those which did not. I was also concerned to ensure that VIP leads which were unproductive were closed down quickly.”

Dr Chris Hall: Mm.

Lead 5: So that concern did not translate into any change to the VIP process, did it?

Dr Chris Hall: It resulted – I mean, this was a discussion I had with Max, and Max did take action, as I’ve seen in some of his emails, in order to winnow down the stock of offers that he had in front of him.

Lead 5: But you’re making a slightly different point, aren’t you, that there are some VIP offers that come in that are no hopers, and they should be stopped short, instead of consuming resource?

Dr Chris Hall: And they were triaged out, so there was a triage process at the beginning of the High Priority Lane process that did take away people who were not offering sufficient quantity, people who were offering the wrong product.

Lead 5: So you would say that the concern that you were expressing was actioned?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, I believe, it was.

Lead 5: All right. I want to move on now to some examples of offers that you dealt with. Some of those offers came to you via Lord Feldman, didn’t they?

Dr Chris Hall: That’s right.

Lead 5: Can you just briefly – we’ll be hearing from Lord Feldman himself. What was Lord Feldman’s role in relation to the VIP Lane?

Dr Chris Hall: In relation to the PPE acquisition process more generally, I understand he had been appointed, and had near enough quasi-ministerial status, appointed into the Department of Health and Social Care to help Lord James Bethell with this particular task.

Lead 5: He referred three offers to you that resulted in contracts, didn’t he?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: SG Recruitment, Maxima and Skinnydip?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: I’m just going to take you relatively briefly to two of there was. I think probably the swiftest way to deal with this is by reference to your witness statement, which I hope can be brought up, it’s INQ000536369, we’re looking at page 17 and paragraph 6.12, You say at 6.12:

“In some cases, I was unaware at the time that the supplier had any link to the Conservative Party, while in others, Lord Feldman made the connection explicit.”

As far as you can tell, why was that connection made explicit; was it relevant?

Dr Chris Hall: I believe it was Lord Feldman’s way of saying that he had some personal – well, in this particular case that he had knowledge of or knew Lord Chadlington and, as a consequence, he believed that this company was credible, was, you know, not merely opportunistically trying to find an opportunity.

Lead 5: You say something to that effect a little lower down:

“Lord Feldman also informed me that Stuart Marks was formerly Northern Treasurer of the Conservative Party. This I took to be Lord Feldman’s way of saying that he knew Mr Marks personally and could vouch for him.”

Dr Chris Hall: And I take it you’ll put those questions to Lord Feldman because I don’t pretend to be in his head but –

Lead 5: No, no, of course. Yes, you’re quite right, and yes, I will. But the reason I draw it to your attention is I want to know how that, if at all, affected your handling of the offer?

Dr Chris Hall: What affected my handling of the offer was not the connection to the Conservative Party. What affected my handling of the offer was that Lord Feldman had some confidence that the counterparty was credible.

Lead 5: Are you aware of whether or not Lord Feldman conducted any due diligence or inspected or assessed the offer that had been – that he was referring in?

Dr Chris Hall: I think it’s worth looking at the phrase “due diligence” because it has particular meaning for procurement professionals and it really means assessing the economic and financial standing of a particular company. So did Lord Feldman formally undertake that level of due diligence? No, I doubt if he have the capability or the knowledge to do it.

Lead 5: Any form of assessment?

Dr Chris Hall: I believe he made some assessment of the credibility of the offers that were made to him, yes.

Lead 5: Mr Rhys Williams’ evidence this week that that, as far as he was aware, offers were simply referred in without scrutiny?

Dr Chris Hall: What he’s referring to – and I was here when Gareth gave his evidence – what he was referring to was that many offers never actually crossed the desk of the minister who nominally had referred them. Those offers were received by somebody in a private office and the private office send them on to – as directed, to a particular mailbox. Feldman is a different case, yes? Feldman did have a private office but they didn’t send the offers: Feldman sent the offers.

Lead 5: Oh, right. In any event, in relation to this one, you noted that the due diligence position – I think this is towards the bottom of 6.12, perhaps. It’s not there but you noted, did you not, that the due diligence position of the initial offeror, SGH Global, was not straightforward, as the company was registered in Jersey; do you remember?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Consequently, fully transparent information was not available about its finances?

Dr Chris Hall: Not on a public website, for example.

Lead 5: You raised concerns about the consequent counterparty risks and suggested that they needed to be mitigated before a contract could be awarded?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: As far as you were aware, you then went back, didn’t you? These mitigations were detailed on a deal form when a further deal was agreed with a different company, SG Recruitment?

Dr Chris Hall: SG Recruitment is a subsidiary of SGH Global, and the reason that that particular subsidiary was put forward as a counterparty was that it was an existing supplier to the NHS and it was in a UK jurisdiction. So in many respects it was easier for us to contract with that counterparty but we would not contract with such a small counterparty on a valuable contract unless we had some other backing in the form of, for example, a parent company guarantee back to a larger entity.

Lead 5: The contract, as you rightly observe, was of a significant value. It was a £16.1 million contract for chemicals and plastic films?

Dr Chris Hall: I don’t recall that but I’m happy to take your advice.

Lead 5: It comes from the DHSC table that we looked at earlier today.

Dr Chris Hall: Okay.

Lead 5: There was to and fro before the contract was concluded and it resulted in a subsidiary as co-contractor, rather than the initial offeror, didn’t it?

Dr Chris Hall: It’s not a co-contractor, I’m afraid –

Lead 5: Co-party?

Dr Chris Hall: It’s the counterparty for the DHSC.

Lead 5: Was this level of iteration or back and forth available to an offeror outside of the VIP Lane?

Dr Chris Hall: Certainly changing counterparties took place for other deals than just deals that were in the VIP Lane.

Lead 5: So is your evidence that the connection to Lord Feldman or to Stuart Marks placed the offeror at no advantage in terms of negotiating an alternative solution to the original offer?

Dr Chris Hall: No, I don’t believe so.

Lead 5: All right. Let’s move on to paper straw drinking company.

Could we have INQ000513411, which is the witness statement of Mr Stuart Marks.

We just situate ourselves in paragraph 1. He says:

“I was also Northern Treasurer for the Conservative Party.”

At paragraph 3, below that:

“I was approached by a friend in our local community who in turn had a close friend called Jonathan Salem …”

Paragraph 6:

“[I knew him] from his role as Conservative Party Chairman …”

Then finally, 7 and 8:

“I offered to email Lord Deighton …”

Did you have any involvement with Lord Deighton through the VIP Lane?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Yes?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: On a similar basis to Lord Feldman?

Dr Chris Hall: It’s a different kind of relationship. Deighton was deeply involved in operational matters because he was put in charge of the PPE Buy operation.

Lead 5: “I offered to email Lord Deighton to see what, if anything, he could do … it seemed that there was nothing to lose by going back to him and at least asking.”

Then finally:

“One of the Conservative Party donors [Mr Agustsson] runs a very large PPE manufacturing business in Manchester … he asked me whether I knew Lord Deighton, as he was experiencing difficulties in his factory. I told him I did and he asked whether I would act as a messenger and deliver an email to him, which I did and the email is attached.”

So similar question, Dr Hall. You say that a connection to the Conservative Party offered suppliers no advantage over other suppliers in securing procurement contracts?

Dr Chris Hall: Absolutely. I’m absolutely confident of that.

Lead 5: Let’s turn to Skinnydip, please. INQ000560757.

This is a short statement of Lord Leigh of Hurley. Paragraph 1, describes himself as a Tory backbench peer and Senior Treasurer of the Conservative Party:

“In view of my perceived relationship with [the Government] and Lord Feldman … I was contacted in early 2020 …”

In paragraph 5, he says:

“In every case I simply passed on the names with the information that they had sent me. I was not in a position to assess or advise on the credibility of any offer of help …”

So there was an example of a referral in that had no scrutiny applied to it, and that was quite commonplace, was it not, Dr Hall?

Dr Chris Hall: Forgive me, my Lady, I’m not quite sure what point Mr Wald wants me to make.

Lead 5: Well, you answered earlier that there was some degree of scrutiny undertaken by those who referred in cases to the VIP Lane.

Dr Chris Hall: I –

Lady Hallett: Did he?

Mr Wald: Well, he said that there was either – I thought that his evidence was that –

Dr Chris Hall: I said that in many cases it was obvious that an offer had not actually crossed the desk of a minister because the email chain showed that the offer was handled by a private secretary in the private office. The offers that came from Lord Feldman, came from Lord Feldman, they came from his DHSC address or another email address. So there is some reason to believe that Lord Feldman had looked at them and sent them on if he thought that there was some merit in them. But, again, that’s a question, really, you ought to put to Lord Feldman.

Lead 5: I will.

Final example, Meller Designs.

Dr Chris Hall: Okay.

Lead 5: Can we go to INQ000536369. This is your witness statement, pages 18 to 19 and paragraph 6.15 to 6.16. You just remind yourself of that:

“David Meller of Meller Designs had originally been introduced to the HPL via Michael Gove’s office, as was noted in the list of HPL companies published by DHSC … I knew that David Meller had a connection to the Conservative Party because I remembered his name in connection with newspaper stories in 2018. Meller Designs was awarded several contracts for the supply of PPE, but I had no dealings with him or role in the award of those contracts before or around 1 May when [Lord Feldman] mentioned him to me in connection with a deal to supply a large quantity of Type IIR masks and I had been pursuing with John Vincent and Leon Restaurants.”

“Andrew [which is Lord Feldman] explained that he had discussed the deal with John Vincent and David Meller and that David Meller had agreed to provide the counterparty, as John Vincent did not believe that it was appropriate for his restaurant business to front the deal.”

Then at 6.16 there was a problem about certification, wasn’t there?

