19 March 2025

(10.00 am)

Housekeeping

Lady Hallett: Mr Wald.

Just before we begin, by way of reminder, tomorrow I’ll be holding a closed session in the morning to hear evidence from the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health and Social Care witnesses. This means that there will be no attendance from members of the public and there will not be the usual broadcast of Inquiry proceedings or publication of a transcript. Core Participants will be able to attend and be represented at tomorrow’s hearing and some media representatives will also be present.

I have imposed these restrictions at the request of the National Crime Agency so the Inquiry can consider evidence relating to PPE and Medpro fully without any danger of prejudicing future criminal prosecutions.

These restrictions are only temporary. They will be lifted as soon as the prospect of any prosecutions is resolved or prosecutions that are brought are concluded. Once I’ve finished the hearing of evidence in closed session, we shall revert to open session tomorrow afternoon for the last remaining witness for this week.

Mr Wald.

Mr Wald: My Lady, before we commence, a small matter of housekeeping from me, as well.

In the course of yesterday’s evidence Lord Agnew raised a matter of commercial sensitivity in respect of which we seek a restriction order.

Lady Hallett: Very well. Thank you.

Sorry to keep you standing, Lord Bethell. Welcome back.

The Witness: Thank you.

Mr Wald: My Lady, our first witness today is Lord Bethell.

Lord James Bethell

LORD JAMES BETHELL (sworn).

Questions From Lead Counsel to the Inquiry for Module 5

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

Lord James Bethell: James Bethell.

Lead 5: Lord Bethell, thank you for providing to the Inquiry a witness statement. It’s Inquiry reference INQ000528392, which you have signed. Please confirm that it is true to the best of your knowledge and belief.

Lord James Bethell: Yes, it is true.

Lead 5: Thank you, Lord Bethell. I have a limited number of topics that I wish to address with you over the relatively limited time that we have together this morning. Before doing so, can I just touch upon your background and then onto your role during the pandemic, if I may?

You entered government as a whip in the House of Lords in the middle of 2019; is that right?

Lord James Bethell: That’s right.

Lead 5: Your responsibilities included ones within the Home Office and the DHSC?

Lord James Bethell: And also the Treasury.

Lead 5: And the Treasury. On 9 March 2020 you were appointed as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Technology Innovation and Life Sciences. Your portfolio included data and technology, NHS IT, and data to support innovation?

Lord James Bethell: That’s right.

Lead 5: And you, of course, maintained your seat in the House of Lords and continued to be involved in House of Lords business?

Lord James Bethell: That’s right.

Lead 5: Thank you. Then moving on to your role during the pandemic, Lord Bethell, by March 2020 you had an extensive portfolio of responsibilities which you list at paragraph 9 of your statement. And that portfolio included the supply of medications, testing technology, test and trace, research and life sciences, including vaccines, which of course was the reason why you appeared in Module 4 earlier this year, global health, security, international diplomacy and relations, NHS IT, and data and technology; is that right?

Lord James Bethell: That’s right. There were further responsibilities later in the pandemic, including the red listing programme.

Lead 5: And by red listing programme, do you want to just explain what you mean by that?

Lord James Bethell: Yes, the programme for closing the borders and ensuring that people who arrived in the UK were properly tested.

Lead 5: All right. Well, we won’t move on to that in the course of our time together this morning.

Your ministerial responsibilities largely centred around testing; is that right?

Lord James Bethell: I wouldn’t say “largely” centred; it was one big aspect of it.

Lead 5: You describe your role as acting as a liaison between industry and the government?

Lord James Bethell: The role was bigger than that. It included providing ministerial oversight of the testing programme.

Lead 5: Yes, I am taking this from your statement. So if I’ve – if it requires adjustment then, of course, please offer that.

You say you were often brought in to engage with industry and energise their support for the national response and to encourage the private sector to come forward with their best ideas and resources.

Lord James Bethell: Yes, that’s right.

Lead 5: All right. Let’s move on, then, to early stages and the setting up of the so-called GO Team. You were involved in the setting up of an initiative that became known as the GO Team in the early days of the pandemic?

Lord James Bethell: Yes, that’s right.

Lead 5: Now, the GO Team, was that essentially a team based at the GlaxoSmithKline headquarters which sought to find promising suppliers of key medical equipment and supplies?

Lord James Bethell: So there were a number of teams which had different names at different times. It is true that the Glaxo and AstraZeneca companies provided a huge amount of logistical and – logistical support and advice, but they weren’t the only team that were helping us.

Lead 5: No. I wasn’t suggesting that they were. But have I correctly summarised –

Lord James Bethell: Yes, you have.

Lead 5: – the function of the GO Team? And you explain at paragraph 20 of your witness statement that this would draw on their intelligence and market muscle to access the best suppliers to work in parallel and directed by the NHS procurement team with a particular focus on ventilators, PPE, cardiovascular medicines and testing kits?

What do you mean by drawing on intelligence and market muscle?

Lord James Bethell: Yes, so at the very, very early stage when they were their most valuable, we, the NHS procurement system was under huge strain and parts of it, including SCCL, completely fell over. We needed their team of procurement experts who had access to the data of what was available to them in the market to literally provide, as it were, a catalogue of the materials that we might be able to source, and advice on where we might go in order to find other materials.

I know that sounds rudimentary but I can’t overestimate – I can’t exaggerate how important basic intel on where stuff was at that time.

Lead 5: Were leads passed on to the DHSC and Parallel Supply Chain or was this essentially a scoping exercise?

Lord James Bethell: That GO Team was not primarily focused on PPE; it was mainly focused on medicines, and I didn’t have any engagement with it and don’t know exactly what they passed on.

Lead 5: All right. Can I move now, both in time and in topic, forwards to the Government Testing Strategy. That was published on 1 April 2020. We have touched on this with a previous witness so I want to go fairly swiftly, if I may, to the five pillars of the strategy. We can look at them very briefly.

INQ0006325, I think it’s page 2 that tells us – there they are, those five pillars. With which of these pillars were you most involved?

Lord James Bethell: So with NHS, I was involved in encouraging the NHS to step up to the biggest ambition it could find for itself. Pillar 2 became the biggest part of this programme and became NHS Test and Trace. Pillar 3 was very important to begin with but faded once we realised that just because you’d had coronavirus didn’t mean you couldn’t have it again. Pillar 4 was very slow to get going but became extremely impressive, and although it wasn’t financially the biggest part, in terms of its intel it was incredibly important.

And then Pillar 5 initially was slow to get going but became a really big part of what I was doing to try to encourage UK industry to source and manufacture diagnostics.

Lead 5: All right, thank you for that.

That’s the beginning of April, that’s 1 April 2020. Matt Hancock announced that as part of its strategy, the government would deliver 100,000 tests a day by the end of April 2020, didn’t he?

Lord James Bethell: Yes.

Lead 5: Did you think at the time that that was achievable?

Lord James Bethell: I did. I encouraged him to step up to that and I thought it was exactly the kind of big, hairy goal that we needed to in order to galvanise the system.

Lead 5: The testing strategy document itself explains that although the UK had undertaken one of the highest numbers of tests in Europe, we had the worst starting point, didn’t we?

Lord James Bethell: Yes.

Lead 5: So my immediate question is, can you offer any reflections on why that was?

Lord James Bethell: Yes.

Lead 5: And how difficult it made achieving that target?

Lord James Bethell: So we had, in PHE, fabulous scientists who were extremely good at the analysis of viruses, but had no ambition or remit for putting together the kind of population health diagnostics that other countries had. That was a very weak platform to build our response on. And in fact, we were essentially starting from scratch, both in terms of testing and in terms of tracing.

That meant they didn’t have a reach into diagnostic companies in order to source the material, they didn’t have a data spine to build on, and nor did they have any local or regional aspect to their test and trace capability. All three of those were substantial weaknesses when we were going to build a national response, and that was why we had to create an entirely new organisation from the bottom up.

Lead 5: So those are the weaknesses. Can I just come back to the other part of my question, which is whether you are able to assist us in identifying the reasons for those weaknesses. Why was the UK an outlier within Europe? Was there anything systemic from which we can learn anything within this Inquiry?

Lord James Bethell: I think that public health generally has been underestimated in terms of its value to the country, both in terms of supporting the underlying health of our workforce and of our people, in providing resilience at times of crisis and also in terms of reducing pressure on the NHS. There is a fundamental misallocation of resources in our health and care system: 3% of our budget roughly spent on public health, and that is much lower than in other organisations. People in public health have got a low status compared to, for instance, those who run acute hospitals.

We need to pivot to prevention in a massive way and this is a glaring example of that.

Lead 5: All right, thank you for that. You tell us in your evidence, it’s paragraph 35, page 12:

“In March 2020, I produced a memo on how to industrialise UK testing where I set out the urgent steps to address the issues of limited availability and increase our testing capacity.”

So I want to hear from you what those key steps were. Can we start by putting up a document that might assist in this regard.

It’s INQ000497128.

Lord James Bethell: Thank you. What date was that?

Lead 5: This was in March 2020 you tell us in your witness statement.

Lord James Bethell: Yes.

Lead 5: And there are, within this document, bullet points or Roman numerals.

Lord James Bethell: Yes.

Lead 5: Are these the key steps?

Lord James Bethell: Yes. In terms of creating a UK testing industry, yes.

Lead 5: And these were – you devised these steps?

Lord James Bethell: Working with experts. I was led very much by people who had deep experience of both international diagnostics, which is more ambitious and creative than UK diagnostics, and also those in the UK industry who understood where we were starting from.

Lead 5: All right. And how were they received, these steps?

Lord James Bethell: They received – well, it was very ambitious. A lot of people had hoped that this moment would come. There was a great amount of ambition in the industry to take the UK diagnostic industry which had suffered greatly from our lack of focus on population health and public health more broadly, and people were up for it and really wanted to see it succeed.

Lead 5: On 8 April 2020 the DHSC issued a press release launching an online portal for companies to offer their services to bolster the UK’s diagnostics industry. That’s right, isn’t it?

Lord James Bethell: Yes, that’s right.

Lead 5: Was the government flooded with too many offers as a result?

Lord James Bethell: Well, I will just caveat that by saying that we did a number of different appeals for help at different times. Some of them were very, very specific. We did an appeal, for instance, on swabs, we did one on tubes, and a lot of them worked through the industry bodies like the ABPI and BIVDA. And then we did this one you’ve referred to, which is more of a public appeal. So yes, there was a huge amount of – an overwhelming amount of interest in it, and we struggled to manage the huge amount of interest.

We set up a call centre for people to handle it and a webform for people to fill in, but I would say that the practicalities of handling the response were not as well organised as I would have liked them to have been.

Lead 5: Your own words are that you say, “We are drowning in helpful suggestions”?

Lord James Bethell: Yes, I said that to Parliamentarians.

Lead 5: Yes, now I think, just going back to your previous sentence, your view was that the flow of offers was welcome but the ability to handle them was inadequate or insufficient; is that how you view it?

Lord James Bethell: Yes, you put it well. I think that I was surprised that a relatively straightforward operational task of canvassing a large amount of interest amongst UK industry and then processing those expressions of interest seemed to be a bit of a struggle for the system to work itself through. I was surprised it was difficult for us to ask thoughtful, sensible questions, put it into a database, prioritise them, order them, and then target the ones that met the right criteria.

Lead 5: There will always be a burden of triage where offers are invited and are received at a large scale, won’t there?

Lord James Bethell: That’s right. That’s part of the procurement process. In fact, that kind of transparency, particularly at a moment of heightened public concern, is important.

Lead 5: And assuming that no triaging process is perfect, the more specific one can be about the request for and receipt of offers, the better, as a generality?

Lord James Bethell: As a generality, that is true. I would just add – yes, I agree with you. I would just add that it also, though, shook out some quite creative and interesting offers, some of which were distracting but many of which were helpful.

Lead 5: All right. Let’s turn now to the test and trace programme.

Lady Hallett: Sorry, just before you do, I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr Wald.

Mr Wald: Yes, of course.

Lady Hallett: Going back, Lord Bethell, to your point about canvassing interest and processing interest being a task that systems struggled with, was that because the technology wasn’t there, in other words people were using Excel spreadsheets as opposed to a proper –

Lord James Bethell: Yes.

Lady Hallett: – database – is that why they struggled?

Lord James Bethell: I think three reasons. One is operational, as you describe. The government is not very good at throwing up a web page in the way that, you know, a tech start-up might do very easily.

Secondly, the industry wasn’t used to us actually asking them for things, so they themselves – it took them a while and they didn’t have the expertise, the management depth, to be able to respond to such a large request very easily.

And thirdly, what it elicited was that there was a huge amount of diagnostics that we just weren’t engaged in, diagnostics that might analyse spit or coughs or poo or dogs or any number of creative solutions that you might mention, that the system had never really looked at very carefully. So we were starting from the beginning in terms of building an understanding of what was available.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Mr Wald: And in terms of just to finish on this point of achieving specificity where possible, you refer in your own evidence to the approach of canvassing known industry players, associations, holding roundtable discussions. All of those are helpful in relation to achieving a greater specificity and placing less of a burden on the triage process.

Lord James Bethell: Yes – yes and no. When you’re doing a public call for a tube, being really clear about what the dimensions of that tube should be is very, very important. But if you’re at the very, very early stage, you may not know what you really want. So, for instance, the lateral flow device was not on the agenda at all. It didn’t come from PHE as a suggestion, it really was driven by industry interest and sponsorship of the idea.

So the roundtables and the engagement with industry brought up fresh and new ideas, some of which were not conventionally used by the system.

Lead 5: I was going to come on to it in a moment but we might as well pick up the point now. You used the word “pivot”. There are certain industries, and we’ve seen it in the evidence that’s been heard within this module so far, that might manufacture one product but would be able to manufacture another in a given set of circumstances, so PPE as an example of that. Clothing manufacturers were able to pivot.

Now, we had evidence from Mr Hall who was the originator of a rapid response team, and suggested that it would have been preferable if there had been a more targeted approach adopted to manufacturers of PPE, or even manufacturers of products that – in relation to which it would have been possible to pivot to PPE, rather than seeking in rather more blanket or open terms offers, including ones that were received from those that were no hopers, let’s say.

Would you agree with his evidence or disagree with it?

Lord James Bethell: Well, I think his evidence is true at certain times but not others. In March and April when we were scrambling for PPE, there was no question of being able to put together telephone numbers of the ten big players and phoning them up and saying, “Hi, would you please send us a couple of planeloads of PPE?”, because it was such a mad scramble. Actually, we needed to galvanise the entrepreneurs and the buccaneers and people of extraordinary talents who could somehow get their hands on this stuff and find the angles that would get them back to Britain. And we were competing with New York City mayors who were sending Learjets full of cash to get that stuff off the Hong Kong runway and into their own plane.

So no, I don’t think at the early stage that lovely rational approach he describes would have been – worked. In testing, for instance, the rational approach was to work with Roche, who had the biggest fleet of machines, PCR machines, in the UK. But of course they couldn’t give us any of the reagents which Bev, I think, explained very, very clearly. So again, we had to open the Overton window to a much broader range of opportunities.

And also, the science was changing very quickly. We didn’t necessarily know – now, a gown is a gown. But we didn’t know what kind of mask we necessarily needed, what kinds of gloves we needed. So a lot of the specifications were bouncing around a lot of the time, and I think you have the memo from Mr Bourne on the difficulties he had for getting a specification, even for a simple tube.

So I think there is a lot of hindsight wisdom that is applicable in planning for the future but at the time the scramble mode was a necessary feature of our response.