Dr Chris Hall: This is quite a technical problem but would you like me to describe the issue?

Lead 5: Yes, please.

Dr Chris Hall: Okay. So the masks themselves were an acceptable product. They were certified. The challenge was that the masks needed to be marked with a CE mark before they could be exported from China. The Chinese government would not allow them to be so marked, and without – sorry, to be exported without that mark. The mark could not be applied because there was no registered supplier of these medical devices in the UK. Meller was intended to be the registered supplier of the devices, so, in other words, sponsoring the import of the devices into the UK.

The time to register as a supplier with the MHRA was a matter of days but, at the point that the – that this communication came in, in relation to the deal for IIR masks, that registration had not taken place and this was a blockage to us being able to obtain the IIR masks. So consequently I was asked – I can’t remember whether it was directly by Meller or by somebody else connected with the deal or indeed by Feldman himself – whether there was anything we could do.

Actually, in retrospect, I believe it was Meller who. This was probably the only communication I had with him.

Lead 5: You say towards the middle of your paragraph 6.16 that:

“… Lord Feldman’s private secretary liaised directly with the MHRA to request that the derogation request receive their immediate attention.”

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, that’s right. And in fact – but I do recall replying to Meller saying that the MHRA is, by statute, an independent regulator and there was nothing that I or any other official could do to force them to make a – you know, to give an opinion one way or the other.

But this isn’t actually the approval of the devices. The devices are acceptable. This is merely the registration of a particular company as essentially an improved importer.

So I made a very gentle enquiry to the MHRA saying, “What’s happening with this? Is there any piece of information that’s missing? We’d really like to have these devices.”

And actually the matter was resolved, I believe, and would have been resolved without me communicating with the MHRA, because the approval came through within a day or so of that contact.

Lead 5: You would say that this is a matter that would have been resolved without a connection to Lord Feldman, without a connection to the Conservative Party –

Dr Chris Hall: In all likelihood, yes.

Lead 5: That you would have intervened even if it had not been a VIP –

Dr Chris Hall: Absolutely, because we wanted the masks.

Lead 5: At your paragraph 5 .8 Dr Hall you say:

“[You] have been asked to address the question as to whether suppliers being processed through the HPL were given unequal treatment compared to those coming through the Buy Cell.”

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: And you say:

“… I recognise that this process had the potential to lead to unequal treatment (as defined by the public contracts regulations), but this was not so apparent to me at the time.”

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: You’re not seeking, are you, to go behind the finding of the High Court that there was unequal treatment?

Dr Chris Hall: No, not at all, but, I mean, we’re talking about a period, probably, I don’t know, 18 months before that finding came down. And you must remember the circumstances that we were in at the beginning of the pandemic. So we are moving from a situation where pretty well all requirements are competed to a situation where we’re making extensive use of Regulation 32.

I had never used Regulation 32; I had never made a direct award in my time in the Civil Service, or indeed acting as a consultant to the Civil Service.

Regulation 32 is very rare, there’s practically no case law in relation to Regulation 32, so we didn’t have a strong set of determinations that we could rely on to say, “This is what you can do and this is what you can’t do under Regulation 32.”

We knew you could make direct awards but, for example, it’s not a competitive situation. We’re not running a competition. So really, does the particular consideration of equal treatment even come in to bear?

Lead 5: Dr Hall, it’s not quite right that you – you wrote this in January of this year. This is your witness evidence.

Dr Chris Hall: Correct.

Lead 5: And the reason for my question was that you – it’s your rather odd use of language “I recognise that this process had the potential to lead to unequal treatment.” We now know that it did so – (overspeaking) –

Dr Chris Hall: To unequal treatment as – led to unequal treatment as found by the – Justice O’Driscoll, yes.

Lead 5: O’Farrell?

Dr Chris Hall: O’Farrell, beg your pardon.

Lead 5: You do, within your witness evidence, 5.16 to 517 and page 13 of offer an alternative, don’t you, and you’ve started to discuss that earlier. Is there anything you want to add to that?

Dr Chris Hall: I think there are some other considerations to bring in to bear. There’s been some discussion about the call to arms and when it happened and quite what form it happened, whether there’s an explicit call to arms or not, a minister standing up on television saying, “Please send us your offers.”

A very, very large number of unsolicited offers of help, of product, had been received by Department of Health, by the SCCL, by my own office in the GCCO, by CCS, because I believe the public were motivated to help, businesses were motivated to help and, lo and behold, a lot of businesses found they had to diversify because their existing business was gone.

So, whatever solution we come to, there’s got to be a way of doing something with those offers.

In addiction, people contacted their MPs saying, “I want to help”, people contacted politicians saying, you know, “I’ve got this offer”, and there’s got to be some way of dealing with those. I don’t have a magic pulled for dealing with those. Both of them are challenges that need to be addressed in a similar situation. I don’t believe receiving offers from either of those routes is the most efficient way to obtain these emergency goods. I do strongly believe that a proactive approach to potential suppliers in the market would have been a different way of doing this and possibly more efficient.

Lead 5: Can I take it from that answer which you gave earlier, but you’ve now reinforced, that you didn’t consider that there was anything inherently more credible or more promising about offers that arrived as a result of referrals into the VIP Lane?

Dr Chris Hall: I heard Max’s evidence earlier, and I share his feelings about the VIP Lane in many respects. Initially I too was sceptical, and I think I’ve reflected that in my evidence and in some of the emails I wrote at the time.

So, what are we doing here? Is this just a matter of political handling? Is this genuinely going to lead to what we really wanted, which was large volumes of useful PPE?

Because I’ve got relatives in the NHS. Max didn’t mention it, but he’s got relatives in the NHS. We’re all incredibly motivated to try to get PPE to the front line. I didn’t want to be involved in this matter if it was just a case of reassuring some politicians that everything possible was being done. I wanted to get PPE to the front line. And as a consequence of that, I tried to make the process more efficient. I did some of the other things that I’ve described in my witness statement.

Lead 5: So like Mr Cairnduff, you started sceptical?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: You grew increasingly convinced that the VIP Lane was a source of promising or inherently more credible offers?

Dr Chris Hall: Well, I can demonstrate that. Within a matter of days I was talking to the most senior executive in the UK for Amazon, which I believe was a credible route to obtaining large volumes of PPE. And we did obtain some PPE from Amazon, perhaps a little bit less than we would have liked to.

Lead 5: So you have individual cases that you can cite?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: It’s what one would describe as anecdotal evidence. The Inquiry has assembled more data than that. I mean, I appreciate that you were in the thick of it, and I showed – you may have followed it – Mr Cairnduff a number of graphics –

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: – relating to performance and due diligence.

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Would you like an opportunity to comment on those as well?

Dr Chris Hall: I’d very much like that opportunity.

Lead 5: All right let’s do that now.

The first is at INQ000475005 and page 1.

This is produced on the basis of witness statements from 36 referrers, of which two-thirds responded.

Dr Chris Hall: Yeah.

Lead 5: And amongst those who did respond, 67 indicated that there had been no due diligence, and you’ve explained what you understand you meant by –

Dr Chris Hall: 67%, yes, roughly two-thirds. But I’m in this sample, I’m one of these referrers –

Lead 5: Yes?

Dr Chris Hall: Yeah.

Lead 5: You’re not a referrer?

Dr Chris Hall: I did refer, yes. I referred one company into the High Priority Lane and I enabled the referral of another company into the –

Lead 5: What was your experience? Did you undertake any –

Dr Chris Hall: Did I undertake formal financial due diligence? No. No, because there was another team to do that.

Did I talk to the supplier? Did I talk to people who knew the supplier? Did I investigate whether the supplier was – had the right kind of experience to provide the kind of product that we were looking at? Yes, I did. And thus, I made the referral because I thought the offer was credible.

Lead 5: Okay. Did you also answer the questionnaire from the caseworker side as well?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, I did.

Lead 5: Well, you may be in an unusual position in the sense of being able to help us from both ends of the telescope. We’ll move on to that.

But in addition to the due diligence figures, there are performance figures which you may have seen.

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Within the same period, how do HPL versus non-HPL contracts stand up to the test of performance?

Dr Chris Hall: I think the things you showed yesterday suggest that 50% of HPL figures had some issues –

Lead 5: 55%?

Dr Chris Hall: 55% of HPL contracts had some issues. And I believe it’s something like 37%?

Lead 5: 39.

Dr Chris Hall: Thank you; you may have the figures in front often you but I don’t.

So I also heard Jonathan Marron explain how those figures come about and how you dig underneath them. So a performance issue might be that there’s one gown missing in a shipment of several hundred thousand. It might be that there’s a piece of documentation missing. It might just be that the inspectors from the MHRA at Daventry are in some way cautious about the shipment and decide to put it into quarantine.

Lead 5: It might be of course, but all of those possibilities would apply equally to HPL and non-HPL.

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, and I heard you make that argument.

Lead 5: And what’s your response to that?

Dr Chris Hall: You’d have to look at the detail. Mr Marron said that roughly 20 contracts from both the HPL set and the non-HPL set fall into this category, you know. And I know one, for example, that did fall into this category, because I was involved in working it. So we haven’t discussed this yet, but maybe you’re going to come to it, there’s a referral from a gentleman called Mr Farha, who sold us £135,000 worth of gowns.

Lead 5: I will. Not with you, I hope you’re not disappointed, but with a future witness.

Dr Chris Hall: By all means. So Mr Farha bought these gowns in good faith, 10,000 gowns, we ship them from China, they turn up in Daventry, they are inspected, we told Mr Farha we’re only going to pay him on satisfactory inspection, and they didn’t pass inspection because they didn’t conform and have the right documentation. It’s £135,000 in a £13 billion programme. So I think you’ve got to dig underneath those figures and get some sense of proportionality.