Lead 5: All right. Let’s turn, if we may, to the Test and Trace Programme and the fast tracking to which you refer that formed part of it. In July 2020 you were asked to lead on the new strategic testing strategy; is that right?

Lord James Bethell: That’s right.

Lead 5: You tell us that in October 2020 you started attending weekly meetings to discuss testing suppliers; is that also right?

Lord James Bethell: That’s right.

Lead 5: Some suppliers were designated “VIP” or “fast track” or “priority”. Did you personally have a hand in those designations or in the idea to introduce those designations?

Lord James Bethell: That’s not something I had a hand in. I don’t recognise a list of VIP suppliers. There was a list supplied by the industry bodies of people who had experience in that area and they were naturally prioritised.

Lead 5: Are you therefore unable to help us with what would – the basis upon which a particular supplier might or might not be designated a VIP?

Lord James Bethell: I’m not quite sure which list you’re referring to.

Lead 5: Well, you say at paragraph 67 of your statement:

“Although there was no separate VIP route or channel for testing suppliers and ministers were not involved in the evaluation or procurement process for contracts, where emails came from a supplier with an established reputation in diagnostics or related to products or services of which there was an acute shortage, the email could be tagged by the triage team as ‘VIP’, ‘Fast Track’, or ‘Priority’.”

Lord James Bethell: That sounds – yes, that’s right.

Lead 5: We can put it up on the screen if that would help?

Lord James Bethell: Thank you, but that sounds right.

Lead 5: All right, then – it’s been done in any event.

Lord James Bethell: Thank you very much.

Lead 5: All right. There is the bit I just read up to “Priority”, and then towards the end of that paragraph:

“We were invited to mark the email as fast track in order that it could be tagged as such and to help officials to provide progress reports.”

Lord James Bethell: Yeah.

Lead 5: Now, this is quite different, is it not, to the VIP Lane about which we’ve heard a fair amount of evidence within this module relating to PPE? It is a criteria-based prioritisation system, isn’t it?

Lord James Bethell: Yes, it is.

Lead 5: And I understand what you say about the initial scramble, but all other things being equal, that criteria-based approach is a better one, if it can be achieved, because it places less burden on the triaging process?

Lord James Bethell: Well, yes. Well, you say it’s reasonable but the reason why I hesitated is that even here, I would just point out that in the six – 6 April 2020, we thought that antigen testing was going to be the answer. We thought that if we could establish that someone had had the disease, they could then go back into the workforce and then be free of the threat of infection. That proved to be incorrect shortly afterwards, and that was a very daunting and terrible moment when we found that out, and therefore our whole strategy had to move to an infection method and that’s when things like the PCR and the LFD became more important.

So you are right that having specifications and criteria are nice, but you should remember that actually, the science and the circumstances were chopping and changing all the time and didn’t settle for a long time.

Lead 5: So Lord Bethell, there does seem to be an important distinction between what you are saying in relation to the, I suppose, the uncertainty about exactly what it is you might need at a given moment in time, and therefore, the inability, without levelling any criticism of anyone, to be that specific at those early stages, and ascribing to a particular offer priority by dint of who it was that referred it in to a particular process. There is a distinction. You don’t seem to draw the latter as an example of something that is a reasonable or a desirable method of prioritisation. You give instead, it seems, if I’ve understood your evidence correctly, a system that either achieves a high level of specificity when it is possible, or avoids that specificity when it is not possible. But in none of the situations are you saying that because a referral comes from a particular person or type of person, that offer should achieve any form of priority?

Lady Hallett: Just pause before you answer, Lord Bethell, just give you time to think, it was a very long question.

I’m just wondering whether you’ve entirely represented the evidence correctly, Mr Wald. As I understand it, one of the factors in from whom the offer came, the credibility of the offer would be that they were a successful manufacturer maybe in a different field. So it’s not necessarily the name of the person or their personal connections; it could just be the credibility of their work to date and their experience.

So I think you – I’m sure you didn’t intend it, but I think your question may have been a bit misleading.

Mr Wald: My Lady, we’ve had mixed evidence as to whether any form of triage was done in relation to referrals. Mr Gove, for example, described himself as a post-box. When he received an offer, he would refer it into the VIP Lane without more. Other witnesses, such as Lord Feldman have given evidence to the effect that some form of triage was conducted at that point.

I suppose the more general point is that it was a limited category of person that was able to refer an offer into the VIP Lane.

Lord James Bethell: Yes, I understand. So I think that where there is some confusion is it depends which stage of the pandemic you’re talking about. In the later months, when the procurement process was settled, when the strategy was agreed, when we basically knew what we were trying to get: oxygen, masks, vaccines, therapeutics, when the science was essentially agreed and the strategy was planned, then you could have your wonderful specification-led approach.

But on April 6, we were bouncing around all over the place. We didn’t – half the scientific community thought the virus was being transmitted by touch, and I was being overwhelmed by people saying they had hand sanitiser, and half the scientists said we should be deep-cleaning homes and offices. So we were in all sorts of confusion about what it is that we actually wanted.

I was very close to the meetings and to the discussion around the science. So to an extent I had a, in terms of that triaging you’re talking about, if we’re talking about early April, then I had about as much knowledge as anyone about where we thought things were going to settle and so in terms of, if you’re talking about April, I would have applied quite a big filter on what was going to come through or not.

Later on, provenance does count for something, but not the only thing.

Lead 5: And when you say provenance, the identity of the referrer?

Lord James Bethell: The identity of both the referrer and the source, the ultimate source of whatever materials we’re talking about. If someone says Roche can’t get through, then I really want to hear about it, and if a thoughtful scientist or a Cabinet Minister vouches for something, then their mandate does count for something, and in the algorithm there’s a mixture of the two.

Lead 5: Just to pick up on the term “fast track” that you set out in your written evidence, that doesn’t include, I take it, the provision of progress reports or feedback updates?

Lord James Bethell: Yes, that’s a great – thank you for that question. Listen, I wasn’t trying to run a sort of British Airways gold card scheme for valued people in the British community. I was trying to make sure that people who had good ideas and good recommendations got through, and the people who were time wasters or fraudsters got turned away.

Lead 5: Yes, so the management of expectations or the provision of updates would have formed no part of this system. It was a system to identify the good opportunities and make sure that they received urgent attention.

Lord James Bethell: No, I think that’s – no, you’re putting words in my mouth there. We were trying to give a “buy” signal. If we’re talking about diagnostics, which we are here for the moment, the British government had not bought diagnostics in a serious way in this … We were well known for being diagnostic light, and so major diagnostic companies did not regard Britain as a key customer. So, you know, to use the phrase that was used earlier, we needed to put a “buy” signal into the market.

And so for credible diagnostic companies, we had to reassure them that we were going to be a thoughtful, reliable, pay-on-time, customer. So yes, feedback to them was very important. To the time wasters, feedback to say, “Could you please stop wasting our time and stop writing articles in the Daily Mail and stop phoning the Prime Minister” was also important.

Lead 5: And were ministers actively seeking feedback in this regard?

Lord James Bethell: When there were people who applied with sensible sounding measures, some ministers would not have known the difference between what was a credible offer and not, and yes, they would have sought to get some kind of feedback. But, like I said, this wasn’t trying to run a concierge service for people so we didn’t hurt their feelings; it was in order to run as good a system as we could possibly put together.

Lead 5: I want to turn now very briefly to the High Priority Lane that we’ve been looking at more extensively within this module, the one that relates to PPE, for two reasons. One is a very brief one. You draw an analogy or you draw a comparison between other forms of VIP Lane, and you give the example of the Ukrainian Refugee Programme. That is, or was – perhaps is – is it still –

Lord James Bethell: No, it doesn’t exist at the moment.

Lead 5: Doesn’t exist at the moment – a programme by which offers of accommodation could be dealt with on an emergency or a priority basis in order to accommodate those arriving from the Ukraine? Is that right?

Lord James Bethell: That’s correct.

Lead 5: It’s quite different, is it not, in its nature, from the procurement situation that we are dealing with within this module?

Lord James Bethell: It is different, and if I can just explain very briefly. What I was trying to get across is that it is the nature of a minister in any kind of pressured situation to put together some form of engagement with parliamentarians about that issue. In fact, at DHSC, there is a substantial Parliamentary engagement team – they used to sit outside my office, as it happened – of I think 20 or 30 people. And sometimes that engagement includes an aspect of operational engagement. So the Ukrainian Refugee Scheme, there was literally a suite in Portcullis House where parliamentarians could drop in and check up on the progress of the – of their refugees’ status.

That is an example of where Parliamentary engagement was done very, very emphatically. Not every procurement, of course, has that aspect. If the NHS is trying to chase down, as they are at the moment, HRT drugs or trying to buy AI, you wouldn’t necessarily have a VIP scheme for that. So, in that respect, we were in an unusual position. But of course, this was a huge explosive problem, and the system had completely fallen down. So that’s why I think it was a slightly different case.

Lead 5: It’s a huge, explosive problem, there is an urgent need to procure, but there was also – without implying any criticism of those that supplied the urgently needed PPE or other bits of medical kit that were required, there was also some interest or even benefit in being the person that entered into that contract, wasn’t there?

Lord James Bethell: Oh, listen, capitalism saved us. If it hadn’t had been for the profit motive, we wouldn’t have had a vaccine, we wouldn’t have been able to stand up extra hospitals, and we wouldn’t have had PPE.

Lead 5: And that profit motive was absent in the Ukrainian refugee –

Lord James Bethell: Sure, that’s completely different, yeah. There were refugees who were desperate to get to Britain, so there were – there was a lot of pressure, and I’m pleased to say we were able to take on – (overspeaking) – one family, so I’m quite familiar with it.

Lead 5: So we’ve dealt with most of the points that I wanted to make on the VIP Lane. I just want to pick up on a couple often points that you make within your written evident. You say at your paragraph 61:

“One of the ways in which I could be said to have had any role in the establishment of the HPL was by commissioning a working spreadsheet into which updates on referrals could be seen and reduce the need for ad hoc chaser emails …”

Lord James Bethell: Yeah.

Lead 5: Now, it was important to reduce that need because they put pressure on those busily, heroically, working hard to achieve emergency procurement, didn’t they?

Lord James Bethell: Emily Lawson put that very well, and I thought her testimony was very touching.

Lead 5: So it was clearly a sentiment that you possessed even at this time?

Lord James Bethell: I felt it really powerfully. I was the junior minister in charge and I felt that I should be a human shield to protect hardworking officials and frontline staff from what was going on in the press and even in their communities, the concern that people had. And so, yes, answering questions from serious senior people was a way of trying to create space for them to get on and do their job.

Lead 5: And for some of those individuals, it was an enormous additional distress and distraction. We know that from the written and oral evidence within this module.

Lord James Bethell: It was awful. People were trying their hardest, working absolutely flat out, and they felt that somehow the system was failing around them. And so to try to give them the confidence that there was a plan and that we were moving forward was incredibly important.

Lead 5: Do you think your working spreadsheet was a sufficient protection against that problem?

Lord James Bethell: No, of course not. What would have been a sufficient protection would have been to have a CRM system that actually worked and hadn’t completely fallen over.

Lead 5: CRM?

Lord James Bethell: A customer relations management system. So that we actually knew what was happening with all of the – SCCL completely eviscerated. It had no warehouses, no database, the staff didn’t have the names of any of their suppliers. I went down to Skipton House to see Emily Lawson on April 21st, and I saw for myself – I saw the good news, which was Emily and her team were putting together from scratch a completely new system. But I also saw the bad news, which was that it was currently stickers on the wall and whiteboards with circles on it.

We were starting from a desperate situation, and my spreadsheet was the beginnings of a proper response.

Lead 5: I just want to probe a little bit further, if I may, this customer relations management system. This would be to siphon off, to protect those involved in the day job of emergency procurement?

Lord James Bethell: No, sorry, if I may. The underpinnings of any business is a database which has all of the orders and details of the suppliers. In the vaccines, for instance, there was an extremely good database where they could track supplies of vaccines coming in, when they were going out, who had done what work. That is the fundamental spine on which any business is built. And at SCCL that had completely fallen over because they had been running this JIT model, the just-in-time model, and that relied on agents and others doing a huge amount of the work.

So they had to start up again, and you’ll remember that Emily Lawson talked about, at first, putting together a salesforce measure. That then didn’t work, and they then had to go to another system. So it was very, very slow to get going.

Once it did get going, it worked quite well.

Lead 5: Just staying with this theme, do you think that the ministerial interventions were excessive? That they should have happened less? That one should try to introduce measures to discourage them?

Lord James Bethell: No, I don’t. I think that it was a desperate time and a lot of people either stepped forward because they were extremely well intentioned or were keen to get contracts, or a bit of both, and handling all of that interest was always going to be tough and difficult, particularly if – and sorry to use the phrase again – but if your CRM system has completely fallen over and you can’t keep track of people’s offers of help, then you’re going to have a problem on your hands. And I think ministers were doing the right thing to try to lend a hand and provide some operational support.

Lead 5: All right, we’re going to turn on to a couple of examples, concrete examples, in the form of Meller Designs and Randox in a moment and see how that plays out in practice. But before I embark on that, are there any measures that you would recommend in order to achieve that protection that you clearly were trying to do with your spreadsheet of those busily engaged in emergency procurement?

Lord James Bethell: Well, I’m afraid that the answer to that is that I wouldn’t have liked to have stood there – started from there in the first place. I wish we had had a public health system that was more robust and I wish that NHS colleagues had had a procurement system that wasn’t so focused on just-in-time desirables and keeping as little in as possible in the warehouse.

So I think resilience does count for something. I also think British industry had been overlooked in diagnostics, in PPE, and in other places. We had – for geopolitical – well, for philosophical reasons, become incredibly dependent on particularly China but on overseas suppliers, when in fact, you know, as Lord Deighton explained very well, there was huge capability in the UK, and we saw that in the scientific and medical space, as well. We should have really had more of an industrial strategy around supporting British industry to be a key provider, partly because they were good at it and it provided jobs but also, when the balloon went up, it was a more resilient way of conducting our affairs.

Lady Hallett: Can I just ask, just pursuing Mr Wald’s line of questioning, I am sure that constitutionally you could actually stop ministers from – isn’t that a part of our system, that ministers can ask questions about matters of important public interest? I mean, it would be undermining the public constitution, wouldn’t it?

Lord James Bethell: Oh, I was up every single day, sometimes three, four, five times a day during this whole period. Some of the correspondence that we’ve been looking at I was literally typing from my iPhone on the front bench whilst peers asked me in very, very clear terms what we were doing. And specifically I was asked why were we allowing red tape and regulatory hurdles from getting in our way and shouldn’t we – and I was giving reassurances to peers from all parties that we were doing absolutely everything we could to meet the urgent need.

So, yes, this was a very live challenge that I had in Parliament, and Parliamentarians made it absolutely clear to me that we should be doing everything that we could to meet the frontline needs of our doctors and nurses for PPE.

Mr Wald: I suppose the only question, Lord Bethell, is who is at the receiving end of those requests? Is it the same person that is triaging, that is sifting through offers, that is processing offers, or can it be – and it sounds like on occasion it was, in your own case – someone else who is not doing that day-to-day, and can therefore spare those who are involved in that activity –

Lord James Bethell: Yes, good question.

Lead 5: – from dealing with both things at the same time?

Lord James Bethell: Yes. So there was a massive capacity problem. We didn’t have enough people, and Bev spoke very well of how she had come over from Cabinet Office. I was – I would have liked an army of 50 Bevs, and if I’d had that, it would have been a lot easier, as you’ve just described.

Lead 5: All right. Let’s turn on, then, to one of the two examples that I said we’d go on to relatively briefly. Could we have displayed up INQ000497141, please.

Now, on 6 April 2020, your private office emailed Jo Churchill’s private office to relay that you’d been contacted by David Meller of Meller Designs, about whom and which the Inquiry has already heard some evidence in the course of Mr Gove’s appearance here. Mr Meller was asking for a letter of intent for the purchase of 35 million face masks. Do you recall this particular offer?

Lord James Bethell: I remember, yes, I do.

Lead 5: David Meller was a friend or a great friend of Michael Gove’s. The email from your private office asked for the request to be actioned as soon as possible, “as Lord Bethell”, it says, “has given David Meller assurances it will be dealt with.”

Lord James Bethell: Correct.

Lead 5: Yeah? The email is presumably correct; it provides a correct account of what happened?

Lord James Bethell: I’m sure it does.

Lead 5: So you did provide these assurances to David Meller. Why did you do so, in relation to a company that was still undergoing procurement checks and was subject to ongoing due process?

Lord James Bethell: So this question of letters of intent was one that came up all the time. The practicalities are, if you’re dealing with a Chinese factory and you’re trying to get them to prioritise you over any number of other competitors, including Americans carrying suitcases of cash, then you need to demonstrate good bona fides, and a letter from the UK Government of some kind is the kind of instrument you need to make sure that they actually deliver and commit to an order.

This was not the only request for a letter of intent, there were a very, very large number of them, and I’m pleased to say that we were able to provide them. That is exactly what – on 6 April, given the scramble that we were in, that was exactly what I saw my role as.

Lead 5: Were you aware that Mr Meller had made similar approaches to Mr Gove’s office two days earlier, and that Mr Cairnduff, who headed up the VIP Lane, as I’m sure you know, had explained that although there might be pressure to act, it was essential to check the deal, and he noted that although some individuals had identified themselves as ministerial contacts, some of those offers were not genuine. And he refers to “noise” as a synonym for distractions.

Were you aware of any of that?

Lord James Bethell: A hundred per cent I was aware. There were plenty of people. Some of them were well meaning but misguided. Some of them were outright fraudsters. And in my – and we were trying to do our best in an extremely confusing situation.

I’d also say that we were trying to galvanise our own civil servants, many of whom – and I’m not speaking about Max at all here – but many of whom were genuinely paralysed by the system – by the situation. The system had been put in place for a hundred years to stop us from doing this kind of thing. The system put in checks and balances and rigour and audit and regulations of a commendable kind which I strongly support, but its psychology was to be very, very cautious about absolutely everything all of the time. And what we needed on April 6 was to take away that 100 years of conditioning and to say, “We need to take some risks, we need to lean in, the British public expect it of us, Parliamentarians have told us that’s what they expect us to do, and it’s the right thing to do.” And so this chivvying email is an example of where I was taking the spirit into practice.

Lead 5: Thank you. That’s very helpful. Could I just ask, you mentioned the checks and balances, the caution, the legacy of 100 years?

Lord James Bethell: Yes.

Lead 5: I just wonder if we can hear your evidence on the approach that you think it is best to adopt where an offer is received from a person who is a friend or a great friend. Would it be to make mention of that in any referral, but include a caveat that no preferential treatment should be given? To simply make mention of it, or to make no mention of it at all?

Lord James Bethell: Listen, these were mad scramble days. As far as I was concerned, he was a retailer who had 30 years of experience working with Chinese factories and had a credible offer to get face masks which at that point were like gold dust.

And our nurses and doctors needed it.

Getting into his personal life history or trying to set myself up as some kind of governance chief would not have been the right thing to do, and I don’t think that’s what the British public would have expected me to do.

Lead 5: I mean, it wouldn’t have related to you, Lord Bethell. I don’t think you had any pre-existing relationship with Mr Meller.

Lord James Bethell: I know a lot of people in this country, and I’ve come across David before but he’s not a particular strong contact of mine.

Lead 5: Okay. Let’s turn on to the Randox case, and explore, if we can, helpfully, whether there are any broader lessons to be learned from the experience of that as well, most pertinently to any issue of perceived conflicts of interest and how to deal with them.

So on 30 March of 2020, Randox was awarded a contract by the DHSC to supply around 2.7 million tests over a 12-week period, as I’m sure you’re aware?

Lord James Bethell: Mm-hm.

Lead 5: The involvement of Owen Paterson MP with Randox has received a great deal of public attention and I want to explore, as I said I did, with you what can be done to ensure that public confidence in the procurement process is not lost when there is a perceived or actual conflict of interest or when elected officials become associated with commercial activities of the government. I hear what you say about the mad scramble, and you will of course indicate if you feel that in circumstances such as these, there is nothing that can be done to maintain public confidence or to set out guardrails to maximise the prospects of that.

Lord James Bethell: That’s not my – that –

Lead 5: That’s not your view? So you’ll indicate what can be done and what should be done?

Lord James Bethell: Yeah.

Lead 5: You describe in your witness statement that you had some involvement in the award of the Randox contract but you were not involved in the contractual negotiations?

Lord James Bethell: Correct.

Lead 5: Yeah.

You describe Randox as “a rare example of a large, experienced diagnostic company, based in the UK that might be able to produce the tests that we so desperately needed …”

Lord James Bethell: Yes.

Lead 5: So it ticks a number of boxes, including some of those that you described a moment ago?

Lord James Bethell: Yes.

Lead 5: UK manufacturer without dependence on overseas suppliers –

Lord James Bethell: No, they were dependent on – everyone was dependent on overseas suppliers.

Lead 5: For parts or materials?

Lord James Bethell: And particularly the reagents, yeah.

Lead 5: What was the size of the UK’s diagnostics industry in the UK at the time, as you understood it?

Lord James Bethell: Well, it was tiny and characterised by small, science-led operations, often founder-managed, which had a very good reputation in niche sectors but had no experience or capacity on mass throughput testing, which is what we needed.

Lead 5: Discussions between Mr Hancock and Mr Paterson started as early as January 2020 and we know from – we were told that Mr Hancock and DHSC were in discussions with Owen Paterson who, I understand, was a paid consultant for Randox. That’s from your evidence. When did you learn that Mr Paterson was a paid consultant for Randox?

Lord James Bethell: Oh, I don’t know. It was published in his register of interests so it wasn’t a secret.

Lead 5: You gave your authorisation for civil servants to start contractual negotiations with Randox on 24 March 2020?

Lord James Bethell: Yeah.

Lead 5: On what basis did you approver this? Had you had discussions with Randox or with Mr Paterson?

Lord James Bethell: Well, Randox is the standout candidate for working in the diagnostic area. We had had a lot of problems with PHE and reluctance to engage with the public sector – with the private sector at all, and therefore Randox had tried to communicate in whatever fashion they could, including through Owen Paterson, their frustration that the coming train down the track was not being handled properly and no one was engaging with them. So what was the precise run-up to the signing of the contract? I can’t give you chapter and verse off the top of my head, I’m afraid, but they were definitely the biggest player in British diagnostics, so of course we were going to do a deal of some kind with them.

Lead 5: You said that you did a search to establish Mr Paterson’s role in Randox. Did he openly declare that to you as well?

Lord James Bethell: Yes, of course. It’s public knowledge.

Lead 5: Did you identify or regard there to have been any actual or perceived conflict?

Lord James Bethell: I think that if someone has put something in their register of interest and are utterly transparent about it, then it doesn’t qualify as a conflict.

I should also add –

Lead 5: Yes?

Lord James Bethell: The information that came from Randox was phenomenally helpful. We were being told by PHE that they were engaged with the British diagnostics industry, and the information from Randox came that they were not. It turned out that Randox were correct and the information we got from them was of value and help to us – helped us galvanise the system.

Lead 5: You will, of course, be aware that the Randox transaction provoked quite a lot of attention, public attention?

Lord James Bethell: Yes.

Lead 5: Do you think there is any way that it could or should have been handled differently?

Lord James Bethell: I think that the attention around Randox has been highly politically motivated. I think it’s a great shame that a British company has been demonised in that fashion’s. Other British companies will take that lesson and will be extremely reluctant to step up to the challenge in the future, and I think that it’s a great shame what’s happened to a good company.

Lead 5: And just returning to my question, do you think there is any – there are any measures that could or should be taken to prevent any of that?

Lord James Bethell: Yeah, I understand what you’re getting at. We were falling over ourselves to be as transparent and clear-cut and working within the regulations as possible. We could – everyone knew that there was going to be an Inquiry. From the very beginning that all this started off, we knew that we were going to be sitting in a chair like this answering questions like this. So we deported ourselves accordingly. And we were incredibly thorough. We took the advice of our officials. We gave them the space to tell us when they thought we were wrong, and we were extremely cautious about everything we did, and in our handling of Randox, I think that was – couldn’t have been a better example.

Lead 5: Finally, Lord Bethell, on 30 June Mr Hancock asked you to speak to a contact of his, Alex Bourne, to see if he had any useful suggestions about testing kits; do you recall?

Lord James Bethell: Yes, I do.

Lead 5: Could we just have displayed up on the screen INQ000551393.

It’s a short email from Mr Hancock:

“I think this is a very interesting critique from someone who [has] turned his business to testing when the crisis broke. He’s a very impressive guy and quite a good analysis. Thoughts?”

Did that suggestion or that description in any way influence your treatment of the Hinpack or Alpha Laboratories offer?

Lord James Bethell: This was a classic offer from a maverick entrepreneur who was stepping up to both the challenge and opportunity that the pandemic was coming, and I read the email, which I thought was very thoughtful, and judged it on its own merits.

Lead 5: You said earlier in relation to the referrals that were made into the VIP Lane that it was a mixture, as you saw it, of the referrer and the supplier when you were assessing credibility?

Lord James Bethell: Yeah.

Lead 5: Does it not follow that a recommendation such as this from a person such as Mr Hancock, would carry some weight in addition to the analysis that you obviously did of the email below it?

Lord James Bethell: Well, Mr Wald, I just mentioned that this email is a very detailed analysis of some of the challenges he’s facing. It’s not actually a pitch for any work. It didn’t have any credent – it didn’t have a pitch in it. I think it was sent to me because it explained problems he was having trying to get a decent specification, and it was a very painful and bald reminder of how problematic, even at this stage, even in June, our own system was proving.

Lead 5: Did you assist in taking the Hinpack/Alpha Laboratories offer forward?

Lord James Bethell: It wasn’t an offer.

Lead 5: Did it result in any form of contract?

Lord James Bethell: I have no idea.

Mr Wald: All right.

Lord Bethell, those are all my questions, thank you very much.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Ms Morris, who sits there.

Questions From Ms Morris KC

Ms Morris: Thank you, my Lady.

Lord Bethell, I ask questions on behalf of the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice UK, and I am going to focus my questions on the topic of preparedness, about which you’ve offered some observations this morning already. I think it’s quite clear from your evidence that we weren’t prepared. Is that a fair summary?

Lord James Bethell: I think you put it very well.

Ms Morris KC: Thank you. In your statement you say that you found it hugely frustrating that our normal procurement system didn’t seem capable of securing the vast volume of PPE, and you focused on the fact that it had become increasingly optimised for cost and waste management but not for flexibility and resilience –

Lord James Bethell: That’s correct.

Ms Morris KC: – is that something you would agree with? In your lessons learned section you say that you believe that the biggest problem was that we were lacking when we went into the – there was nothing in the store cupboard, you’ve said that already this morning.

Lord James Bethell: Yes.

Ms Morris KC: And you’ve mentioned the just-in-time, the JIT, delivery system. One of the things you highlighted was the lack of direct contact with manufacturers, and you said this morning already that there was a number of intermediaries, agents and networks, and there wasn’t that direct contact with manufacturers –

Lord James Bethell: Mm.

Ms Morris KC: – particularly in the UK. So do you agree that that lack of direct relationships and overreliance on agents and intermediaries was a fundamental failing affecting the PPE procurement response of the pandemic?

Lord James Bethell: Yes, it was. And if I could mention, we did a large amount of work around Project Defend, which I would recommend to the Inquiry, to look at how we could build resilience into the system, and it identified a system, which is very well known, of ensuring that you have some manufacturers onshore, some in territories where you’re friendly with, maybe some that are a bit further reach, and maybe some where you have poor relations. It’s creating that network of different relationships which you can ultimately rely upon and also scale if needed. And what was so problematic is that scaling from nothing is very, very difficult. Scaling from a foundation of some kind is much easier.

Ms Morris KC: Thank you. I was going to ask you what, in your opinion, a more flexible and resilient system would look like. For example, would there be more direct contact with manufacture – I think you’d say yes –

Lord James Bethell: Yes.

Ms Morris KC: – there should be more direct contact with manufacturers? More investment in domestic production? I think you’d agree with that. And sort of an increase in rolling stock and moving away from just-in-time contracts, that store cupboard being full at the point that you need it; would you agree with that?

Lord James Bethell: I completely agree. And I would say that resilience is not a mystery. It’s not something that we have to think about and design and invent. We know how to do it. It’s all been extremely well explained in government policy. But we’ve chosen not to go down that route and I think that that is a mistake.

Ms Morris KC: Thank you. My second but connected topic is about sleeping contracts and stockpiling. You said in your statement you don’t believe in sleeping contracts, you don’t believe they’d have a strong role to play in any future pandemic planning. You say it only really works if you know what type of pandemic you’re planning for.

Do you agree that in 2020 there was an over-focus in planning, in preparing for an influenza pandemic as opposed to different kinds of pandemic responses?

Lord James Bethell: In part, yes. There had been a failure to acknowledge the lessons from SARS. I think there was, at root, a philosophical playbook misunderstanding that stopping the progress of the disease was an important part of our reaction. And so that was a sort of fundamental problem. And I think that we have just underestimated the societal lack of resilience we have in terms of volunteers, British industry, the use of data, and we need to think again, and take lessons from countries, like Finland, that have put resilience at the top of the agenda rather than at the bottom.

Ms Morris KC: Okay, but just focusing on sleeping contracts and how –

Lord James Bethell: I’m sorry, yes.

Ms Morris KC: – they can assist. Isn’t one of the points of sleeping contracts, or advanced supply contracts as they are also known, is that you can address multiple scenarios because they allow for contracting with – for multiple eventualities that can be required in certain types of pandemics?

Lord James Bethell: So I was very moved by a conversation I had with a big pharma CEO, who told me that in America they had put hundreds of millions of pounds in sleeping contracts and this company had stood up factories to be ready for the pandemic. And when the pandemic kicked off, it showed that they were the wrong kind of factory. So I am sceptical whether you can be predictive.

Where I think you can make a big difference is in warm capacity. So, in testing, if you have a system of public health screening and you have mass throughput labs as a result of supporting that ongoing programme that has value in today’s world to the health system, you then have a platform that you can scale up to be bigger much more quickly.

I think that concept of warm capacity, and making sure it’s in the right place, is more valuable than cold capacity in terms of your contracts.

Ms Morris KC: Okay, but is that not an argument instead for having a sort of wide range of sleeping contracts and stockpiling that can deal with multiple eventualities, as opposed to just, kind of, warm capacity for one eventuality?

Lord James Bethell: My experience was that the science changed, the eventualities changed. You know, if Covid had been a slightly different disease in any number of different ways, we would have had a completely and utterly different set of requirements. So I am instinctively very sceptical whether you can ever predict what’s going to come down the line. For instance, had it attacked children, our response would have been completely different. Had it been more from touch than from air, it would have been completely different. So it’s very, very difficult to predict what the progress of a disease

will be.

Ms Morris: Thank you.

Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Ms Morris. That completes the

questions that we have for you, Lord Bethell. I’m

extremely grateful to you again for your thoughtfulness

and for your help.

I’m not sure, given your role in test and trace,

whether I can say we won’t be asking for you to come

again, so apologies if we do make another demand upon

you, but thank you so much for what you’ve done so far.

The Witness: Thank you very much.

Lady Hallett: I think probably take the break now? I shall

return at 11.20.

(11.04 am)

(A short break)

(11.20 am)

Lady Hallett: Mr Wald.

Mr Wald: My Lady, our next witness today is

Mr Matt Hancock.

Mr Matthew Hancock

MR MATTHEW HANCOCK (affirmed).

Lady Hallett: Sorry we keep asking you to come back.

Questions From Lead Counsel to the Inquiry for Module 5

Mr Wald: Would you state your full name for the Inquiry, please.

Mr Matthew Hancock: I am Matthew John David Hancock.

Lead 5: Mr Hancock, thank you for supplying yet another witness statement to the Inquiry. I believe it’s your seventh. It’s INQ000536350. It’s signed at the end. Can you confirm that it’s true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Thank you for that. I think at this stage very little by way of background is necessary, as you’ve given evidence at several modules in this Inquiry. Those following will, of course, know that you were a Member of Parliament for West Suffolk between 6 May 2010 and 30 May 2024. Is that right?

Mr Matthew Hancock: That’s right.

Lead 5: You were Secretary of State for Health and Social Care between 9 July 2018 up until 26 June, 2021?

Mr Matthew Hancock: That’s right.

Lead 5: You’ve given evidence, as say, on a number of occasions. As you know, in this module we’ll be focusing on the procurement and distribution of healthcare equipment and supplies.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Mm-hm.

Lead 5: May we start, please, with the stockpile.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Right.

Lead 5: We know from paragraph 36 of your statement that, in

your own words, on coming into post as Health Minister,

you were advised that the UK was a world leader in

preparations for a pandemic.

Mr Matthew Hancock: That’s right.

Lead 5: And we further know, perhaps we could have it pulled up

on to the screen, from your book, Pandemic Diaries,

that’s INQ000569777:

“The good news is”, you say in January, at the

beginning of January 2020:

“The good news is we’ve got a billion items of

disposable personal protective equipment (PPE)

stockpiled and ready to dispatch to hospitals if

required. It’s stashed away at a secret location in the

north-west where it’s been gathering dust – hopefully

not literally – since it was put together in 2009”.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, that’s a description of what I was told at the

time.

Lead 5: Yes, I was coming on to that. You were told that, were

you not, Mr Hancock – let’s pull this up on the screen,

as well. INQ000184105, it’s page 2, internal

paragraph 11:

“The UK is acknowledged as being amongst the global

leaders in preparing for a global pandemic.”

Mr Matthew Hancock: That’s right. I’m not sure when this document is from

but that was the standard description given to me. And in fact you’ll recall, my Lady, from Module 1 sometime ago that we had a – that I had a Day 1 brief in this area, and I then interrogated that brief and asked a series of questions and we put in place some further actions as a result.

Lead 5: I was just coming on to that, Mr Hancock. Did you have any reason to doubt what you were told here?

Mr Matthew Hancock: No. The civil servants give their advice to the best of their knowledge in a high-integrity manner, in my long experience as a minister.

Lead 5: It was accepted, presumably, that any stockpile would eventually run out, and a need to buy more in bulk would arise. Did you find any evidence of such a plan in place?

Mr Matthew Hancock: No, there wasn’t a plan. I first ordered the ordering – the opening of this stockpile and the ordering of more PPE in January 2020. So it was towards the end of January 2020 where at the time, by recollection, this was when Professor Whitty was advising that a global pandemic was a 50/50 chance and it was looking increasingly bleak in terms of a pandemic hitting our shores, and I think there were a handful, two or three cases, in the UK. That was the point at which I began the process of ordering more PPE.

Lead 5: And more generally, your department was preparing for a potential outbreak of Covid-19 in the UK from as early as January 2020, wasn’t it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes. Sir Chris Wormwald moved to being full time focusing on the potential pandemic in the middle of January. I can’t remember the exact date. We went through this in Module 1, as I say. But yes, from very early on we recognised the risk was very significant, and in relation to buying PPE, there wasn’t a – there wasn’t a mechanism in place to buy more, and indeed, the purchasing of PPE was essentially decentralised with the exception of SCCL, which I know has been discussed in this module which – but remember, SCCL only existed to supply the 250 main hospitals, not the tens of thousands of other areas that came to need extra PPE.

Lead 5: I’m coming on to that in a few moments.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Sure.

Lead 5: So if we can park that, I promise I’ll come back to it. I just want to continue on the line of questions that I’ve started with you. Did you ask officials at this stage, we’re back in early – well, January 2020 when your department was preparing for a potential outbreak of Covid-19 in the UK,did you ask officials to assure you that the PIPP stockpile was ready to deploy?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I don’t recall if we had a deployment discussion specifically, but that was an inevitable part of using PPE, of course, and anyway, at that point we had a distribution system to the hospitals in SCCL which later fell over.

And the – so it was about early spotting that we’d need to buy more PPE, and about opening up the existing – the existing stockpile for PPE.

Lead 5: Let’s –

Mr Matthew Hancock: There was a third part, actually, which is important to note, which is at the time we’d been preparing for the potential of a no-deal EU Exit at the end of January 2020. And the supply chain had built up some stocks, not just – not specifically in PPE, but across the purchases that are relevant in this module. And the advice came to me in – towards the end of January 2020 to say that we should tell industry to reduce those stockpiles. And given the risk of a potential pandemic, I overruled that advice and said we should not request the disbanding of these stockpiles once the risk of a no-deal Brexit had been taken off the table.

Lead 5: Were those EU Exit stockpiles able to contribute positively to the need that arose due to the Covid pandemic?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, very much. In two ways. One, directly, because there were more stockpiles in the supply chain than there would otherwise have been. The second is indirectly, and probably actually more important. It meant that brilliant officials like Steve Oldfield, who had worked on and led that policy, were then immediately able to turn the information about in particular the pharmaceutical supply chain, to understand that supply chain better.

We’ve just heard from Lord Bethell the lack of supply chain information in certain areas like diagnostics, but in terms of pharmaceutical drugs – and here, the critical ones were anaesthetic drugs, although we didn’t know it at the time – we knew those supply chains better than we ever had before because of the work preparing – in case there was a no-deal Brexit.

So there was information and actual goods, but it pertained less to PPE and more to things like medicines, as I say.

Lead 5: I asked the question because we heard yesterday from Lord Agnew, who gave his views on whether Brexit planning helped or hindered the task of procurement. I suppose you’re offering an example of where it helped, effectively?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes. It wasn’t Brexit planning specifically; it was planning in case we’d ended up with a no-deal Brexit. So, you know, my view was that that would not have been a good idea, I was against it, but it was still my responsibility to prepare in case it happened.

Lead 5: I’ve used the term “Brexit planning” to include the possibility of a –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Sure, in that case, yes.

Lead 5: – a no Brexit receipt – a no-deal Brexit.

Let’s just go back to your Pandemic Diaries, if we may. We go to the other end of the month, 30 January, INQ00056977 and page 2. And you say this:

“PHE’s audit of PPE came back and did not lighten my mood. The paperwork is all over the place. There’s no clear record of what’s in the stockpile, and some kit is pass its ‘best before’ date. I’ve instructed officials to work out what we need fast, and buy in huge quantities.”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Now, there’s two questions that arise from that. The first is that you had said, I suppose rather jokingly or glibly, that you hoped that it hadn’t been gathering dust.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: In the event, it was effectively gathering dust. Much of it had expired, hadn’t it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, I wouldn’t say it was glib to say I hope it hadn’t been gathering dust. It turned out that that was – that metaphor was appropriate.

Lead 5: Well, you would perhaps say prescient in that case.

But the second question I have for you in relation to this is, were you given any explanation as to why it was that some of the kit was past its best before date?

Mr Matthew Hancock: No.

Lead 5: No?

Mr Matthew Hancock: All I would say, the explanation I was given was that the recordkeeping was – had not been clear. I wasn’t given the next explanation, which is why the recordkeeping hadn’t been clear. You know, to me, I come from a technology background. It’s obvious that you need to keep a decent record of everything that you put into a stockpile. I mean, this wasn’t the only problem. The bigger problem was that it wasn’t pickable.

Lead 5: So adequacy of the stockpile is one issue, but sufficiency is another, and you deal with this in your paragraphs 43 and 44.

When you say that both the EU exit stockpiles and the existing PIPP stockpile were not going to be sufficient or were going to be insufficient to meet the demands of the pandemic –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: – what is it you mean by “sufficient”? Are you talking there about volumes or items or types of items?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, all of those things. So you have to remember the context here. January 2020, we in the department could foresee the likely potential, which Professor Whitty put at 50/50, of a global pandemic. We could see, therefore, the immediate consequences. Once you took that risk seriously, and we did, you immediately see a whole series of consequences.

And this period, in the last ten days or so of January 2020, is when we put in place a whole series of actions to mitigate the gaps that immediately became evident. One, having been reassured that we had an adequate stockpile, which you can see in the middle of January and before the pandemic, by 30 January, when I asked for the audit, the audit comes back and there are serious problems.

Two. We did not at that stage know the nature of the – of the pathogen but we knew that it was obviously very serious because it was looking 50/50 like a global pandemic. So at that point, I instructed that we got going on all the things we needed, including the fact that whatever the nature of the pathogen, we were going to need more PPE, because you can never stockpile enough PPE for a whole pandemic. I was told we had around a billion items.

It was clear to me on some relatively rudimentary assumptions that if the pandemic was – I think at that point on the assumption that there weren’t mitigating factors, that it would last for – in three waves for about 15 weeks each wave. If you put everybody in the health system in PPE for that period, you’re going to run through the billion items.

So we didn’t know the scale of what need would be, we didn’t know the nature of the pathogen, but we did know that if there’s a 50/50 chance of a global pandemic coming, we need to get buying now.

And we also could see that as soon as – or since we were making these decisions in the UK, others would be making these decisions around the world, and therefore, there would be a massive crunch.

So we – my instruction was to get going as quickly as possible.

Lead 5: I’m going to move on to that crunch in a moment. I just want to make sure I understand your evidence in relation to “never being able to stockpile enough PPE for a pandemic”. You mean given limited storage capacity?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, in the realities of the world, and in the realities of public finances, the – I was meaning that colloquially rather than literally. Of course you literally could, but even with the experience of the pandemic, I’m not exactly sure how big the stockpile is right now, I know it’s more pickable and it’s spread around the country rather than all being in one big shed, and I hope beyond hope that they have an adequate IT system telling them what’s actually in there, and good records. But over the course of the pandemic, you need billions and billions of items of PPE.

We could be far better prepared than we were last time, but at the same time, it’s also clear to me that – as soon as the next one veers onto the horizon with any reasonable chance of becoming as catastrophic as Covid-19, you need to get ordering PPE.

Lead 5: But let’s just be careful not to mix issues, Mr Hancock. Over the course of the pandemic, that’s not a reference to the stockpile, is it? It’s one thing to stockpile PPE, if we’re focusing on PPE?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Sure.

Lead 5: So that in the event of a pandemic, there is a reserve.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: And there are various policy decisions that go into the extent to which you do that.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Or, instead, the extent in which you buy in an emergency.

Mr Matthew Hancock: And have domestic supply, yes.

Lead 5: And have domestic supply. That relates to the stockpile.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Buying during a pandemic is something quite different, isn’t it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Yes. So when you say you can never stockpile enough PPE for a pandemic, you’re saying it colloquially, that very much depends on what policy decision is taken as to the appropriate or optimal size and type of a stockpile?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: And whether you want to buy in an emergency?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Okay, if I was to put it technically rather than colloquially, so this is a – what I mean by saying “you can never buy enough”, is whilst it would be literally possible to store 100 billion items across the country, in the practice of government, with restrained resources in peacetime, it would be extremely unlikely to get authorisation to do that and to be able to – and so in practice, one’s future policy – this isn’t a description of then at all – future policy – should be to have much higher quantities of much better organised PPE than last time, but nevertheless, the moment you can see a pandemic being likely, get ahead of it and start ordering.

In the description of what happened, we had, you know, a medium stockpile, a billion items. It was not particularly well organised and it was not easy to get out of the single factory – single warehouse. But we were nevertheless right to get going buying early, because even with that decision, we saw how difficult it became.

Lead 5: And an important part of that process is the topic I want to move on to with you now: the early investigation of PPE supply chain resilience –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Right.

Lead 5: – in which you were involved.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Right.

Lead 5: In February you attended a number of meetings attempting to gain a clear picture of the threats to global supply chains for PPE; that’s right, isn’t it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, yes. I was worried from the end of January onwards about supply of PPE because my view was, as soon as this became global, if we were trying to order as much as we could, so would everybody else be.

Lead 5: And you were right.

Mr Matthew Hancock: On that one.

Lead 5: You were informed that FFP3 respirators were recommended and you foresaw a surge in demand for those types of respirators?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, it was blazingly obvious to me.

Lead 5: Was it not obvious to anyone else?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I don’t know, but I was Secretary of State, it was obvious to me, and I pushed the system to try to act on it.

Lead 5: I wasn’t sure if you were implying there that you had a battle on your hands to establish that point.

Mr Matthew Hancock: I don’t think so, no.

Lead 5: No, all right.

Public Health England had in stock 6.84 million out-of-date respirators that were being tested for shelf life extension. That’s right, isn’t it? It’s in your evidence.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Thank you.

Lead 5: You instructed SCCL to increase its buying activities.

Mr Matthew Hancock: I did.

Lead 5: And you’ve mentioned a little bit about SCCL. They provided or supplied 250 main hospitals. They were – do you want to say a bit about SCCL and what it did?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, SCCL was – from my vantage point as Secretary of State, where I wasn’t involved in the detail of procurement until it became a crisis point, the purpose of SCCL was to have an efficient system of delivery of supplies to hospitals. And by “efficient”, you see, in normal times, that means carrying as little stock as possible. But in a crisis, that leads to lower resilience.

And so the commendable drive in normal circumstances for value for money and for efficiency meant that when the – when the pressure of a radical increase in demand met with a radical constriction of global supply, because everybody else’s demand was going up too, the idea of having this just-in-time delivery system collapsed, and with it SCCL. And then some extraordinary individuals, like Jonathan Marron and Emily Lawson, who have given evidence, stepped forward and put together the response. And the work they did was absolutely phenomenal.

Lead 5: It wasn’t until 3 March 2020 that you were provided with formal advice about PPE stocks?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, what do you mean, “wasn’t until”? We were discussing this in the department from January. I think this is an example of if you follow only the paperwork and you weren’t there, you don’t really understand the work that was going on.

Lead 5: Well, it’s your 65. We can pull it up, if you like:

“I was provided with further formal advice about PPE stocks on 3 March 2020.”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, there you are, “further advice”. The bit of your question that was wrong was when you said it was only on 3 March. I mean, that’s a – the tonality of that is – completely underplays the work that was – (overspeaking) –

Lead 5: When were you previously provided with –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Excuse me. I was finishing my answer. Thank you.

The tonality of that question completely underplays the work that was going on from the end of January until 3 March.

Lead 5: Mr Hancock, that wasn’t its intention, I’m sorry if that was how you perceived it.

When did you previously receive formal advice as to PPE stocks?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I don’t know. It’s not the question of formal advice; it’s the question what we were doing on the substance that matters.