Lead 5: Of course. It’s a crude analysis but it is an analysis that is equally crude in the HPL case and the non-HPL case.

Dr Chris Hall: I’m afraid I don’t accept that argument. I think, in order to have something which is of value to my Lady, you would have to look at more detail than that.

Lead 5: Right. You’ve made clear that your own view is that speed within the process is advantageous if you are about the business of trying to secure a contract?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Yes. And in fact that was made all the more so by internal guidance to say anything over two weeks, don’t spend further time on it, move on to others?

Dr Chris Hall: Well, I’d clarify that, if I can, that internal guidance says if it’s anything over two weeks, revalidate the offer. Which sounds to me to be sound advice.

Lead 5: Okay, let’s have a look at it then.

INQ000477274, second page, please.

“An opportunity should only be progressed if:

“The offer is less than two weeks old. Offers more than two weeks old are generally not credible in the current market and should not be progressed unless you have expressly confirmed with the caseworker that they remain valid.”

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: So where do we see that if they’re more than two weeks old you should revalidate them?

Dr Chris Hall: That’s what the last clause means: you should expressly confirm it with the caseworker that they remain valid.

Lead 5: Was it every single one that went beyond two weeks that was revalidated?

Dr Chris Hall: I can’t attest to that because, you know, I would have to go back and look for the evidence of it, but that’s what the instruction says. The instruction says if it’s more than two weeks old, then go back to the caseworker, who will contact the supplier, and say, “Are you still making that offer on those terms?”

Lead 5: All right.

Let’s move on to the next graphic that was put to Mr Cairnduff earlier today and upon which you may wish to comment. Chasing for updates.

INQ000475005, page 2.

Again, you were part of this cohort?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: You were a referrer. Did you chase for updates?

Dr Chris Hall: No.

Lead 5: You’d have been chasing from one of your colleagues, presumably?

Dr Chris Hall: Exactly.

Lead 5: Yes. We see that 61% did chase for updates. Are you able to comment? Would you have any sense of whether that –

Dr Chris Hall: It feels high. That wasn’t my personal experience.

Lead 5: It feels high. Then we move on to the survey in which you did participate –

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: – as a caseworker.

INQ000581860, pages 1 and 9.

We start off there:

“Did referrers to the HPL contract you directly?”

I think we can conclude from what we’ve heard in your evidence already that you were one of those that said yes?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, that’s correct.

Lead 5: So you were one of the eight. Then let’s move to the next, if we enlarge it slightly. No, sorry, we’ve already looked at that. There we go:

“Do you consider contracts in the HPL were treated differently through the process to contracts … outside …”

Now, can we assume from the evidence that you’ve given that you were one of those that said no.

Dr Chris Hall: No, you can’t. I said yes.

Lead 5: You said yes? All right.

Dr Chris Hall: And the reason I said yes was because of the feedback issue. So my understanding was that – well, there was no one to refer back to, so there was no one to feed back to in the non-HPL lane. But I gave feedback to – at the request, to people who that referred opportunities into the High Priority Lane because that was one of the purposes of having a High Priority Lane.

Lead 5: That was the sole reason you said yes?

Dr Chris Hall: That was the sole reason I said yes.

Lead 5: You didn’t consider that there was any speed advantage in a referral in or –

Dr Chris Hall: There’s some advantage in – there was some advantage in the speed to Technical Assurance, but I don’t know whether we’re going to come on to this. I recently wrote to the Inquiry with some analysis I did on the relative processing speeds of different cases.

Lead 5: It wasn’t part of my plan this afternoon.

Dr Chris Hall: As you wish. But it’s part of my second witness statement, I believe.

Lead 5: Your evidence is that there was overall no speed advantage?

Dr Chris Hall: Well, if I may take the Inquiry’s time –

Lady Hallett: Well, I think Mr Wald has opened the door. So do.

The Witness: Okay, thank you.

So I did two different sets of analysis, and I should give a caveat that, doing this kind of analysis is actually really quite difficult, it’s not just a question of selecting a few cells from the spreadsheet and then putting in a formula.

So I went back to original communications and original documentation in Mendix, for example, to try to do this analysis. I looked at two different times: the time between when a company was first made known to the PPE Buy Cell and when it received a contract, by which I mean the purchase order. I took the purchase order date because that was the dataset that I had. And the other piece of analysis I did was look at the time between the first acceptable offer and the time to contract, which is shorter, as you would expect, because it sometimes took time for companies to make an acceptable offer, and the first offer they made wasn’t always acceptable.

The time outside the High Priority Lane, again, from memory – or would it be helpful to look at my statement so I’m not inadvertently misleading the Inquiry?

I don’t know if one of your colleagues can remind me what the paragraph number is.

Lady Hallett: This is the statement – did you say second statement?

Dr Chris Hall: I believe it’s in my second statement but I could be wrong on that.

Lady Hallett: Dated 16 January 2025?

Mr Wald: 5.10.

Dr Chris Hall: That must be the first statement.

Lead 5: Yes, the second statement is –

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, that’s right. Thank you very much, I do appreciate it.

Can we go on to the next page, please? That would be helpful.

Okay. So I won’t – you can read the process description there but, looking at the very bottom of the page, so the time from first contact to first purchase order for non-HPL cases is of the order of six weeks. The time for High Priority Lane cases, that time is of the order of four weeks, and there may be different explanations for that, but you must remember that there’s a very large volume of opportunities which are made known to the Department of Health in March, and in some – from the earliest date from something like 13 March, and there was no one there to process them. There was no way of actually picking these up and investigating whether they were good, bad or indifferent.

So, consequently, there’s couple of weeks, I can imagine, of backlog building up, before the PPE Cell was stood up properly and before it was in a position to process these cases, whereas by definition, the High Priority Lane cases come in and there’s Hannah Bolton ready to pick up the phone to talk to them. So, yes, there’s a difference in speed. But if we can go on to the next paragraph, please, which is on the following page.

So this is in speed to contract, and there the data is quite interesting. So this is the time between the first acceptable offer and a contract, and from both streams, non-High Priority Lane and High Priority Lane, that’s between three and three and a half weeks. So once somebody has made a good offer, they get through the sausage machine and get their purchase order in roughly the same time. And I think that proves the contention proves – that supports the contention that my colleagues, that once these offers, once they were being handled, once they were being treated, were treated in a very, very similar way.

Lead 5: You don’t say that entry into the system, we saw a slide yesterday that identifies “(A + B) OR C”, A plus B being criteria that relate to the company or the offer –

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: – with C relating to VIP status, entry into the system conferred any advantage in speed or otherwise.

Dr Chris Hall: It probably got you to Technical Assurance, the point of Technical Assurance more quickly, but there were some serious bottlenecks in Technical Assurance in particular in April and that’s where the process got held up.

You made one further inference from that particular evidence which is that there was no triage on the High Priority Lane offers and that’s just not true. There certainly was a triage on the High Priority Lane offers.

Lead 5: To put it into context, this two-week period, the overall period of PPE procurement lasted for 100 days, didn’t it?

Dr Chris Hall: Roughly.

Lead 5: Yeah, so we’re looking at a 14-day period within a period of 100 days?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Yes. So it’s not an insignificant period of time?

Dr Chris Hall: No.

Lead 5: In that procurement window?

Dr Chris Hall: In many cases, it would have made the non-High Priority Lane cases less likely to get to contract, but I think it’s also worth observing that, inside that set of non-High Priority Lane cases there are some of the things that Max Cairnduff talked to you about, and I hope this isn’t being unserious, but one of my – that I mentioned in the witness statement, was an offer for a recipe for chicken soup, with proven anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties, and that offer had to be picked up and looked at by somebody and then said, “Thank you but no thank you”, in the same way that an offer of 10,000, 100,000, 1 million gowns had to be looked at. So there’s a really big qualitative difference between the offer set processed by the non-HPL stream and the HPL stream.

Lead 5: Thank you, Dr Hall. Have you said everything you wanted to about your analysis?

Dr Chris Hall: I have, thank you.

Lead 5: All right. Thank you for that.

Final point but an important one, conversion rates.

Dr Chris Hall: Right.

Lead 5: Now, there was I suppose, a degree of confusion about whether the conversion rate offers to contracts was a tenfold rate of conversion or a 17-fold rate of confusion (sic). I want to ask you some questions in the hope that you will be able to clarify that important point for us, all right?

Can we start with Mr Marron’s witness statement and a table there.

It’s INQ000528391.

Table 11. There it is. Number of suppliers, HPL, a figure of 430 is given; is that correct?

Dr Chris Hall: For these purposes, it’s good enough. The matter of who is an HPL supplier and who is not an HPL supplier is, I’m afraid, like many other things, not a straightforward question to answer. So, generally speaking, we’ve used the existence of a case file in Mendix as a determinant of whether a supplier was or was not an HPL supplier.

Now, as part of work for the Inquiry, I had to look at – I must have done something bad in a previous life – look at these 430 cases, yes? And the – some of the 430 cases turned out to be state governments and I don’t believe we ever bought PPE from, for example, another state. So that number is a close approximation.

Lead 5: But what I’m interested in for these purposes, is should it say “suppliers” or “offers”?

Dr Chris Hall: It should say “suppliers”. What it says there is correct.

Lead 5: Then, as against that number of suppliers, there are 51 contracts awarded: number of suppliers awarded a contract?

Dr Chris Hall: I think it’s actually 52.

Lead 5: Okay. If those figures are correct, that results in an 11.86% of potential suppliers being awarded a contract?

Dr Chris Hall: That’s correct arithmetic, yes.

Lead 5: Being awarded at least one contract –

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: – because some suppliers were awarded multiple contracts?

Dr Chris Hall: As you can see from the figure below.