Lead 5: Let’s have a look at that. 65, then, and 66:

“The advice noted …”

A range of problems of sufficiency, if I can summarise it in that way.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, that’s a good summary.

Lead 5: How did that advice measure up to that that you’d been given when you took up office, namely that the UK was one of the leading nations in the world in relation to pandemic preparedness?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, as I testified in Module 1 and indeed the Inquiry found in its interim report on preparedness, the preparations that had been put in place were not adequate to the task. I mean, there was a much, much bigger problem than this, frankly, which was that the whole attitude to a pandemic was to allow the thing to wash over us and deal with the huge amount of death that that would cause.

And at this stage, as you’ll know, no doubt, from following other modules, I was not only dealing with PPE; I was dealing with other massive issues, the biggest one of which was trying to change the entire attitude to pandemic response to be one to try to stop the spread of the virus rather than simply deal with the consequences.

PPE procurement was just one of many, many areas where that meant that we had to act differently to the inadequate plans that had been put in place a decade earlier.

Lead 5: It’s one of the principal areas with which this module is concerned.

Mr Matthew Hancock: I’m sure. I’m just explaining the context, because the necessary module and nature of this Inquiry means that often context is missed in the questions.

Lead 5: You came to the view that the UK was going to run out of PPE in a pandemic. If we could have on the screen, please, INQ000551276. It’s an email from yourself of 5 March 2020:

“On the constrained PPE market …”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: “… and stock position, he …”

I think that’s a reference to you?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: “… notes concern that we will run out. As discussed in the meeting this morning, he is worried about this from a comms/public reaction angle. Can we prepare a comms package to mitigate potential negative public response?”

Presumably, Mr Hancock, your primary concern –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: – was not a PR one?

Mr Matthew Hancock: No, absolutely not, no. I didn’t write this note but – of course there would be a comms consequence, but the comms consequence would be entirely driven by the fundamentals on this one.

Lead 5: Yeah, as one would expect.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: You provide, if I may say so, a pithy summary of the position at that date, at your paragraph 69 of your evidence, which I can perhaps just read out –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Can I – just before we move on, it is worth also noting, just so nobody gets the wrong impression, in the final bullet here – in the thing that was on the screen a moment ago – we need to ensure adequate supply. So whoever has written up the note has put the substance in there, it’s just that you’ve only highlighted the bit about comms.

Lead 5: Right. The summary you offer at 69, as at this point:

“The situation at this time was therefore:

“a. The market for PPE and other medical supplies was exceptionally tight;

“b. We were in competition with every other country in the world for key items;

“c. Our primary source for these items, China, had put embargoes in place;

“d. International air travel and freight, particularly from China, was disrupted.”

Points that you have more or less made in the course of this morning.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Yeah. So that was the challenge faced at that moment?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Early March –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: – 2020?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah, and remember at this point, by early March, people were dying. It was clear that this thing was coming in a massive way to the UK. At the same time we were dealing with testing, contact tracing, getting the vaccine going, and deciding what measures to put in place to stop the spread of the virus, keeping the NHS going at the same time.

So there were a whole – for context, this is part – or this is one part of a much wider set of actions that we were undertaking.

Lead 5: So I now want to turn to what you describe as the collapse of the SCCL supply chain?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Mm-hm.

Lead 5: That is a description that you give at paragraph 14 of your evidence. You say:

“… SCCL was overwhelmed by demand and effectively collapsed.”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: What do you mean by “collapsed”? It continued to function, didn’t it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: It was no longer able to manage the supply of PPE to the NHS.

Lead 5: All right.

Mr Matthew Hancock: I mean, others were closer to the detail, and again, you heard from Lord Bethell this morning, who gave a more detailed set of examples of what happened.

Lead 5: You therefore – let’s have on the screen INQ000551284, which is an email of yours from 19 March of 2020. There are a lot of recipients, I see. Which starts “We needed” – “I’ve been asked” – “When I first became” – sorry.

This is the email in which you asked that anyone with testing capabilities be asked to come forward, and anyone with testing capability in line with standards to come forward –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: – such as universities.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: So this is in March, 19 March. This is before the call to arms that relates to PPE that comes later, isn’t it? But it’s an invitation for anyone who could help with testing capabilities to come forward?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, the context for this is that on 19 March, that was two days after I’d brought into the department responsibility for expanding testing. So the testing capacity, as has been frequently described, was very well stood up at a scientific level very early, but then PHE had failed adequately to expand testing, and had failed adequately to engage with the private sector, and as a result of that, I had taken responsibility off them on the evening of 17 March, and this is two days later.

So the – we’ve – one of the things that we immediately did, that was in fact driven from – by Will Warr, was to go and find the testing capability, including, for instance, PCR machines, that were distributed around the country in universities, and bring them into one place so we could optimise the throughput of tests. So that’s what this refers to. It isn’t – that doesn’t really refer to a call to arms from my reading of it.

Lead 5: No, no, I said I’m going to move on to the call to arms –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Sure.

Lead 5: – which takes place on 10 April, later on.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Right.

Lead 5: Over the weekend of 21 and 22 March, DHSC officials developed the Parallel Supply Chain, taking procurement out of the hands of SCCL and bringing it in-house to DHSC.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Okay.

Lead 5: Was that – who approved that plan? Whose idea was it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I can’t remember at all. I may have ticked a piece of paper saying that we need to do this, I may – it may have been a decision made at operational level outside of my office. I can’t remember.

Lead 5: Do you therefore – can you help us with why it was that the decision was taken to do this, rather than support SCCL with further staff, contractors, seconded civil servants and so on?

Mr Matthew Hancock: It’s a perfectly reasonable question to which I’m afraid I can’t shed any light. I don’t recall the nature of that decision. But there must be a huge amount of paperwork around it.

Lead 5: And in hindsight, do you believe that was the right decision?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I do, yes, because the pressures that we were under was absolutely overwhelming. SCCL had, as I say, collapsed, and simply the nature and the scale of the pressures were so much bigger than could be dealt with at the time, and it took us a couple of months to get from that position to a – back into a position of a structured ordering process. And no doubt we’ll go on to some of the examples, but there was an absolute global scramble, and what the – the expansion pace that SCCL could have delivered was simply not fast enough, not least because their model didn’t work.

Lead 5: So those who say, of this measure, that it was the reinvention of a wheel, you would say the wheel was not fit for this purpose in any event?

Mr Matthew Hancock: That was my understanding, yes.

Lead 5: All right. Let’s move on, then, to distribution of the stockpile. You say in your witness statement at paragraph 95 that:

“On 23 March … I formally approved a request from the NHS for military aid for PPE distribution … One of the problems that the warehouse where the PIPP stockpile was stored, was in ‘deep storage’ in the north-west and not designed for rapid access …”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: “… so that we needed military assistance to physically get the stockpile to the front line.”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: That is put in rather more graphic or colourful terms in your Pandemic Diaries.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Let’s just see how you put it there. INQ000569777. This is pages 6 and 7 of your Pandemic Diaries. It starts “Continuing to work” – I don’t think it’s the bit that’s highlighted there – oh, there it is, thank you.

“Continuing to work through the practicalities, Steve Oldfield updated me on the huge stocks of PPE in a warehouse in the north-west: a billion items. Just one problem – we can’t get it out. It turns out that when they laid down the PPE stockpile in the 2000s, no one thought about the circumstances under which we might need it, ie, an emergency, in which time is of the essence. It’s in a huge storage unit which only has one door. Ergo, only one lorry can pull up at a time.”

This is a fairly basic or fundamental problem or error in judgement, is it not, Mr Hancock?

Mr Matthew Hancock: It was certainly a massive problem for us, yes.

Lead 5: It meant that precisely the situation that this was put in place for was one in which it could not be, save with the assistance of the army, beneficially used?

Mr Matthew Hancock: No, that’s wrong. It was beneficially used but it could have been more beneficially used.

Lead 5: It was trickling out, wasn’t it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: No. That is a – one of these terrible pejorative comments that you often make that’s just totally inappropriate.

Lead 5: How would you describe it? How would you describe it, Mr Hancock?

Mr Matthew Hancock: It could not be picked as well and quickly as we would have liked and was needed in the circumstances.

Lead 5: We’ve heard from Mr Webster, on behalf of SCCL – who, by the way, took issue with the term “collapsed”. He didn’t accept that SCCL had collapsed, but you’ve given your evidence on it.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, and it’s totally reasonable for the person running it to say it hadn’t collapsed, but for the purposes of what we needed and the massive increases of scale, that is how it looked to me.

Lead 5: His evidence was that this warehouse was not designed to directly deploy stock to hospitals, but rather that the plan was to decant the stock to distribution warehouses.

Was that also your understanding?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, in a way it doesn’t matter either way whether there was going to be an intermediary step; we couldn’t get the stuff out fast enough.

Lead 5: What would you recommend be done differently to enable a better outcome in the future?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, what I put in place later in the pandemic is what we need in future, which is distributed stockpiles. At every level there needs to be a stockpile. So every care home needs a stockpile, every GP surgery needs a stockpile. Obviously every hospital needs a stockpile.

Then there need to be regional, essentially, stockpiles. I don’t mean that in the formal sense, that there need to be nine around England but I mean they need to be distributed across the country. They need to be structured so that they can be picked, preferably automatically, and using machines. There needs to a data system so that we know exactly what’s in it, when its sell-by date is. There needs to regular audits of that stockpile.

We need, as I’ve mentioned in the next sentence in my book, more of an Amazon-style approach to delivery. Now, they have a just-in-time delivery system too. And if they went – and if demand for a particular item multiplied by 100 times in the course of couple of weeks, and went into global short supply, I’m pretty sure they’d have a problem too.

You know, it is inevitable that there are going to be challenges in the system when you put such colossal strain on it. But you can mitigate some of those in advance, for instance by having a distributable and pickable stockpile.

Lead 5: SCCL was struggling with the surge in demand in January and February of 2020, weren’t they?

Mr Matthew Hancock: They were struggling with the increase in demand already, yes.

Lead 5: Do you think, again, on reflection, with the benefit of hindsight, that earlier deployment of the stockpile might have assisted matters?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, it’s very hard to say that because we deployed it in January 2020, so it’s hard – we couldn’t really have deployed it much earlier.

Lead 5: All right, let’s turn on to another topic I want to explore with you if I may, Mr Hancock, the call to arms. And by this, I mean the PPE call to arms, the April 10 call to arms. Yes?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Right.

Lead 5: Prior to the public call to arms in relation to PPE, which you made on 10 April 2020, the Prime Minister had made a call to arms for the provision of ventilators, hadn’t he?

Mr Matthew Hancock: So I understand it. I can’t remember the order of the dates.

Lead 5: Well, that may be the answer to my next question. Were you aware that this ventilator call to arms gave rise to very high numbers of offers of supply, many of which were non-starters?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, of course. There has to be a triage system in any expansion of procurement.

Lead 5: Such that the team was struggling to assess those offers and to process them?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Of course, there needed to be a bigger team to do that, yeah.

Lead 5: The size of the team was known when that call to arms was made, wasn’t it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, I imagine it was. I wasn’t particularly close to the ventilator – (overspeaking) –

Lead 5: All right, well let’s move on to one –

Mr Matthew Hancock: – call to arms. I obviously knew that it happened, and was involved in the discussion around it.

Lead 5: Were you aware that in fact many PPE suppliers answered the ventilator call to arms?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I … no idea. I don’t see the relevance either.

Lead 5: Well, let’s move on and perhaps understand that relevance. So your PPE call to arms came on 10 April 2020 didn’t it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: It was the government’s call to arms. I made it, yeah.

Lead 5: Whose idea, was it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I don’t recall.

Lead 5: Not yours?

Mr Matthew Hancock: It might have been, it might not. Isn’t that in the paperwork?

Lead 5: What was the problem that that call to arms that you made, perhaps on your own account or perhaps on someone else’s, was trying to fix?

Mr Matthew Hancock: We were short of PPE. We were radically short of PPE. The PPE was about to run out at a national level, and there were local shortages of supplies of PPE that we were aware of, and a lack of PPE has the potential to lead to death, including, and especially I was worried about, amongst health and social care workers. That’s what the problem was.

Lead 5: Well, that’s understood. Was there a shortage of offers of PPE that needed to be triaged?

Mr Matthew Hancock: We needed more offers to get more PPE, yes.

Lead 5: Let’s turn to INQ000536362, please.

It’s paragraphs 31 and 32. It’s from the evidence of Sir Gareth Rhys Williams. It starts:

“At around this time there was pressure from the then Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and from No. 10 for a ‘call to arms’ in relation to PPE. This was initially planned for 20 March but then postponed to 23 March …”

And then presumably it was postponed further until April; is that right?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I don’t recall. I haven’t seen this evidence before –

Lead 5: Do you know the reason for it being postponed?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, all I can tell you is here it says that there – that Gareth, understandably, wanted a mailbox and a response team in place.

Lead 5: Yes, that’s his paragraph 32.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Right.

Lead 5: It says:

“My office replied …”

He sets out various different things:

“Using a webform …”

It says:

“It was necessary to avoid a situation again where people are sending emails all over the place …”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Absolutely.

Lead 5: “The request should specifically request details of specification, country of origin …”

And so on.

And he says this towards the end of that bullet point:

“… ‘if it’s anything like the response to ventilators you will be inundated with offers, possibly even more given some of the items are less technical than others’.”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Yeah, and that is in fact what happened, wasn’t it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: We were inundated with offers, yes.

Lead 5: I know you followed some of this module to date. Did you follow Sir Gareth’s evidence?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I’ve seen a summary of it.

Lead 5: All right.

Mr Matthew Hancock: But I also recall talking to Gareth ahead of the – ahead of this, which I – which was probably in that period from – between 20 and 30 March, about how best to do this.

Lead 5: Let’s just turn up that evidence, in case you’ve not seen it.

And for the benefit of others, it’s PHT000000150, page 50.

Where Sir Gareth was asked about the call to arms:

“But looking back, the call to arms was a mistake, wasn’t it? It was counterproductive?”

To which Sir Gareth says:

“I can understand why it needed – why politicians felt it needed to happen but it had some very, very serious ripple – well, more than ripple, it caused huge problems, and a lot of the problems that the Inquiry is rightly looking into, I think, flow as much from that as they did from our lack of stock to start with.”

So the question comes:

“It was an announcement that was counterproductive in terms of the challenges of procurement at the time. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

And Sir Gareth says:

“Yes, the yield from the offers generated through the call to arms rather than getting the industry into a room, which is what we did with ventilators, I suspect was marginal.”

“Question: It’s an example of ministerial pressure or ministerial interference proving unhelpful, isn’t it?

“Answer: Um, yes, I wouldn’t describe it as ‘pressure’. It was a decision that ministers took to engage the country.

“Question: Against your advice?”

And then he says:

“Yes.”

Do you think, on reflection, and reflecting also on Sir Gareth’s evidence, that there was any sense in which that call to arms proved to be counterproductive?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, it obviously led to more pressure because we were inundated with offers. The result of it was more PPE. And considering that there was such a lack of PPE and we came, as you know, later, within hours of running out as a country, I think a marginal, as he put it, even if it was only a marginal improvement in the supply of PPE, I would take it, because my total focus was on saving lives.

I understand that it caused more pressures in the buying team, and it is absolutely true that ensuring that we have as high-quality triage as possible in any system is necessary and I’ve no doubt that now that there is lived experience of what happens in these intense high-pressure situations, that that sort of triage system, which I wasn’t involved in designing, could be designed better.