Lead 5: Yes. Comparing that to the non-HPL, we have 15,194 potential suppliers; 173 suppliers awarded contracts, and that conversion rate is 1.13% –

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: – which results in a difference in conversion rate of approximately 10.5?

Dr Chris Hall: If you look at this by suppliers, yes, that’s roughly –

Lead 5: If you look at it by suppliers.

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Can we now have up on the screen INQ000477283, page 3.

Dr Chris Hall: I take it you’re looking at the second-to-bottom paragraph; is that right?

Lead 5: I am indeed. It says:

“A small proportion of offers – approximately 430 of the 24,000 – were processed through a ‘high priority referral’ route.”

Dr Chris Hall: Forgive me, I’m not quite sure what the document is, but that’s wrong.

Lead 5: Well, let’s go to the top of it. Before you say it’s wrong, it’s a DHSC Government website document –

Dr Chris Hall: Right.

Lead 5: – published in November 2021 and then updated in February 2022.

Dr Chris Hall: Okay.

Lead 5: You say it contains an error?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Let’s go back to the error. To be clear, Dr Hall, on the first day of this module in opening, I presented a figure of a conversion rate of 17, based on this document being correct.

Dr Chris Hall: This document is incorrect.

Lead 5: It’s incorrect?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: What should that say instead of 430 offers?

Dr Chris Hall: Around 2,200, and I think this is something we’ve put in the corporate witness statement to you, so this will be our second corporate witness statement, which was submitted by Clare Gibbs, and I think I’ve got the paragraph number here, it’s 3.93, and this says that around 2,200 individual case records exist in Mendix and that means 2,200 offers.

Lead 5: Do you want to give that citation for the transcript?

Dr Chris Hall: Certainly. I don’t know – have I got the INQ number here? No, I don’t, I’m afraid, have the INQ number. Perhaps one of your colleagues can assist me.

Oh, sorry, it’s on the bottom of the page. So the INQ number is INQ000528389 and it’s on pages 56 and 57.

Lead 5: Paragraph numbers?

Dr Chris Hall: 3.93, it’s all in one paragraph.

Lead 5: All right, look, thank you for that correction.

Dr Chris Hall: Okay, I’ll just add one more thing if I can?

Lead 5: Please.

Dr Chris Hall: So we’re talking about 10:1 measured by suppliers. If you look at it measured by offers, it’s much nearer 3, 4, 5:1. I don’t know if that’s material or not but certainly the proportion of offers accepted that came from the High Priority Lane, as opposed to the non-High Priority Lane, is different again.

Lead 5: In either event, there is a significant advantage in terms of conversion rate within the HPL compared to outside of it?

Dr Chris Hall: But I remind you of what’s in the not HPL, in the not HPL is, as Max suggested, people offering to knit face masks for us, people offering to make scrubs and, although some of the offers in the HPL were less credible than others, there’s nobody offering to knit face masks.

Lead 5: Thank you for that reminder. What’s the answer to my question: in either event, there’s a significant advantage, isn’t there?

Dr Chris Hall: There’s an advantage but the advantage accrues from the nature of the offers in the queue.

Lead 5: Final INQ number and question for you, please, Dr Hall. INQ000565970, and page 34. This is an analysis of how this translates in terms of the amount that was spent on PPE in and out of the High Priority Lane?

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Lead 5: Does that concur approximately with what you had understood?

Dr Chris Hall: Well, these are probably better figures than the figures I had, because I assume these are Department of Health and Social Care figures and, remember, the Department of Health and Social Care has the contract data, which the Cabinet Office doesn’t hold because we only did the front end of the process. We didn’t do the back end of the process.

Lead 5: It shows that roughly – sorry, I beg your pardon.

Dr Chris Hall: And I take it this also excludes certain categories because you’d also need to look at how much came through the China Buy route and how much came through the SCCL route. And I don’t know whether these non-High Priority Lane contracts includes China Buy or not.

Lead 5: What we see here is a rough equivalence, High Priority Lane and non-High Priority Lane –

Dr Chris Hall: Mm-hm.

Lead 5: – and an approximate equivalent in expenditure, as well?

Dr Chris Hall: All I can draw from this is a very significant value of contracts were let through the High Priority Lane.

Lead 5: Yes.

Dr Chris Hall: Yes, that’s correct.

Mr Wald: Dr Hall, that concludes my questions for you, thank you very much.

Dr Chris Hall: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Just couple more questions, Dr Hall. Dr Mitchell, who is sitting that way.

Questions From Dr Mitchell

Dr Mitchell: I’m obliged.

Dr Hall, I appear as instructed by Aamer Anwar & Company on behalf of the Scottish Covid Bereaved. This next question I’m going to ask you isn’t a reflection on your business nous but perhaps a reflection on some evidence you gave earlier.

You said that part of the issue was that you were working with a newly formed team that were not used to buying PPE.

Dr Chris Hall: Yes.

Dr Mitchell: Now, in the last module criticism was made by Dame Kate Bingham that, to put it bluntly, business nous was not abundant in government staff. I think more broadly than people buying PPE, but’s a further criticism noted in Professor Albert Sanchez-Graells in his report.

How can this be changed to ensure that, when the next pandemic comes, there are groups of people who are ready and understand how to buy PPE?

Dr Chris Hall: So there are – there’s a very, very small group of people in the UK that buy PPE for a living, now, because, frankly, it’s not a difficult thing to buy. It’s a commodity. It’s usually bought through wholesalers.

I’m not trying to diminish the skill and application of my former colleagues who came from SCCL, that’s quite a small cohort, and all of those people worked in the PPE Buy Cell. All of them.

What we had to do was multiply that by 20, and of necessity – I mean, I’m a software engineer. You know, of necessity you had to bring in people who did not have experience of buying PPE.

Dr Mitchell: Would there be merit, then, in training people how to buy when markets are unstable?

Dr Chris Hall: I think there would certainly be a merit in doing that and in exercising that, but I think it’s actually insulting of someone to say that we didn’t have business nous. We had – I don’t know, 83 per cent of the team are commercial professionals, most of whom have been a formal accreditation system, like myself, to test that we knew what we were talking about, and we knew how to deal with suppliers and buy things.

Dr Mitchell: In fairness to Dame Kate, her observation, as I said in my statement, was more generally, I think, about government. It wasn’t in relation to PPE.

Moving on, Dr Hall, I wonder if I can ask you, we read in disclosure the prospect of using Amazon to streamline procurement of PPE, and I am wondering, on behalf of the Scottish Covid Bereaved, would this have outsourced a lot of work to businesses who could take the strain or would there have been more specific problems with that, in your opinion?

Dr Chris Hall: Different problems, I think. I mean, outsourcing is – brings both advantages and disadvantages, and I have other colleagues who have written about that at length. And Amazon’s wasn’t, strictly speaking, an outsourcing proposal but we did receive other proposals saying, “Why don’t you give us this problem?” You know, “We’ll take it away for you. We’ll go out, find the suppliers, we’ll source this for you, maybe do the logistics or maybe not.”

I think that would have created other, but different, problems, because then we would have had to manage the outsourcing contract and be a little bit that more remote from this highly critical activity.

And it would have taken time to set that kind of arrangement up and at the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t have time. You know, the house was burning. We had to find a big enough firehose to try to put the fire out.

And consequently I think what the Department of Health did, because it wasn’t my decision –

Dr Mitchell: Yes.

Dr Chris Hall: – what the Department of Health did was the right thing to do.

Dr Mitchell: Yes. So you’re saying that, speed being of the essence, it would be better to keep it in-house than to try to – (overspeaking) –

Dr Chris Hall: I believe, yes.

Dr Mitchell: I’m obliged my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Dr Mitchell, very grateful.

You’ve obviously been following our proceedings and done a lot of work preparing responses and things to the Inquiry. If there’s anything else that occurs to you that you wish to alert me to, please do. I’m entitled to take into account not just oral evidence, and do take into account written material, and I want to make sure that any findings I make are entirely fair. So if there is anything else – is there anything else immediately you wanted to say that you haven’t been asked?

The Witness: I don’t think I’ll take up any more of your time today, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: If there is anything else, please let us know.

The Witness: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed for your help. I know what the feeling is like to be on a glide path to retirement and then Covid comes along, so thank you for coming off that path, and for trying to help get the equipment that we needed. Thank you very much indeed.

The Witness: Thank you.

(The witness withdrew)

Lady Hallett: Very well, I shall return at 3.05.

(2.49 pm)

(A short break)

(3.05 pm)

Lady Hallett: Mr Sharma.

Mr Sharma: My Lady, the next witness is Andrew Wood.

Mr Andrew Wood

MR ANDREW WOOD (sworn).

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Lady Hallett: Mr Wood , I hope you were warned that we might not get to you until the very end of the day.

Mr Andrew Wood: No, that’s fine, thank you.

Lady Hallett: I’m sorry if we’ve kept you waiting.

Mr Andrew Wood: That’s okay.

Mr Sharma: Mr Wood, would you please confirm your name to the Inquiry.

Mr Andrew Wood: My full name is Andrew David Wood.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Wood, you have provided the Inquiry with a witness statement. I wonder if you would be kind enough to confirm that that statement is true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Wood, I start, if I may, with your background. You’ve worked in commercial procurement since 1993; is that correct?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yes, that’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: On 24 February 2020, you joined the Complex Transactions Team?

Mr Andrew Wood: I did yeah, 20 days before we were deployed onto PPE.

Counsel Inquiry: You were the Deputy Director, a commercial specialist, part of the Government Commercial Function in the Cabinet Office; is that right?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yes, that’s right.