But there’s a big category error in this line of questioning that you put, and the category error is that it was a mistake to want more offers. What we needed was the best-quality triage to get the most PPE that we could. And so having reflected on it and having – I did see this part of Gareth’s evidence, and Gareth, by the way, did an absolutely extraordinary job, and it’s true that the call to arms we made put pressure on him and his team. But I cared more about getting more PPE because we were all working all hours that God sent at this point, and nobody has testified that the PPE call to arms led to anything other than more PPE. And indeed, it’s in Gareth’s testimony. And more PPE saved lives. So I stand by it.

Lead 5: Let’s just pick up on that point before I turn to those pressures to which you refer. When you say it resulted in more PPE –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: – it’s not possible for you to know what level of PPE might have been procured without that call to arms, is it? It’s simply not possible.

Mr Matthew Hancock: You would have to argue that more offers of PPE led to less PPE for it to have had a negative impact, and that is hard to believe. Not least Gareth’s evidence was that there was an increase. He calls it marginal, I don’t think that’s the case, but an increase – any increase was worth having at the time.

Lead 5: You mention the pressures. Let’s turn to those. There was a call centre set up to deal with the backlog of offers, wasn’t there?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah, yeah.

Lead 5: MPs were escalating offers from time to time, weren’t they?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: Suppliers were threatening to go to the media with complaints?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah, and phoning up the Prime Minister. I mean, there was absolute – you know – you’ve heard the – you’ve heard the – what I’ve called the pressures. There was a whole series of consequences of those pressures – yes. And by the way, these were happening before the call to arms as well, because it was so obvious that the country needed more PPE.

You know, I had the head of The Royal College of Nursing, somebody who had previously owned a pub in my village, the editor of the Daily Mail, Martin Lewis from – the money saving expert. I had all these people contacting me saying, “We’ve got kit, can we help?” That’s what happened, and that happened because there were huge pressures of supply and because it was so obvious to everybody that unless you did everything you could, more people would die than otherwise. So people were coming forward with life-saving propositions, and we needed a system to deal with that.

And, you know, my job, total focus across all of the different parts of my portfolio, was to save as many lives as possible. Right? That was my total focus. And, you know, the end result of that was enormous pressure on the – on all sorts of supply chains. We’re primarily talking about PPE, but right across the board. We had to get as much in as we could. In some cases we paid expensive prices for that but I think that was worth it to save lives, and in the end on PPE, we over-succeeded, right? We procured more than was needed, and had to – I’m sure we’ll come to dealing with the oversupply that we had at the end.

Lead 5: We will. We will.

Lord Bethell, to whom you referred and from whom we’ve heard evidence earlier today, says in his evidence that the teams dealing with the main route for referral via the portal were indeed swamped by unsuitable offers. You wouldn’t disagree with that.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Of course. There were huge amounts of offers. Also, I’ll say this, we knew when we went into this that some of the offers would be inappropriate or indeed fraudulent. And there’s – you’ll have seen it because I’m sure you’ve read all of the paperwork, there are references that were made within the meetings to ensure that we dealt with those sorts of proposals that were unhelpful, as well as obviously the proposals that were brought forward that were helpful. But the normal PPE supply chain was totally inadequate to the task that was needed, and the consequence – these were life and death consequences of whether we got more PPE or less.

Lead 5: And Nigel Boardman’s review – with which I’m sure you’re familiar, are you?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I contributed – I was interviewed for the review but I wasn’t particularly close to it.

Lead 5: – concluded that:

“… a number of organisations and individuals who were well meaning but lacking the necessary competence responded to this call to arms and made the task of identifying the best likely sources of PPE more difficult to identify.”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, of course that’s true. And some people came forward with fraudulent propositions but the overall result was more PPE, and my job was to get as much PPE as possible.

Lead 5: So let’s just step away from that for a moment and just reflect on how the exercise might have been done better.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Okay.

Lead 5: You touched on that a few moments ago.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Mm.

Lead 5: Let me pose that initially as a completely open question.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Okay. So off the top often my head, but having reflected on this obviously over the years, the number one thing is that the industry and the suppliers who are already incumbents need to be properly and fully engaged as aggressively as possible, okay? They are likely to be the core of the response.

Secondly, bringing other suppliers who are already supplying those materials into your supply chain is absolutely vital.

Third, trying to encourage others with the capability to pivot to very specific demands with clear specifications is absolutely vital.

Fourth, you do need to leave open the proposition for creative proposals and creative solutions, especially from credible players.

Layer on top of that the fact that a large, a very large proportion of PPE was bought internationally, and this was part of a lack of resilience as a country that was there before the pandemic, and, you know, still is there to a lesser degree now, you needed the international element of this. So, for instance, one of the things we did early in this stage was we pivoted much of the action of the civil servants, Foreign Office civil servants who worked on the ground in China to helping to procure PPE.

Then you need a triage system, and you do need to triage for two different things: you need to triage for initial assessment, and you need to triage for chasing.

And you need a process that those who are approached, you know, whether they chose to be or not, can put a proposal so that it can be adequately purchased.

All of this needs to be done whilst removing the standard rules that slow down this process enormously, which are necessary and proper in normal times, but are not adequate in these times. That’s both the, you know, the extremely rigorous checks, for instance on background of suppliers, on the details of the shipments, but – and also on the price point. Because, you know, the UK Government has a standard procedure to go for a low price point but when the price is moving up, that just means that we lost – we couldn’t buy PPE for – easily, because of those standard rules until the Treasury, rightly, suspended them for this period.

So you’ve got this global demand which is extraordinary. You know, we’ve heard testimony of shipments being taken off the – being bought from us whilst they were being loaded into planes to come over to the UK. You have political involvement in every country round the world. The idea that this could just be done independently of ministers is not only wrong and unconstitutional for domestic reasons but it was totally impractical.

So there was one example where we were desperately tight and about to run out of one particular item, I think it was gowns, I can’t quite remember, at a national level. We got a supply from Turkey, unfortunately a – the fact that that supply was coming got into the public domain, and understandably in Turkey there was a public outcry, “Why are we shipping off our PPE?” And that supply was stopped on the tarmac when we had sent the RAF out to pick it up.

So all the – the questions that I’ve heard and the questions that I’ve responded to both at the Inquiry and many, many times before, including in some of the court cases around this, far too often completely fail to understand the sheer scale of the challenge and the pressure, and so you have to put yourself in the mindset of what actually is going on at that time, including the real world pressures – and these aren’t political presentational pressures, this is people dying – in order to then design a system that procures as quickly as possible.

And, you know, Paul Deighton did an amazing job at getting that straightened out as things calmed down over the summer, but the one other thing I’d say, and this pertains to this – your questioning and this Inquiry – is that you also have to protect the people who are making decisions at great speed, because some of their – some of the integrity of civil servants who gave their all in that time has been impugned since, and I fear that it will be harder to procure PPE in the future because people will look at the treatment that some of the people involved have received, including some of the sort of undertones of some of the questioning, and think “I’ll just run a mile, in the future”, whereas instead, what actually happened in the pandemic is people leaned in, and that’s what you need in a crisis of this scale.

Lead 5: Mr Hancock, you’ve given a very long answer, but it’s my fault because I asked an open question.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, feel free.

Lead 5: But – there are, I’m sure, helpful parts to it – I just want to ask you about some of it.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, of course.

Lead 5: In summary, you would advocate for, you would recommend a more focused approach to procurement, but allowing for that pivot aspect, ie, to the possibility of suppliers that were not conventionally manufacturing, say, PPE but could do so?

Mr Matthew Hancock: And creative potential solutions that you haven’t thought of as well, yes.

Lead 5: Yes. So, so far as the protection of those, so to speak, on the factory floor, those toiling hard to –

Mr Matthew Hancock: To buy the kit.

Lead 5: To buy the kit.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: Procuring, long hours.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: You refer to possible adverse effects of the Inquiry or the media in terms of those individuals. I want to ask you about the protection of those individuals within this process at the time.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Absolutely, that’s important too.

Lead 5: Okay. Now, you say there should be triage for assessment and for chasing?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Should they be separated?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, they necessarily have to be connected because you need –

Lead 5: They do?

Mr Matthew Hancock: – you need to know. So the precise details of the design of it, you know, we could work out in slower time, but are – it is necessary to have both, and there needs to be a connection between the two of them.

For instance, I’ve heard the Chair ask previous witnesses “Would you go for this traffic light system?” Well, the traffic light system is a high priority, medium priority and low priority triage. We, in the end, had a high priority and everything else triage. There isn’t much difference between the two. What you need to do is design a system that has triage and allows for interrogation of where things are up to. And they do need to be connected but I’m sure they could be – they could be designed as efficiently as possible.

Lead 5: Mr Hancock, what you’ve not referred to, but I’m sure you would agree would need to form a part of this, is the smart use of data –

Mr Matthew Hancock: A hundred per cent. Vital.

Lead 5: – the arrival at an early stage of all the data that is necessary, or as much as possible of the data that is necessary, to form a view on an offer?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Front-loaded into the system?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Absolutely. And knowing that the progress of any particular offer is updated accurately in the system, so anybody chasing could just go into it and say, “Well, this is where it’s up to”, yeah.

Lead 5: So what you have described or what you have recommended is different to what came into being?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Of course, because we had to design it from scratch.

Lead 5: Absolutely, and a large part of the purpose of this Inquiry is to learn lessons.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: You say in your evidence that you were not involved in the setting up of the High Priority Lane?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Sure.

Lead 5: It follows, I think, from the answers that you’ve been giving that, with the benefit of that hindsight, you wouldn’t reinvent it, you would invent something that was better, that was more effective?

Mr Matthew Hancock: You need something, right? So, as Secretary of State, when I – before or after a public call to arms, irrespective of a public call to arms, as Secretary of State, I received proposals. And, as I’m sure you’ve seen from all of the paperwork, what I did with those proposals was I pinged them on to the system. In the first instance, I sent almost all of them to Jonathan Marron. In some cases I would send them to private office or Lord Bethell, particularly if somebody was being particularly difficult, to be honest. But if it was a plain vanilla offer, I’d send it to Jonathan Marron. And then, when I heard about the setting up of the High Priority Lane, I would ping it on to the High Priority Lane.

You do need a system for that because when an offer came to me, it would have been a dereliction of duty not for me to pass it on to the system.

Lead 5: You do need something, absolutely. I don’t know whether your following of these module included early on in Week 1 when Professor Sanchez-Graells gave his evidence. His evidence on this point with which no one has disagreed is that there is no equivalent of the VIP Lane to be found abroad or in the devolved administrations. Do you know of one?

Mr Matthew Hancock: There are endless, endless examples across government when a – in particular an MP or a minister has a challenge, a request of government, that they are able to get a response to it. Lord Bethell referred to the scheme for Ukrainians. There are endless –

Lead 5: That’s not quite my question, Mr Hancock.

Mr Matthew Hancock: It is – my evidence is that it is absolutely standard practice across government. So I was not at all surprised when one of these was set up.

Lead 5: Let me re-put my question. We’re talking about the context of procurement and we’re talking about whether, within the experience of the pandemic, it is possible to find abroad or in the devolved administrations – I’m not focused on Ukrainian refugee allocation – accommodation allocation –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, you may not be but you said within the confines of this module, and, you know, as you know, this is a challenge of the modular approach. It is absolutely standard in the UK Government to have a process for the triage of requests. Absolutely standard.

Lead 5: Do you know of an example of emergency procurement in the pandemic of a VIP Lane, of the type that existed here, elsewhere?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Every single country had a process to try to buy more PPE. What – the evidence – that evidence which I obviously – actually I heard it on the Today Programme rather than the Inquiry, I thought was completely flawed, because it – the problem with some of the analysis around this, and we’ve had it in some of the other evidence, is that it tries to pretend that these were normal times. You know, there was a court case back a couple of years ago where they found that some of the paperwork was filed in public a couple of weeks late, and that was deemed this great catastrophe. It wasn’t a catastrophe. People were choosing to save lives instead.

And the reason I’m answering your question in this way is that I think it’s an entirely subjective view as to how different countries responded to the problem, that people would contact ministers and others, like MPs, like senior civil servants, like senior clinicians, and say, “I’ve got an offer”, and what you need to do is get that offer into the system as quickly as possible.

And it’s become this great big thing and frankly we’re going to have to have a system to do something similar in the future. I have no doubt that the next time there is a pandemic people will email the then Secretary of State and she or he will need a system to be able to send the requests they receive on to. It’s just – it’s an inevitable part of life.

Lead 5: Your own system, Mr Hancock, would have that person feeding in to –

Mr Matthew Hancock: A triage –

Lead 5: – a data-fed system –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Mm.

Lead 5: – information about the offer that would populate a live platform –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah, but there you go again discussing a perfect world. Absolutely we should design a better, data-driven system for the future. Of course better use of data would be a far better way of doing this in the future than essentially starting from scratch and from a – then building it on a spreadsheet. But the problem is – the reason I’ve answered in this way is that, frankly, the questioning on it has been wholly naive to the circumstances that we faced.

Lead 5: Let’s –

Lady Hallett: Mr Hancock, could you just – I think you are seeing hostility in the questioning –

Mr Matthew Hancock: I certainly am.

Lady Hallett: – where there isn’t –

Mr Matthew Hancock: It’s totally understandable.

Lady Hallett: Will you let me finish, please.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Oh, sorry.

Lady Hallett: There isn’t hostility. It’s about what could we do better in the future, understanding what the system was like, what all the pressures were like. I can assure you this isn’t about saying, “Oh well, they should have had this perfect system in place, it’s all their fault.” You could argue that they could have done more by way of preparedness, you’ve accepted that – it’s about how can we do it better when the next pandemic comes?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, and –

Lady Hallett: So it’s not intended to be hostile.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Thank you for clarifying that. What I would say is that is how I took the questioning when I was being asked how to do it better in the future.

When then asked a question specifically about has anybody else in the world done it this way, my answer, I suppose, my considered answer is: every country will have – I don’t know what these systems were like, but every country will have had some kind of system for dealing with this problem.

And forgive me for being impassioned on this point but I have been subject to enormous amounts of conspiracy theories about what went on here, when in fact what happened was so many people, working as hard as they could to save lives, and they bought more PPE as a result, and therefore people are alive who would otherwise be dead and, frankly, I’m incredibly proud of the people, who themselves have felt under attack because of the way that questions have been put, which does have a material consequence on future responses to a pandemic.

Mr Wald: Mr Hancock, it’s only right that you should have an opportunity to respond to the part of Professor Sanchez-Graells’s evidence that relates to this. I’m just going to put it on the screen, I’ll read it, and then invite you to comment on it. All right?

It’s INQ000539153. Where Professor Sanchez-Graells expresses his view on the VIP Lane.

“In my view [it says at the bottom]” – it says – ah.

Mr Matthew Hancock: It says turn it off and turn it on again. That’s a new one.

Lady Hallett: Just read it out.

Mr Wald: Okay, I’ll just read it out.

“In my view, the ‘VIP Lane’ also fell short of several applicable requirements and is problematic from a broader perspective. The reasons for its creation are unpersuasive, as there were alternative measures that could be put in place without creating preferential treatment at triage stage. There was no consideration given to the risk of de facto differential treatment that the pressure stemming from regular requests for updates and the labelling of offers as ‘VIP’ could have, or potential confusion as to what ‘VIP’ signalled. There was no consideration of the fact that a referral by Ministers, MPs or Senior Officials was not a justification for preferential treatment.”

Do you wish to comment on that paragraph?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, at one level, and I, of course, agree that a reference of – from who a – an offer was triaged through doesn’t impact automatically the likelihood of that being worth pursuing, but it does have some informational value. And what I would say about that particular paragraph that you read out is that it is wholly naive as to the circumstances that we faced. And I believe Mr Gove gave some pithy evidence as to his view of this particular bit of evidence to the Inquiry with which I wholly concur.

Lead 5: Certainly he did comment on Professor Sanchez-Graells.

Mr Matthew Hancock: But the point about naivety is really, really important. Okay? It’s fine having academics write papers about this stuff, and some of the academic analysis of how you could do better in a future pandemic is really, really valuable, but it can only have any value at all if you understand what it was like. You know, you weren’t there. This professor wasn’t there. But you’ve got to understand what it was like. And that’s what I’m trying to get over. The pressure to save lives is intense, but so is the reality that high-quality offers will come through and be sent through to senior decision makers. And you have to have a process for dealing with that.

I didn’t design this process. I’ve no reason to defend it, but I do care that this is done well in future. And I didn’t care if an offer came through me and somebody had to go back and say, “I’m terribly sorry, we’re not taking this one up”, I didn’t care either, and there’s loads of paperwork of me just saying, “Well, please just go and tell them appropriately.” Right?

What I cared about was getting PPE and I worry, and the reason I keep repeating this point, this emphasis, I worry that well-meaning but naive people are going to get this wrong for the future, and leave more bureaucracy in a future emergency procurement than is relevant at the time, and then the Secretary of State at the time will set that aside and will end up having to invent something from scratch.

If we’re going to invent something now, let’s invent something that is going to actually work when the proverbial hits the moving object.

Lead 5: Mr Hancock, you also care about the protection of those involved in emergency procurement.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Absolutely.

Lead 5: And one of those individuals was Chris Hall.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: And we know from his evidence, and perhaps we can have it up on the screen – my screen seems to have come back to life. Is yours functioning, Mr Hancock?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Great. INQ000536369. He is, in this part of his witness evidence, talking about complaints about particular offers that have been made, delays in the system.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: He says:

“Ultimately” – 6.24 –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah. Tell me about it.

Lead 5: Or is it 6.25?

“Ultimately, many of these complaints 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.”

Now, if we can move from there – thank you for that – to INQ000527557 and page 2, there’s an email from Chris Hall, and if we go up to the top of this, Allan Nixon says:

“Thanks Chris. Mammoth effort from you and [the] newly established team and we really appreciate the note setting this out.

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

Who I assume is yourself, Mr Hancock?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, that would have been me, yeah.

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

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: So it’s an illustration not just of the pressure or the increased pressure that is brought to bear on those, and we touched on this earlier, at the end of your quite lengthy answer, Mr Hancock, how to protect those individuals who are working hard and long hours to achieve what they needed to?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah, yeah –

Lead 5: This is an example of where you yourself are contributing to that additional pressure. Is there any way out of that?

Mr Matthew Hancock: There needs to be a system that takes it into account. Please zoom out.

Lead 5: Yeah, you want to see above that?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Because I want to see Chris’s response:

“All good and we really appreciate the support we’re getting from Matt and the political team.”

Right?

Lead 5: Yes.

Mr Matthew Hancock: So absolutely I would refrain from putting this kind of pressure on unless there was a good reason to do it. For instance, if the particular chasing came from somebody who we were also in discussions or negotiation with on some other matter, then it would have a material consequence. So you’ve got to have a system that takes this into account. And this is why I disagree with this assessment that such a system didn’t exist anywhere else in the world. That can’t be true, right, in my experience. I haven’t been a minister in any other government so I don’t know directly, but I can ask some of my colleagues who were.

The – these sorts of pressures exist in reality. If we try to design a system to pretend they don’t exist, or worse, to say these pressures exist and what we’re going to do is tell the senior people “stop putting this pressure in place”, then it will fail. Right?

I would not have gone to Chris with a request unless there was a good reason to do so. And that’s why I respond in this way, it’s because my motivation was to get as much PPE as possible. I was also, at the same time, dealing with a dozen other subject areas, and I had to make decisions as appropriate. Senior leadership sometimes involves asking what’s going on in one area because of something important going on in another area, and so you do need a system that deals with this, yes. And you can’t just say, “Let’s just ask people to ignore those pressures”, because they are real.

Lead 5: All right. Mr Hancock, let’s move on from the VIP Lane. You anticipated that we would come to excess PPE –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: – or overpayment for PPE. I want to do that with you now, if I may.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Mm-hm.

Lead 5: You’ve said in your witness statement at paragraph 16 that the procurement teams, as we’ve been exploring, were under immense pressure, and that in those circumstances, you don’t expect everything to be perfect so that when action was taken that can later be criticised, for example overpaying for a consignment of PPE, you don’t apologise for a minute because you had one goal, and you’ve said this several times today and in other modules, and that was saving lives?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: You say:

“While of course theoretically there is a limit to this approach …”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: “… we were nowhere near it.”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: And would you apply that to both prices paid for and surplus amounts of PPE and other urgently needed medical kit?

Mr Matthew Hancock: No, I think that that refers only to prices paid, I think, in what you read out from what I said. In terms of oversupply, obviously, what you want is the perfect quantity. Right?

Lead 5: Yeah.

Mr Matthew Hancock: That’s obvious. But it’s also extremely hard to deliver.

Lead 5: Yeah.

Mr Matthew Hancock: My instruction to the team and my bias – and by the way, it will be the bias of whoever is Health Secretary next time there is a pandemic, is more rather than less, and they achieved more rather than less. They over – the oversupply was rather larger than I anticipated, but it is better to have more – to err on the side of more supply, because if you err on the side of less then you run out and we got very close to that.

Lead 5: I think Sir Christopher Wormald said that he would rather be sitting there saying that we had too much than that we had too little?

Mr Matthew Hancock: He’s absolutely right.

Lead 5: Yes. When you say that your own view is that we rather oversupplied, can you say by a factor of what? I mean, did you form a view as to how much of an excess it was?

Mr Matthew Hancock: No, it’s very hard to say because by – firstly, by then Paul Deighton was running PPE supply and doing it brilliantly. Secondly, it depends how much you can put into a future stockpile.

So I was asked in 2021, for instance, to dispose of some of the PPE, and my view was that we should put it into a future stockpile, not dispose of it.

And – but that’s a difficult and very practical matter, what can be stockpiled, where it is. And so there is – there’s an important administrative task of dealing with an oversupply. Exactly how much was oversupplied is actually impossible to tell because it all depends on what you could do with it.

Lead 5: Well, we’ll come back to that. I just want to go to the previous point, which is pricing.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: And you’re quite right, the bit that I read out was relating to pricing, but I wanted to ask you about both aspects at the same time.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Sure, sure.

Lead 5: Let’s turn to INQ000088616, and page 6 of it.

The minutes of the 20 April 2020 Covid-19 strategy ministerial group?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: This records you as saying that:

“The current rules state that the Government should buy at 25 per cent below market value.”

Was that the position at the time?

Mr Matthew Hancock: That is the standard normal times position of Treasury in terms of public sector procurement.

Lead 5: Well, clearly that’s unachievable in a crisis such as this.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Correct, and when I brought that to light of Rishi Sunak as Chancellor, he removed that rule.

Lead 5: “He said that we should buy above market value in order to become a ‘go to’ customer for global suppliers of PPE.”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, there were stories, I don’t know whether they were true or not, of the CIA turning up with literally truckloads of US dollars in China in order to buy a kit. We didn’t do that, but that was the sort of thing that we were dealing with, and you’ve heard other stories of losing supplies when they were on the tarmac. I mean, so – and when a price is rising, if you’re trying to buy below par in a rising market you just get nothing at all.

So that rule was a problem for a period, but as soon as it was brought to the Chancellor’s attention, he suspended it. It is, of course, totally reasonable in normal times.

Lead 5: What did you envisage it being necessary to do to become that go-to customer?

Mr Matthew Hancock: To pay above par.

Lead 5: And how much?

Mr Matthew Hancock: That was entirely a matter for people on the ground.

Lead 5: You’ve made reference at numerous points in the course of today to the fact that you were – you had many responsibilities within your department: vaccines, therapeutics, IPC guidance, test and trace, and so on. All of them required some form of budgeting, didn’t they?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: So you presumably needed to keep a close eye on that which was budgeted for, say, PPE procurement and ensure that there was enough in the coffers to allow for other expenditure?

Mr Matthew Hancock: No, that’s not really how it worked in the pandemic. Because of the extraordinary circumstance, as a department we were able to draw down on the Treasury Reserve, and indeed the Treasury issued a huge amount of debt in order to pay for these costs.

So that – the management of that was – obviously I cared about how much money we were spending, but I thought that that was second order to stopping the pandemic and keeping people alive.

The – I essentially delegated the day-to-day management of that challenge to David Williams, who of course engaged with civil servants in the Treasury, and, frankly, the system they put together was exceptional and they are exemplary in their service. I only got involved when something then needed to be escalated to ministerial level in Treasury.

Lead 5: We’ll come on to the relationship between DHSC and Treasury in a moment – and we’ve heard some evidence that relates to that: Steve Barclay appeared earlier in this module.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: But I just want to ask you this point: in a minute of a meeting of 21 April, so the following day, you indicated that the government needed to take a dynamic approach to pricing and be willing to take on extra risk?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: What did you have in mind there by “extra risk”?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Oh, to be able to pay above par market value. So my attitude – I basically took a risk on attitude to many areas in the pandemic because of the scale of death that we were facing. I took a risk on attitude to legal risk; I took a risk on attitude to making decisions that may not have had the formal minute. I’ve referred somewhat grumpily to your reference of the first formal advice I had in early March on PPE procurement. That’s because we weren’t doing formal advice at this point; we were getting on and buying stuff.

So I took a – the risk on attitude here was to be prepared to pay above market value, which normally I would have been pretty aghast at. I was the minister for efficiency before I was the minister responding to Covid, and so I found it quite uncomfortable, but it was necessary to save lives.

Lead 5: It wasn’t the risk of over-procuring?

Mr Matthew Hancock: At this point I was not worried about the risk of over-procuring because we were desperately short. That became – I think the question is referring to about April, May 2020. The risk of over-procuring hove into view later.

Lead 5: Okay let’s just pick up on this point that we – as I say, we heard evidence from Steve Barclay.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: He, along with Lord Agnew, who did become a minister for efficiency, and he had various other roles –

Mr Matthew Hancock: As well, yeah.

Lead 5: – expressed a degree of frustration at the sums that were being asked of the Treasury –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: – at very short notice.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: And in fact Mr Barclay invited the Inquiry to seek evidence from DHSC as to why such little notice was given.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: I think both of those witnesses felt that by the time they’d received the request, given the short timeline, it wasn’t possible to apply –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Normal levels of scrutiny.

Lead 5: Normal or even any meaningful level of scrutiny. Lord Agnew refers to a particular request for 1.25 billion with a turnover time of 24 hours?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Right.

Lead 5: So can you comment – can you help the Inquiry as to why the deadlines imposed, even for sums as large as that, were so short?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Because we were in a desperate situation with, you know, this – if you’re referring to something I think in about May 2020, there were just under a thousand people a day dying, and there was – we had no idea how long the pandemic would go on for, and there was a high degree of scepticism as to whether a vaccine would be successful. So sometimes actions needed to be taken very quickly.

As I say, I understand those frustrations. They’re natural frustrations for a Chief Secretary to the Treasury and a minister for government efficiency in the circumstances. I wouldn’t have been particularly close to the individual procurements or spend because I wasn’t close to any contracting other than on vaccines, and really David Williams was the person I turned to for those questions.

Lead 5: They were, as you say, exceptional circumstances. The normal rules, regulations, norms, did not apply as between DHSC and the Treasury?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Rightly so.

Lead 5: You say that you told Sir Chris Wormwald that “we deal with any legal headaches later and … the primary goal above all else was to save lives”.

And that’s a phrase I think you use – let’s just turn up the document.

INQ000536350, paragraphs 10 and 11 of your statement, I think.

Mr Matthew Hancock: There you go.

Lead 5: Pages 10 and 11, I beg your pardon. It’s paragraph 48. Yes. What did you have in mind there, the “legal headaches”?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Oh, for instance, if – the statutory declarations is a good example. You know, there are a whole series of – as Secretary of State, you inhabit a world constrained by a statutory and common law framework which is entirely right and understandable in – and in normal times, working through that can be frustrating, but is proper. And there are some ministers who rail against it more fulsomely and publicly than I do. I actually think that working within the rule of law to get stuff done that is a – is basically the job of leadership as a Secretary of State, and if you really don’t like the law, then you have to seek permission to change it, and that takes time and brings in further constraints. That is how you operate. That is the statecraft of being a Cabinet Minister.

When you have a scale of this – a calamity of this scale facing you, when you realise that you are going to be the Secretary of State facing the first global pandemic in 100 years, and when you know that the death toll if you don’t act and lead is going to be in the hundreds of thousands, the estimate at the end of January was 800,000 people dead, then you are prepared to lean into that and deal with, as it says, legal headaches later. What mattered was appropriate action to save lives, and that – and that is what we did.

Lead 5: I’m just trying to focus on my question, you said statutory declaration –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Declarations, yeah. So I’m referring to the court case I mentioned earlier, yeah.

Lead 5: The contract award notices?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Contract award notices, is that what they’re called?

Lead 5: This the notices of what – the procurement awards that were made?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah, and we were a couple of weeks late with some and there was then a case about it, and it was – the whole thing was ludicrous.

Lead 5: Yes, indeed. And you had that – well, I’m not sure it was ludicrous but –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, it was. That’s my evidence.

Lead 5: – I understand what you were referring to.

That’s what you had in mind, is it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Or anything like that?

Mr Matthew Hancock: That sort of thing, yes.

Lead 5: All right.

Mr Matthew Hancock: I can give you another example. We had to change the law with the Coronavirus Act in order to remove a whole series of restrictions that made it difficult to act quickly. So that’s another, you know, in that case we changed the law.

Mr Wald: My Lady, I see the time. I am very close to the end of this topic – I’m in your hands.

Lady Hallett: Yes, I think we’ll break now and I’m issuing a warning to all advocates, the Inquiry has given an undertaking to the last witness of the day that he can catch a flight back to Northern Ireland. He will get that flight if I have anything to do with. That means that all advocates are going to have to think about restricting their questioning and we will finish Mr Hancock before the afternoon break, and we will finish evidence today at the very latest by 4.30. Thank you.

(12.46 pm)

(The Short Adjournment)

(1.45 pm)

Lady Hallett: Mr Wald.

Mr Wald: Thank you, my Lady.

Mr Hancock, final furlong. We had almost finished with excess PPE, we dealt with pricing. I just want to finish up with the amounts or the quantity of excess.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: It might be convenient just to turn up a document that gives us a sense of that. This was drawn to the attention of Mr Marron at the beginning of his evidence, but I’ll draw it also to your attention. I hope we can agree figures from it.

It’s a DHSC document, INQ000534966.

It’s a document produced by Peter Howitt and sent to Jonathan Marron, and what we see, if we scroll down a bit, please, and a bit further – that’s it:

“Table 1: Snapshot of volume and value of excess stock from 7 June 2021, with high assumptions for demand …”

This by items in billions.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: It results in an excess stock amount of 6.9 but we need to reduce that down and we’ll look at the paragraphs that follow in order to do that.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Could you just tell me the date of this note?

Lead 5: Yes. If we turn to the top of it, I hope it’s got that date on it. I think it’s towards the end – it’s 28 July 2021.

Mr Matthew Hancock: So I obviously haven’t seen this because I wasn’t Secretary of State at that point. So this will have been a note to Secretary of State Sajid Javid.