Counsel Inquiry: The Inquiry has heard today and yesterday about the experiences of those within the PPE Cell engaged in procurement of PPE. In your witness statement you describe it as one of the most frenetic and stressful period of the careers of those you were working with. Would you be able to expand a little bit upon that?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah, of course. As you’ve heard already in some of the witness evidence, commercial work is normally quite painstaking. It takes time to run through a commercial process, and the outcome of it isn’t linked to saving lives. Obviously, in this environment, by the time that we were called in to help DHSC on this assignment, we were already in a bad place as a country, which we quickly learned.

So there was immense pressure. I think all the team felt that it was immense privilege to do the work because we see it was important to the country and to frontline workers. So yeah, it was a very strange, unusual, environment that we had to get really focused on really quickly.

Counsel Inquiry: If I can take you on forward a little bit in the chronology to a moment on 21 March 2020 when you describe in your witness statement arriving at Skipton House and you were given a briefing. Could you please recount the content of that briefing?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah, I immediately met Dr Emily Lawson, who made me a cup of tea, which was very nice, and then she proceed to tell me the situation that we were in, in terms of SCCL had already had the conversations around whether they could cope with the crisis, the fact that we would be using DHSC’s procurement function but we needed to set up a completely new cell from scratch.

She also explained that, at that time, we didn’t know how much PPE we wanted or needed, so the instruction was we needed to buy as much as we possibly can. I was also introduced to the team that were already on the phone with Beijing embassy, who had already started a week or so before, I believe.

I met Lord James Bethell and, you know, he just asked if there was any help that you needed to let him know and he would make things happen. I met the former CEO of the NHS, I believe, Simon Stephenson (sic), and yeah, I think my impression was – you know, I could see it in their eyes and their body language, it was very professional but they were very worried and there was an immediate urgency.

And the very next thing I did to add to that briefing, if you like, was to request Emily’s office to call Jin Sahota, the CEO of SCCL, who happened to live in London, which was where we were having our meetings and he immediately came into Skipton House and we got in front of a flip chart and he sketched out for me exactly how SCCL – I say “exactly”, but broadly how SCCL is organised and the fact that they needed to focus on everything else apart from PPE, because the healthcare system needed them to do so and it was clogging it up, and that we would need to set up a completely new supply chain.

Importantly that their existing suppliers were, you know, very, very low on stock. They’d already been – yeah, they’d already been – I’m trying to think of the word. They were empty of stock as well.

Counsel Inquiry: So your instruction was you had to buy as much PPE as you possibly could; is that fair?

Mr Andrew Wood: At that time that was the initial instruction, yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: If I were to describe you as very much at the coalface of the PPE buying effort, would that be a fair description of your work?

Mr Andrew Wood: There were many coalfaces. My coalface was – and I’ve described it in my statement, which you’ve seen, obviously – my role was to oversee the setting up of the PPE Buy Cell in a very short period of time to quickly learn and adapt to the circumstances we were in – I mean, I had those few initial facts from that briefing but we found out new things every day – and also to be the link between the buying part of the Parallel Supply Chain with the other elements.

So Emily was my client and she was the lead, along with Jonathan and later Lord Deighton, but I was that kind of interface, which I occasionally shared with my colleagues when – if I was on a day off, which was quite rare for all of us, so yeah. That was one coalface that I was on.

But, you know, my caseworkers in the different areas, as I’m sure we’ll go into, were very much at the coalface with the suppliers.

Counsel Inquiry: You described in your witness statement the organisation and the reorganisation of the PPE Cell during the course of the pandemic –

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – and that the cell was trying to constantly learn and adapt about the things that it was experiencing.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah. Would you like me to talk about that for a bit?

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, please.

Mr Andrew Wood: So when we first turned up there were already a few hundred offers that had come in via various emails that I know you’ve already heard about, and SCCL also passed a big spreadsheet over to us. We literally started with Post-it notes, you know, within minutes of designing a process of how we were going to meet immediate needs. And I have seen the expert report, which talks about having different types of approaches to this, and different structures, et cetera.

And I think, for me, this wasn’t an either/or, we would have to do both. There was an immediate need we had to meet, there were offers sitting there, some of them, as Chris had said earlier, had been sitting there for a couple of weeks. We needed to get a team on the phones, on the emails immediately.

Yeah, it was tough. It was tough and, obviously, then we had to find our interfaces across the rest of the programme, where were we going to dock into, the move part of the team, in terms of logistics, et cetera? The technical due diligence, we didn’t have that expertise.

So there were a number of reasons why we had to do that but, at the same time, we were thinking about going to a – and I think you’ve heard some of this terminology and apologies for the terminology – into a product-based category structure. And I think there’s correspondence that kind of backs up that I think around 9 April we were already building that into our strategy.

Counsel Inquiry: So just pause there for a moment.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah, sure.

Counsel Inquiry: So 21 March is the day you received the briefing?

Mr Andrew Wood: I had an email, I think, on the 20th and I had a brief discussion with a gentleman in DHSC, but actually the 21st was the day that myself and two or three other colleagues actually turned up at Skipton House and met Emily and the rest of the kind of management team and –

Counsel Inquiry: And you describe considering going to a category approach as early as 9 April?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah. So, amongst ourselves, there was a member of the CTT who was part of that initial team, and she was responsible for the organisation, for going out across government, across the GC – the Government Commercial Function to find resources, and also to pull in people to support us on building systems, which I’m sure we’ll come back to.

Her and I were discussing that already, and then also another colleague from CTT came in, and his role was to pull together the strategy. So while I was kind of overseeing it, Jo was focusing on organisation, structure, IT, plus, I’m sure, other things, and Rob Nixon was called in to specifically work on strategy in parallel to us.

So it wasn’t an either/or, it wasn’t “This is going to be the best process”, we knew that. It was “We’ve got to do something now because we’re running out of PPE.” We’re kind of, I think –

Counsel Inquiry: Forgive me if I interrupt.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: You were at the same time, in your team, you were frantically trying to call – man the lines for PPE?

Mr Andrew Wood: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: And at the same time as doing that, you are designing and setting up a system for that to be undertaken on an enormous scale?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah, absolutely. I think, from 21 March to 9 April, that’s just a few days. That’s maybe, what, two and a bit weeks. So our initial initial focus was we’ve got to get this up and out of the ground really quickly, but we know that this isn’t the way this should be done. And there was reasons why we could not do that straight away. We had to deal with what was in front of us and start to place orders, basically, for PPE. But at the same time we started designing a system that we were ready with agreement with DHSC, to implement from the end of June onwards.

Counsel Inquiry: You describe in your witness statement, and you have also this afternoon, the pace at which events were progressing. You describe the pressure which you and your team were under.

Mr Andrew Wood: Mm.

Counsel Inquiry: And you also set out, just as an indication of the volume of work which you were involved in, a figure about the number of emails you received in just two months.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone in this, but just me personally, I think I received six and a half thousand emails in two months. And also in my statement I’ve mentioned that I had to get couple of people, colleagues from Gareth’s office, to help man my inbox, because I couldn’t cope with that, obviously. Yeah, so it was – frenetic is the right word. It was a privilege but it was also very high pressure. And yeah, we had to build the aeroplane as we were flying it.

Counsel Inquiry: Although you have experience in commercial procurement, did you have, prior to the pandemic, any experience in the procurement of PPE or other medical equipment at all?

Mr Andrew Wood: Not specifically, no. I was thinking back across my career of – the closest I’ve come is, kind of, plastics, food products, when I was working at Tesco for nine to ten years. But the preciseness of PPE, I mean I’ve heard a lot of people describe it as a commodity and we kind of call it a commodity, but I think that does a slight disrespect to the PPE sector in the industry. It’s a very, very precise industry in terms of certification, you know, the investment required to build PPE, and to manufacture PPE is a heavy investment. Some products are simpler than others but some of them are very high investment. So, yeah, it’s a very exacting product.

And, you know, we wanted to deliver equivalents from new suppliers to the front line. That was our job. So that was a lot of pressure in itself, to get that right, because, you know, that’s somebody’s – that’s somebody’s relative working on the front line, whether they’re in a hospital or whether they’re in a social care setting. That was a big responsibility for us.

Counsel Inquiry: You describe, if I may say so, in vivid detail, an example of sitting up late at night reading technical guidance about PPE.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Could you please take the Inquiry through that and how that came about and why you were doing that.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yes, of course. So we’d received the specifications from SCCL, which we gratefully received, and they came through quickly. And these were the specifications that the NHS was using. So I decided, in my own time, sort of during the night, to go online and to find specific documentation around some of these products.

So I looked at the FFP3 mask, which was a very important piece of kit for all of us during the pandemic, and I read the HSE report, which was, you know, quite a few pages. It talked about the need to certify manufacturers, the need to have sampling and testing and retesting and visiting factories.

So it just gave me an idea of kind of what I thought I was starting to understand, which was how precise some of this kit is. You know: aprons, slightly different; gowns, very precise, different types.

So, yeah, I was – I was trying to give myself that insight at midnight at home while I was trying to sort – you know, manage the team.

Counsel Inquiry: And you land, in the evidence you’ve just given, one of the crucial differences between procuring items such as PPE in an emergency and procuring it when you’re not in an emergency –

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – and that’s the ability to see exactly what it is that you’re buying?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah. I mean, the great thing about the job that we do is we get to become, kind of, experts in what we buy, and so we learn lots of different subjects. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to do that here. We didn’t have time to become experts. We didn’t have time to get to know the market, to speak to customers and end users. We didn’t get time to visit factories. In fact – we’ll come on to that later, I think, but we couldn’t. We couldn’t move anywhere.

So, you know, that was a big problem, particularly on such a crucially – a crucial product that was keeping our people safe.

Counsel Inquiry: If I may turn to, please, some of the general problems which you have laid out in your witness statement about the procurement effort.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And of course, you set out in some detail the areas in which you consider that the UK succeeded and your team succeeded, but if I may turn to the problems with you.

Mr Andrew Wood: Sure.

Counsel Inquiry: What were the principal, I think you describe them as disablers –

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – within the system that had been established and within the expertise that was available to you and with the technology that you were confronted with?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah, so there’s a list in my statement which I’ll just pick out a few. So one I’ve just recently mentioned about travel bans. You know, we wanted to be on the ground wherever this stuff was being produced, wherever it was being manufactured, we wanted to look at the stock, build relationships with the suppliers.

Luckily, we’ve got a fantastic FCDO, as it’s now called, and DIT teams, who were out there doing some of that for us but with different eyes. So we couldn’t travel around.

There were many products that had export bans on them. I think around 6 April we received a letter from 3M, who is one of the big manufacturers and an existing supplier of masks, that President Trump in his first term had basically had banned 3M from selling any stock to anybody else, and it couldn’t move around, it just had to go to the US.

Counsel Inquiry: So you were confronted, if I may say so, and put it in these terms, with the fact that it was difficult, if not impossible, to visit the locations in which PPE was being manufactured and then, around the world, there were export controls being imposed on PPE which was being received into the United Kingdom?

Mr Andrew Wood: Exactly, yes, and those export bans also had an impact on our Make Team, who were trying to get certain materials that were made in certain countries to British manufacturers to produce, for instance, gowns. So they had a very broad effect on the effort.

Counsel Inquiry: If I may turn, please, to a very different subject, which is the call to arms.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah. A number of witnesses have described the problems which the call to arms created and, in your evidence, you’ve described it in these terms, it’s at paragraph 12.7 on your statement, we don’t need to bring it up, that:

“The call to arms was not a commercial decision. It gave us a huge problem of trying to assess an avalanche of offers.”

It’s this point I want to deal with you here today with. It’s:

“Government does not have due diligence in a box.”

What does that mean? What did you mean by “Government does not have due diligence in a box”?

Mr Andrew Wood: Specifically on that point, I think some of your witnesses have described the normal processes in normal times of doing due diligence on suppliers and their products and their financial credibility, you know, as a detailed piece of work.

We, through our initial 100 days, as such, matured faster and faster with outside help, the size of, and the quantity that we could undertake due diligence on these thousands of offers. And the particular due diligence in a box, you know, it probably took a couple of weeks to set that up, and we didn’t have that. We had to – you know, the first offers were, I’m sure, caseworkers going onto, “Have they got a website? Are they on Companies House? Oh, they’re not in the UK. Okay, so they’re not in Companies House”. So they would have to do that kind of very desktop due diligence.

It wasn’t until two weeks later of us working with the Cabinet Office team that we actually started to build that capability to cope with the number of offers, which obviously was very important in such a critical product.

Counsel Inquiry: So did that mean that at the beginning of the response to the pandemic – correct me if I’m wrong, but does it mean that due diligence at the beginning of the response was likely to be worse than the due diligence as it progressed, or was it one of those processes that was developing? Explain to me, please.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah, it wasn’t mature. It wasn’t mature. There are publicly accessible documentation, sources of data for doing due diligence on companies. There’s quite a lot available. We were in a position where we had a few hundred, few thousand offers at that time. Our processes for doing due diligence weren’t drafted, you know, we’d just literally walked through the door and grateful for, as people started to arrive, particularly the MoD team or the DfE team, they started to develop processes while we were working with the market sourcing and suppliers team in the Cabinet Office to actually ramp up external support to help us do that, in a much more deep and structured way.

Counsel Inquiry: The way that you’re describing it, is a sort of iterative process –

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – in which, whereas at the beginning you didn’t have access to due diligence, experts may come in from the Ministry of Defence and they could assist and then from the Department for Education and so expertise, again, correct me if I’m wrong, was being brought in from other government departments?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yes, it was. As we were building the team, we were bringing in accredited commercial people who had their own systems at their own home departments, and they were utilising those in the first instance, so that we had something. But I think, as Chris said, the term “due diligence” we need to just define a bit. It means so many things. The eight-step process, I would – you could say – and I would call each one of those steps – is due diligence. But then there are deeper dives on financials, there’s a very deep dive on the product, and then ultimately at the back end, there’s the contractual diligence as well.

Counsel Inquiry: Just to go back to the expression you use in your statement “due diligence in a box”, what kind of due diligence are you referring to there?

Mr Andrew Wood: There I’m specifically, I think, talking about the financial due diligence of potential suppliers.

Counsel Inquiry: That’s critical, isn’t it because –

Mr Andrew Wood: Absolutely.

Counsel Inquiry: – if the financial due diligence isn’t there and isn’t right, then the Government and the public are exposed to contracting with parties –

Mr Andrew Wood: They are.

Counsel Inquiry: – who may become insolvent who may not supply the equipment which has been paid for, and so on and so forth; is that right?

Mr Andrew Wood: Absolutely. We talked about playbooks, I think, in some of the previous sessions. In the sourcing playbook there is a policy and a tool to undertake a very thorough financial viability and resilience study.

We weren’t in a position to do that. That’s one instance, in terms of the numbers of offers and capability. But we did what we could. I think the other piece around this is we were presenting offers the Accounting Officer of DHSC, we had to try to identify, for them, as many risks as we possibly could, so that they could make an informed decision about whether to go ahead with a contract and a purchase order.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Wood, could I turn, please, to the subject of the High Priority Lane –

Mr Andrew Wood: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – and it’s establishment. In your witness statement to the Inquiry, you said this:

“What is now known as the High Priority Lane came about as an evolution of offers being received via email before the 21 March 2020 from various parts of the government, usually at senior civil servant up to ministerial level.”

So is it your evidence that there wasn’t a conscious choice to create the High Priority Lane?

Mr Andrew Wood: I would say no, it was a reaction to a potential source of offers and market, if you like, that had opened up to us. Similarly, you know, there was 150 plus staff in the Beijing embassy from FCDO and DIT, who had opened up a market through their contacts. The Make Team obviously opened up a market of potential British manufacturers. The general opportunities lane was opening up potential markets.

This was another example of that, and we were reacting to it. So I’ll just hold there for a second, if you’ve got further questions.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, could I please bring up on the screen INQ000534911, and if we could zoom in, please, to “Another action” in the middle of the page, just to place this in some context – forgive me, perhaps we can zoom out so we can have a look at the origin of this. This is a readout of a meeting with you, Mr Wood, and Lord Agnew?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: If we could zoom in, please, to the paragraph “Another action”, thank you:

“Another action I took was to advise Lord Agnew if we could fast track ministerial/seniors emails regarding offers of help that they were sending through. We have developed a public pro forma – very simple, that automatically populates our database.”

You then go on to set out that “hot leads” should be sent Lord Agnew and you and others.

What was happening in that meeting between you and Lord Agnew and how does that relate to the High Priority Lane?

Mr Andrew Wood: Sure, absolutely. So this was on 25 March, so this was my day 4. A meeting had been set up with myself from Lord Agnew’s office. The meeting, I think, was for him to meet me. He’d never met – we’d never met and to probably check me out and prod me a little bit, “Is this guy up to it?” Too early to tell at that point.

One of the points he raised – well, I’ll just go back. So after that meeting, I received a readout from his office straightaway, and I was just about to send kind of my response back to him, and I had sent this to some of my team to say, “Look this is what I’m thinking of sending back, what do you think?”

Then in relation to the HPL, as it’s now being termed, it’s actually high priority appraisals, not lane, sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: Forgive me, was that what it was called at the time?

Mr Andrew Wood: No, no. From 1 April, roughly.

So what Lord Agnew was asking me was, you know, “Have you got enough people? How quickly can you respond to offers?”

He said, you know, “I’ve got business contacts, some of my peers have got business contacts. They can help you. Is there a way that we can look at those offers more quickly” – not more quickly than others, but “Can we look at those offers quickly and get back with an update?”

Even if it’s a no, it’s just – “We’re kind of looking in at this box, we’re seeing what’s happening and we need some feedback of where we are.”

So that was what that conversation was about. But I’m happy to provide more context if you need it.

Counsel Inquiry: What, in your view, was Lord Agnew saying and not saying when you had that conversation with him?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah. It was about the response. He was saying, in my view – and I’ve never spoken to him about this since, but in my view and my interpretation of it – that this was about “We need to respond to the offers quicker. We can’t have a backlog building up. So how do we do that and how can I help you [ie, Lord Agnew] to do that?”

What he wasn’t saying, in my view, is “Right, I know loads of people that can provide PPE and I’m going to send the contacts to you and I’d like you to set up contracts with them really quickly.”

That absolutely wasn’t what he was saying. This was about the response to those offers, because he felt that some of them were credible, the types of companies, the size of the companies, the potential international reach. He was trying to help. But he wanted to know that from our side we had a team there or we could build a team, bearing in mind this was 25 March, that could actually respond to them quickly. That was my understanding.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Could we take that down.

Turning to another subject, Mr Wood. You’ve referred to the different lanes in which PPE was being produced.

Mr Andrew Wood: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: There was the New Buy team, the UK Make team?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: And the China Buy team, and then of course there was SCCL, which had its own operation.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Could we have up on the screen, please, INQ000534713.

I just want to explore with you some comments which are in an email about the relationship between New Buy and China Buy and what the issues were between whether they were complementing each other or competing with each other.

So if we could zoom in, please, to paragraph 2. Forgive me, let me just place this in context.

This email chain is from Mr Cairnduff. He sets out the content of the email beneath to you.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And then at the top of the email chain, you reply that you’re “aligned”. So I can take it from that that you’re agreeing with what Mr Cairnduff says in the email below?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yes. At 11.04 pm, I think, on – no, 5.11 pm. So, yeah, I can provide more information.

Counsel Inquiry: Can we please zoom into paragraph 2. It says:

“The VIP Cell and the wider sourcing Cells are mostly dealing with intermediaries, many of whom are sourcing from the same factories our China team are already in contract with. There is clear risk of our disrupting our already-contracted supply and outbidding ourselves for supply that we were already due to receive. I think the VIP and wider sourcing Cells need to be much better aligned with the China team, with a clear and quick route to check if offers of PPE are potentially disruptive rather than additive.”

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: You agree with that statement of Mr Cairnduff, and it was a concern of yours, wasn’t it, that the actions of the New Buy team, rather than complementing and sitting alongside the China Buy team, could actually be in competition with them. Could you explain that a little further?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah, absolutely. The number of PPE manufacturers in the world is not a huge number and, as we’ve already heard from previous witnesses, our existing supply chain was a mixture but more intermediaries that the NHS was contracting with, with some manufacturers in there but not many.

As we looked across all of the lanes, the different buying streams that we had, there wasn’t – I don’t think there was, like, a huge PPE supply chain that we never knew about. Our job was to find new suppliers. We already had our existing suppliers. The difference with the China team was they were in-country, where the manufacturing was taken place. So I certainly, and we all saw this as a very important route for us, for both relationship perspective but also getting close to – whether it’s a state-owned enterprise, an actual manufacturer, or an intermediary that was very close to the manufacturing.

For this reason – this was around 20 April, so we’d just received our demand figures from the McKinsey model on, I think, the 16th or 18th –

Counsel Inquiry: Forgive me, the McKinsey model is what was being used –

Mr Andrew Wood: Yes, sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: – to predict the demand for PPE that would be coming from the NHS –

Mr Andrew Wood: And social care.

Counsel Inquiry: – and Social Care Sector?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And that’s what you’re talking about when you reference to the McKinsey model?

Mr Andrew Wood: Exactly that, yes, yeah. It was a shift from “buy as much as you can” to, product by product, “here is a 30-day and 90-day forecast of our demand”. Which was huge as you can imagine.

At this point, the China team – I was having discussions with the China team around, “Okay, great, you’ve done a few deals in the first few weeks, some of them before we even got here. Can we now start building strategic relationships with the suppliers and can we start to share this demand?”

Because this demand demands attention. It’s big. And we’re competing against, you know, many other countries on the planet who were also in China.

The other thing I was worried about was we were competing against ourselves, whether it was us competing against the central Buy Cell, competing inadvertently with an NHS trust that was talking to a supplier, a devolved administration talking to the same supplier, and, worst of all, if we were competing between ourselves, as this comment suggests.

So, you know, what did we do? We did two things. We circulated around on a regular basis, “This is the suppliers we are dealing with on each lane, please check for …” so we were building up the different knowledge across the lanes and sharing across the lanes. But ultimately at the end of April we built the buying plan, which I can explain further, if you like.

Counsel Inquiry: We won’t deal with the buying plan for now, but is it right that, up until the moment there was a buying plan, that the risk was there that what was going on as everyone was scrambling to procure PPE was, as you describe, that even between competition within the UK that we were pushing our own prices up because we were competing with the China Buy lane, the New Suppliers lane and then, of course, the High Priority Lane?

Mr Andrew Wood: The risk was always there. The main reason why the risk was there is that as a nation we did not find a high level of information regarding the provenance of our PPE. So there could have been instances where we were competing with each other but we would never know and still would never know that we were competing because we just dealing with an intermediary.

Or there were – the things that we could control were: were we actually talking to the same suppliers on this team and that team? Right, we need to start sharing our information, which is what we’re talking about here.

Counsel Inquiry: My final set of questions, if I may, Mr Wood. There is a section in your witness statement in which you describe – in fact I wonder, perhaps, if we could bring it up on the screen. It’s INQ000540488, and it’s page 34, paragraph 7.8.

Forgive me, I think it’s a little bit lower down.

That’s it. Thank you.

My mistake, Mr Wood. It’s 7.7.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: You’ve said:

“Following my reviews of the numerous reports regarding PPE procurement, for me, the commercial and legal point is that it is not possible to apply all peacetime fair and equal treatment principles during an emergency procurement situation.”

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah, I can talk about that.

Counsel Inquiry: Would you please explain what you mean by that –

Mr Andrew Wood: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – and, in particular, is it that you don’t think it was possible to comply with those principles in the emergency as it was at the time, or that you think that in all circumstances, in all emergencies, that it’s simply unrealistic to comply with the principles you describe of fair and equal treatment?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah, absolutely. So in the particular instance that I was involved with, and still looking back, looking at the purest view, and, sorry, the legal view, to ensure fairness, equal treatment and transparency, that’s clear but then applying it in this situation with a number of direct awards, a number of different ways that we were approaching the same market sometimes, or a different close-to market, adjacent market, with the same requirement from UK as a whole.

From any process that I’ve ever run in normal times, in peacetime, you know, that would be a legal challenge, straight away, because you just can’t do that in peacetime. You can’t talk to the market at different times and give them different information. You just can’t do that you’ve got to be completely equal. So I accept that, you know, the Ayanda judgment, et cetera, those judgments had happened around the JRs, and looking at that unequal treatment kind of ruling, I accept that, I understand it. What I’ve tried to get my head around, is, if I was in this situation again, what would I do? And I can come on to that later.

But this is kind of what I was talking about here, is I think as Chris Hall said, there isn’t a lot of case law. There isn’t a lot of detail, which the expert – the expert witness also said there isn’t a lot of detail about how to do this when you’re enacting in emergency procurement, and I wish there was.

Counsel Inquiry: Let me please perhaps ask my final question on this topic, and the final question I will ask you, which is that, although it wasn’t, at least in your mind, possible to do it at the time –

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: – what is it that you think would enable a system to be fair, equitable and transparent in the progress and award of contracts in a subsequent emergency?

Mr Andrew Wood: Difficult to answer on the spot but I’ll try. But before I do that, can I just add one more thing to the previous answer –

Counsel Inquiry: Of course.

Mr Andrew Wood: – in terms of what we could do and attempted to do? And you’ve heard this many times and it’s in my witness statement. We were fishing with many hooks outside the boat because we had a huge demand, we had very shallow supplier knowledge, and we didn’t have a lot of time, so we had to fish with different hooks, we had to react to where the market could be found and go and find it and process it quickly.

What we could do is we could introduce some level of separation of duties and standardisation in the process for how those offers were taken through to a potential contract, which we did do. So – and the entry point, I would say, on all of the lanes was unequal. I know there’s an extra element to the HPL, as it’s now called, because of the political linkage, and et cetera, et cetera, but all of the lines, I would say are equally unequal, even within themselves. It’s impossible for it not to be.

So there were things that we did do to the best of our ability to try to level that playing field but our challenge was the front end. So moving to your question of how could we do this in the future, there were some ideas that I thought the expert witness had which were definitely worth looking into. So publishing, having ready to publish very quickly the requirement across a number of channels to industry of what the requirement was, what our minimum quantities were, being more upfront about that, the reason we couldn’t be upfront about that is because we didn’t know at the time, we didn’t have that information, unfortunately. We did manage to do some of that later on but we just didn’t have the information.

So, you know, step one is to be prepared better, in a number of ways, for an incident like this but second is I think there are some learnings in terms of how we communicate into the market as a whole, as opposed to on lots and lots of one-to-one bases.

Mr Sharma: Mr Wood, thank you very much, those are all the questions I have.

Lady Hallett: Mr Weatherby, just there.

Questions From Mr Weatherby KC

Mr Weatherby: Thank you very much, my Lady.

Mr Wood, I’m just going to ask you a very few questions on behalf of the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice UK group and none of them are, in any way, meant to be critical of you and they are just about systems.

I just want to pick up where Mr Sharma left off, really. You’ve been very clear this afternoon but you were very clear in your witness statement also about what happened at the start and I’ll just give you some references but I won’t take you to the passages. But at 2.7 in your witness statement you said:

“We had to build a buying function completely from scratch. This was a challenging environment to work in.”

You also said, a bit later in your statement, at 3.47(h) and I quote:

“Due to its design SCCL is not set up for or equipped to deal with a crisis of this magnitude and so could not be scaled up to meet the demand, and their understanding of the market in terms of detailed product provenance was limited at the time.”

So question: would you agree that this was a fundamental failure in the UK’s PPE procurement abilities at the start of the pandemic?

Mr Andrew Wood: It certainly didn’t help.

Mr Weatherby KC: Yes.

Mr Andrew Wood: I’m sorry I’m not being more emphatic because I don’t have the full information around this topic, but what I experienced at the time was there was – you know, SCCL was set up to run a just-in-time process –

Mr Weatherby KC: Yes.

Mr Andrew Wood: – and a highly efficient one. The level of knowledge was good up to a level but, in terms of deep understanding of the market, origins of different raw materials and products, et cetera, I think was lacking.

Mr Weatherby KC: Yes.

Mr Andrew Wood: And we had to build that ourselves, which we did with some – (overspeaking) –

Mr Weatherby KC: So the level of knowledge for a business-as-usual was good?

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah, I think that was very good and very efficient.

Mr Weatherby KC: Okay. And the – what I’ve described as a fundamental failure, would you agree that, whether it was a fundamental failure or it didn’t help, this was a result of there being no central emergency procurement plan?

Mr Andrew Wood: I think it’s one of my recommendations which you’ve seen in my statement.

Mr Weatherby KC: Yes.

Mr Andrew Wood: And I was interviewed by the Boardman Review team and those have gone into the Boardman Report as well.

Mr Weatherby KC: Yes.

Mr Andrew Wood: I definitely think we need to have a number of things that are ready to go. We’ve talked about due diligence in a box, we’ve talked about people having crisis training. We’d never had any crisis training. There may have – I’m sure there were some things that we could have learnt if we were ready.

Mr Weatherby KC: I am not trying to cut you short but time is short, and I was going to come to this in overview. You set those out in your statement at 12.15, and that’s what I think you described as the need for a contingency plan.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Mr Weatherby KC: But the lack of an emergency procurement plan, did that come about partly because business-as-usual procurement was effectively devolved to the NHS and to providers, so they would seek their own PPE and business-as-usual through either SCCL or wholesalers? Those devolved rather than centralised. So it was therefore a lack of central planning? That’s really what I’m asking you.

Mr Andrew Wood: I mean, I’m not an expert on that. What I’ve heard and seen so far through the Inquiry is that DHSC did have some preparedness, but it wasn’t enough.

Mr Weatherby KC: Yes, but no plan.

Mr Andrew Wood: And the market then went into a very hot market and a very difficult market.

Mr Weatherby KC: Sure.

Mr Andrew Wood: So I’m not sure how much you could plan but I think there are things we could do.

In terms of being devolved, I think – I don’t think – I’m not sure being devolved is the problem from a commercial perspective.

Mr Weatherby KC: Yes.

Mr Andrew Wood: I think it’s the flow of information data between those parties that create –

Mr Weatherby KC: Sure, I’m not suggesting, with respect, that it being devolved to the NHS or to SCCL is a bad idea in principle, or business-as-usual.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Mr Weatherby KC: What I’m putting to you is that may be a reason why there wasn’t central planning for an emergency.

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah, that’s possible. I wouldn’t be opposed to that.

Mr Weatherby KC: Just finally on this point, just to complete it, you described the Buy Cell being “thrown together”?

Mr Andrew Wood: Mm-hm.

Mr Weatherby KC: And that really is as a result of no planning, nothing that you could rely on. So you were put in the invidious position of having to put something together from scratch from the outset –

Mr Andrew Wood: Yeah.

Mr Weatherby KC: – in double quick time.

Mr Andrew Wood: I can’t say whether it was because of a lack of planning, because I don’t work for DHSC and I’m not responsible for those plans, but yeah, we had to throw an organisation together very, very quickly.

Mr Weatherby KC: Do you think a solution would be to have a specialist PPE procurement team within DHSC, or perhaps PHE, UKHSA, or an arm’s-length body, including SCCL, with the necessary experience, technical knowledge and market awareness that could be scaled up to respond to an emergency situation?

Mr Andrew Wood: I think that that sounds like it’s in the right direction. I’m not – honestly, I’m not familiar with what those organisations have already done since five years ago –

Mr Weatherby KC: Sure.

Mr Andrew Wood: – or three years ago. But certainly that would be the direction of travel that sounds sensible.

Mr Weatherby KC: Yeah.

Different topic, and very quickly, you’ve stated in your – at paragraph 3.13, that on 23 March 2020 you asked DHSC to set up a senior governance board to approve the process strategy and operating model and consider setting price limits, but “no such board was set up at this time”.

Can you just help us with what you envisaged? How would such a board have improved the procurement process?

Mr Andrew Wood: I think it would have helped the accounting officer of DHSC knowing that there had been further checks at a senior level, completely away from the team that was doing the doing, on the way to making a recommendation. We, as you can see, contributed to kind of living within that situation by setting up our Clearance Board, plus we had lots of checks and balances along this process, which I agree were siloed, but I’ve tried to explain the reasons why.

Mr Weatherby: Yes, thank you very much.

Lady Hallett: Thank you Mr Weatherby.

Mr Dayle.

Mr Dayle is over there.

Questions From Mr Dayle

Mr Dayle: Thank you, my Lady.

Mr Wood, I ask questions on behalf of the Federation of Ethnic Minority Healthcare Organisations or FEMHO.

I note at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic the urgency to secure PPE was paramount. As you’ve noted in your statement the immediate mandate was to acquire significant quantities of PPE to meet the escalating demands as the crisis unfolded, and this rapid procurement, driven by the need to save lives, no doubt posed unique challenges, particularly in balancing the imperative to act speedily with statutory obligations such as the Public Sector Equality Duty.

So given your pivotal role in emergency procurement processes, FEMHO would like your insight on the following questions. At paragraph 12.3 of your statement you say, and I quote:

“When I turned up at Skipton House on Saturday 21 March 2020, I was briefed quite literally to buy as much PPE as we possibly could, because people were dying. Buying PPE is exactly what my quickly assembled, fantastically dedicated and hardworking team did with the all of the commercial skills and experience we could muster. We therefore did buy PPE as instructed, and lots of it. Too much it turns out, for reasons set out in relation to the demand that was set for us at paragraph 3.6 above.

“We used our skills and drive to get that done with no experience of managing in such a crisis.”

So my question is: is it fair to say that in PPE procurement, securing products that were considered the prototype, in huge volumes was the predominant objective, even at the exclusion of consequential factors of equality and diversity; what do you say?

Mr Andrew Wood: Thank you for your question. The specifications that were given to us by DHSC were the specifications we delivered, tried to deliver, and bought to. We were not part of any decision making process of what those specifications were, what special characteristics or considerations were in those specifications. They were the specifications, I understood at the time, that the NHS and SCCL were using in their contracts to buy PPE for the NHS.

So I can only assume that they included some of the factors that you’re talking about. I hope I’ve answered your question.

Mr Dayle: Very well. We’ll press on. At paragraph 7.7 of your statement, you say:

“Following my reviews of the numerous reports regarding PPE procurement for me, the commercial and legal point is that it is not possible to apply all peacetime fair and equal treatment principles during an emergency procurement situation. For example, it was not possible to run a supplier questionnaire or pre-qualification process or a tender exercise for every offer received at exactly the same time, giving all parties the same response time. The market was moving too fast, even for our fastest peacetime procurement process.”

So question: can you confirm whether, in your procurement work during the pandemic, there was any regard paid to the Public Sector Equality Duty?

Mr Andrew Wood: Sorry, that last bit you just said, if you don’t mind, the Public Sector Equality Duty, could you just expand on that?

Mr Dayle: Yes, that’s the Public Sector Equality Duty under the Equality Act. That is the requirement under law to have regard or consider issues of equality.

Mr Andrew Wood: The only two things I can think of are that, you know, the demand that we were given, buy product, eventually, and over a timescale, was an aggregation of all demand from all parts of the NHS across the UK and social care.

So within that, I get there must be a consideration to the equality side of things. From a specification perspective, I refer to my previous answer, which is this was a specification that the NHS was buying before the pandemic and it was the specification we bought within the pandemic, so there was no change in terms of what we were asking suppliers to supply us with, which I presume over time is compliant with the Act that you’re citing.

Mr Dayle: Did you understand yourself to be working under public emergency conditions?

Mr Andrew Wood: Were we working in an emergency? Absolutely. Were we working on behalf of the public? Absolutely, in terms of we were supplying PPE to frontline workers, to social care workers who were interacting with the public.

Mr Dayle: Was this just your feeling or was there a formal basis for you to think that you were, in fact, working under –

Mr Andrew Wood: Oh, okay, sorry, I thought you might have meant something like that. I don’t remember having any formal discussion with anyone regarding that. I was just doing my job on behalf of the Cabinet Office for DHSC.

Mr Dayle: You described in your evidence, given to Mr Sharma, how you had to helicopter up to the technical aspects of PPE procurement work, and my question is this: what tools were available to you to ensure there were considerations regarding measurements and specifications arising from ethnicity?

Mr Andrew Wood: Again, I refer back to my first answer, I’m afraid. The tool that we that and the piece of data that we needed was the specification, which was given to us by SCCL.

I do remember that later on in that 100-day process, which I saw as a good sign, we were, as we were planning ahead on our demand, we were thinking about all of the different variants of equipment, not necessarily based on ethnicity but based on sizes and construction, et cetera. But apart from buying to the specification, that’s all I can offer you, I’m afraid.

Mr Dayle: Very well. Next topic. As we reflect on the challenges and the learning outcomes from the pandemic response, particularly in PPE procurement, focus shifts to how we can do more in future pandemic preparedness.

In the lessons learnt section of your statement, you list, by way of recommendation, the following: an advisory panel of expert customers to ensure procurement teams fully understand the product requirement and variants prior to purchasing stock; and a panel of regulatory decision makers with delegated authority and limited liability, including technical compliance expertise, specialist manufacturing knowledge, and frontline NHS trust representation.

This, for the record, can be found at paragraphs 12.15(f) and (g).

Would you agree and consider it beneficial for these panels to include ethnic minority healthcare workers.

Mr Andrew Wood: Absolutely agree that the panel should be from a “customer panel”, if you’re referring to that part.

Normally in our commercial work we swim kind of upstream to our customer so that we can really understand what it is they want us to buy and to sort of match them up with the market. The customer panel I’m talking about there should be representative of the customer base, which, you know, is all ethnicities.

Mr Dayle: Very well, and just to complete this –

Lady Hallett: No, I’m afraid you’ve had your time, Mr Dayle. I’m awfully sorry.

Mr Dayle: Very well, I’ll leave it at that.

Thank you.

The Witness: Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Mr Wood, we all know about how hard healthcare workers work. Give me some idea of the kind of hours you and your team were working.

Mr Andrew Wood: A short answer, my Lady, would be between 16 and 18 hours a day. So it was – yeah, it was full on. And, you know, we weren’t alone in that.

Lady Hallett: I appreciate an awful lot of people in lots of different fields, but I think it is important that people do understand. I certainly got that impression from listening to your colleagues.

Thank you very much indeed for all you did during the pandemic and for all the help that you’ve given the Inquiry.

The Witness: Thank you, thank you.

Lady Hallett: Very well, 10.30 Monday.

Mr Wald: Yes.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

(4.07 pm)

(The hearing adjourned until 10.30 am On Monday, 10 March 2025)