Lead 5: Yes, you may not have seen it at the time. I think you’ve seen it in advance of today’s hearing, have you not?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Impossible to remember –

Lead 5: Well, I don’t think that’s a critical point for these purposes.

Mr Matthew Hancock: No, no, but the point that matters is – the point is that “SoS” there, that’s Secretary of State, but that’s not me.

Lead 5: Yes, a different individual?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: But what we have here is a snapshot of the excess PPE position was at this date?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes. Large.

Lead 5: Yes, it’s very large.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah, enormous.

Lead 5: It’s enormous, and you said earlier that it was larger than you would have certainly hoped, that you would have expected. I pressed you to see if you could give any indication of by how much. I think that was a difficult exercise for you to conduct. And I appreciate there were many, many variables in play at the time, weren’t there? Whether a vaccine would become available –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah, you see – exactly. So the thing is that these figures obviously are the best estimate at the time but they’re also unknowable. If the pandemic had carried on for another year then we would have used 6.9 more billion items.

If it had ended sooner, we – the stockpile would have been even greater. So, you know, it’s actually – it’s a very hard thing to judge.

As it happens, once Paul Deighton was brought in, then those judgements on – ultimately on purchase were for him. So I wasn’t particularly close to it at this stage, and this note is about how – what then to do with it. But it is a, you know, obviously that’s a very large number, and I would have hoped most of that is laid down in storage for next time.

Lead 5: And it’s put into pounds, shillings and pence at paragraph 3 beneath it.

“The PPE network in the UK is currently storing 1.3 [million] pallets of PPE. This costs [the department] in the region of £300 [million] per year in operational costs (mainly storage) … At current pandemic usage, we estimate that £3.8 [billion] of stock … will expire before it can be used.”

So there’s a deduction there because some of it will achieve beneficial use within its lifespan.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, who knows, because we don’t know when the next pandemic is going to strike. My point isn’t to be defensive on this, it’s that these figures are the best estimate; working out how much PPE you should stock is difficult, you don’t know how long a pandemic is going to go on for when you’re responding to one. Obviously it’s self-evident and sort of banal to say that you want to buy the right amount of PPE but there are – nobody is going to, in practice, get that exactly right.

We clearly bought – we, as a nation, bought more than was necessary. The July 2021 estimate of that is here. The learning is: try to buy the right amount. Well, sure.

Lead 5: Well, the only reason for the point I raise, and I don’t want to labour it, is that, even absent a pandemic, there is a degree of use of PPE –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Sure, yeah, on the run, yeah.

Lead 5: – and that’s the basis on which these figures are reduced down?

Mr Matthew Hancock: As best you can, yeah.

Lead 5: All right. Let’s just have a look, at best we can, at how the UK compared in terms of its over-procurement with other countries.

Could we have INQ000474994.

We’ve got a couple of graphs here provided to us by UKACC, who have given evidence within this module. You’ll note at the outset that this doesn’t relate only to PPE but its total cumulative Covid contract awards, here initially awarded in direct and negotiated procedures without publication.

And you can see that on this chart the UK is a significant outlier compared to other countries, Germany, France and Poland.

Mr Matthew Hancock: This – in my understanding, not having seen this chart before, my understanding from the words in the title is that this is entirely meaningless because we have a national publicly-owned single purchaser health system, whereas Germany, France and – is that Poland? – I don’t know much about the Polish health system but I know a lot about the French and the German, and they don’t. So it’s a meaningless chart.

Lead 5: All right, well, just for completeness hear – I hear that evidence. The chart below it relates – you’ve got the sums involved down the X axis, cumulative value?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: You’d say equally meaningless?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah, because in a privately run system, even if it’s got nationally required insurance, like the French system, the – what’s directly procured by central government is different. It’s just a – it’s – the chart might as well be stating that there are two different types of health system and that we’re the only one out of all these to have an NHS. That’s what it tells you. Other than that, there is no factual value in this chart.

Lead 5: All right, Mr Hancock, I want to now ask you – you’ve been asked about ministerial pressure. I also want to ask you about the pressure that was placed on ministers –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Okay.

Lead 5: – such as you, by others?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Right, yeah.

Lead 5: And there was no shortage of that, presumably?

Mr Matthew Hancock: By others and by circumstances, yeah.

Lead 5: Yeah. Now, one of those others, without levelling any criticism at her, was Dame Donna Kinnair, who placed you under a degree of pressure when she contacted you directly about gown shortages.

Mr Matthew Hancock: For context, she was the head of the Royal College of Nursing, so it was entirely appropriate that we should be in contact. And what would you have done?

Lead 5: I didn’t suggest otherwise, and it’s not my role to answer questions today.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Mm.

Lead 5: This is presumably someone you would have wanted to maintain a good relationship with?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, that was very important.

Lead 5: Of course. You were very concerned about frontline workers, and knew that they were at risk every day working on the front line?

Mr Matthew Hancock: That’s correct.

Lead 5: Yes.

Mr Matthew Hancock: As was she.

Lead 5: As was she. She represented their interests quite directly, didn’t she?

Mr Matthew Hancock: She did, yes.

Lead 5: Yeah. You were probably aware at this sensitive time that a negative interaction with Dame Donna Kinnair might have political repercussions and might risk losing the trust of nursing staff, which would have been a problem.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, I’m not sure “political” is the right word because it wasn’t about – none of this was about party politics. That was irrelevant. It was – but I was in negotiations directly or indirectly with Donna Kinnair on a whole series of different subjects at any one time, for instance, you know, the ratio of nurses who might be looking after people in intensive care, the rules around protective equipment and what people should be wearing. So it was a very important relationship to maintain.

Lead 5: Yeah. We know …

Perhaps let’s have it on the screen and display INQ000536369.

I think this is an excerpt from your – yes, Chris Hall’s evidence.

“I was contacted again [says Chris Hall] by Matt Hancock on 16 April … He expressed concern that Donna Kinnair would go to the press with criticism of the way in which his department was procuring PPE, and asked why we were not able to proceed.”

So that, presumably, is an illustration of the sort of pressure you were experiencing as a result of this intervention from Donna Kinnair?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes. I don’t think that Donna Kinnair – I can’t recall Donna Kinnair ever having directly threatened me that she would go to the press but she was in the news a lot and there was a lot of – there were a lot of questions being raised by PPE supply. But this is a reasonable description of the dynamics that we were living in.

Lead 5: Let’s display INQ000551316, please.

This is an exchange of messages between yourself – I think you’re the owner of the cellphone in this exchange?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: Donna Kinnair to you:

“… we are going to need to talk about what we do about the shortages of gowns coming over the horizon.”

And then:

“Why can we not use waterproof table cloths …”

And other suggestions that she makes.

Mr Matthew Hancock: And recycling gowns that are intact.

Lead 5: And recycling gowns that are intact, exactly. Also the 96-hour quarantine. You respond:

“Yes that is a very good argument. We are looking at all options – very important we keep the front line onside & supported”, you say.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Which she apparently interprets as a sort of – as a point of PR. She says:

“This isn’t a PR job we are on side we are going to work I am volunteering”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: “But already this morning leaders are telling those requiring PPE yesterday to forget it today. I am very concerned …”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Then she mentions to you the possibility of a supplier:

“George Farha [whom she describes as] one of your party donaters and my friend can get fda approved gowns here by Wednesday.”

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: And:

“He … know[s] how many you want.”

To cut a long story short, you helped to take that forward, did you not?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, I – well, you’ll see it, no doubt, in the – it’ll be all be written in the messages. I would have – what I expect and what I recollect happened is I said, “Please send in the proposal”. And I then sent it on to the team. That’s what I generally did.

Lead 5: It resulted in a contract for 10,000 gowns, did it not?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I subsequently discovered that. I didn’t know about that at the time.

Lead 5: There were other offers made by Mr Farha, and they are …

Can we have INQ000551372, please.

This is Chris Hall, I think, to you:

“I’m sorry but I’ve some disappointing news on this deal.”

So this was a separate deal, not the 10,000 gowns but something else that Mr Farha was offering as introduced by Dame Donna Kinnair.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Okay.

Lead 5: “I’ve some disappointing news on this deal. We worked intensively with George and his colleagues over five days …”

And so on.

“The deal would have involved about £6 million being at risk at any one time through a company with very little capitalisation while George offered bank guarantees of up to £0.5 million at the last moment. This was not enough to convince DHSC colleagues that this was an acceptable risk …

“We will keep exploring options …”

And so on.

In the end this exchange, this set of exchanges, took up quite a lot of time, including your time, resulting in a relatively small number of gowns, didn’t it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, there were many – as we’ve been through this before. There’s proposals that worked well and there’s proposals that didn’t. And what you can see in front of us is my response, which is entirely appropriate. “Thanks for letting me know,” ie, it’s not like – you know, there’s no – well, there’s no pressure applied to Chris Hall to do anything about it. It’s entirely proper, and no doubt, having read all of my correspondence, you’ll know that that was exactly how I treated all of these proposals that came to me.

Lead 5: Mr Hancock, I must urge you to be a little bit less defensive. No one has accused you in this email string of impropriety.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Aha!

Lead 5: All right?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Carry on, then.

Lead 5: Right? What I want to know from you, we touched on it before lunch, you were devising methods of improving the system and we started to explore the possibility within a Parliamentary democracy of controlling or moderating the input that some may regard as inevitable either from ministers or from individuals such as Dame Donna Kinnair to find out what’s going on, to recommend suppliers of urgently-needed gowns.

Now, first of all, do you think that type of intervention is ever problematic? Was problematic on this occasion?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at. If you – if – you’re going to have to ask a better question.

Lead 5: Well, thank you for your comment.

Did you welcome Donna Kinnair’s intervention?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Oh, I welcomed the proposal of more PPE and I sent it into the system. It also had the characteristics of a response that I needed to maintain was properly looked at, even if the result of it was not successful, it needed success – it needed proper handling. It’s a really good example of why it would be naive to suggest that ministers shouldn’t be involved in this, notwithstanding the constitutional point, it’s – it just – it happens, in these sort of circumstances.

Lead 5: Now, Mr Hancock, you said again, before we – the short adjournment, that you were concerned, to put it lightly, at the welfare of those who were busily, who were actively engaged in emergency procurement?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: One of the ways of protecting them, of safeguarding them, is to provide as much transparency as is possible about offers that come in to their attention; would you agree with that?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I don’t know. It depends on the circumstances.

Lead 5: So last week, Mr Gove was taken to a number of emails in which he was described as a friend of Mr Meller.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Right.

Lead 5: He said that the reference to his friendship was a way of signalling to others that the offer should be treated scrupulously, should be treated without offering any favours to Mr Meller.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Right.

Lead 5: There are alternative methods of dealing with an association or a friendship such as that, such as declaring the association –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Right.

Lead 5: – but adding a caveat that no preferential treatment should be given?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, the thing is I saw that, I saw that exchange and again, I’m sorry to keep having to come back to this, the circumstances at the time were of a shortage of PPE, enormous numbers of people dying, and a huge amount of pressure. So when I was responding to that email or those messages, I’ll have been dealing with 100 such messages at the same time. And so I saw this implication that, you know, an appropriate and proper disclaimer should be put on every email. It’s just not what happens in the real world and so the naivety of the questioning is a bit of a problem.

Lead 5: Mr Hancock, let’s focus on your evidence, I want your –

Mr Matthew Hancock: You asked me about his evidence, so forgive me for answering.

Lead 5: I want to know whether you agree that repeated references to a friendship are a sufficient method of signalling to others involved with triaging and processing an offer that no favouritism should be offered?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I think it’s absolutely reasonable but not the only way of dealing with it.

Lead 5: What are the other ways of dealing with it?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, making sure that whenever you send on a proposal, and it’s rejected, that your response is “No problem.” Making clear that your sole objective is to procure more PPE wherever it’s necessary. There’s lots of different ways of doing it. You could have done it within the triage system. That’s one of the reasons that we had the triage system that – that we had a triage system, so that people like Chris Hall could say, “I can’t recommend this” at then it wasn’t recommended.

In fact, there’s a benefit to that, which is that I could then go back and say, “I’m terribly sorry, this isn’t going to work because it hasn’t got through the gateway.”

So there’s lots of different ways you can deal with it.

Lead 5: You deal in your witness evidence with Hinpack and Alpha Laboratories?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I do.

Lead 5: You do. You were first contacted by Alex Bourne by WhatsApp on 30 March 2020, weren’t you?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I – (overspeaking) – contacted.

Lead 5: Sorry, in relation to this?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Lead 5: Presumably you had been contacted previously, he had your number?

Mr Matthew Hancock: He had my number because he was a constituent. So as you mentioned at the start of this session, I had two roles: one as the MP for West Suffolk and the other as Secretary of State.

Lead 5: Was that the extent of your relationship with him?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Essentially, yes. I had been to a constituency event with him beforehand.

Lead 5: Not a friend?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I didn’t know him before he became a constituent and he – but he had my mobile number because many constituents did.

Lead 5: Was he also your pub landlord?

Mr Matthew Hancock: He had run a pub in the village which I had opened, but he’s not my pub landlord, and he also ran a plastics factory which is an entirely reasonable enterprise. Previously he had served with distinction as a soldier in the UK army. He’s a man of high integrity.

Lead 5: Can I just have up on the screen INQ000551393, please. He contacted you on 14 May as he had approval to make test tubes for antigen tests?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Right.

Lead 5: He was also hoping to get sign-off to produce saliva test kits to be assembled and that is why he contacted you. You passed on his communication to Lord Bethell, didn’t you?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, that’s what this shows, yeah.

Lead 5: And we’ve heard evidence to that effect earlier today from Lord Bethell himself. You say of Alex Bourne:

“I think this is a very interesting critique from someone who turned his business to testing when the crisis broke. He’s a very impressive guy and quite a good analysis.”

To which – you’re referring to the analysis he gives below in the email chain there?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Lead 5: Again, this is a neutral question, Mr Hancock. Would it have been helpful or necessary or protective of others for you to have described your relationship with Mr Bourne or do you think that that was unnecessary in this context?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Totally unnecessary, given the context, and it was – what mattered was, in this case, seeing whether this analysis that he put forward was reasonable.

Lead 5: Can we just finish up, INQ000551404.

Again, this is an exchange, you are the “owner of the cell phone”. It says:

“Yes – I’m taking not forward this end” – that must be a typo.

I assume from the response that you get from Alex Bourne that you are signalling here to him that you will be taking his proposal forward; is that right?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, actually, what this shows you is the speed at which all this was done, this – you know, the argument you imply that there should be a full legal disclaimer put on all communications is for the birds. I am acting at high speed to respond to hundreds of messages. You’ve picked out a couple. You’ve chosen the ones that had most tabloid interest, which is frankly disappointing, but inevitable, I suppose. And what you can see in all of the communications around this is my impeccable behaviour in terms of taking forward this proposal from somebody who was both a constituent and a – somebody trying to help in the national effort.

It is a shame that you continue to impugn the integrity of those involved, especially Mr Bourne, who leant in when the crisis came.

Lead 5: Can I bring you back to my question, please.

Mr Matthew Hancock: I answered it, yeah.

Lead 5: I don’t believe you did. My question was: does your message contain a typographical error?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I have no idea. I can’t remember sending the message. I will have been sending hundreds at the same time.

Lead 5: Did you take Mr Bourne’s offer forward, or not?

Mr Matthew Hancock: I’ve absolutely no idea. You can see the paperwork if you’ve read it.

Mr Wald: All right, Mr Hancock, thank you very much.

My Lady, no more questions for this witness.

Lady Hallett: All right, just a few more questions, Mr Hancock.

Ms Morris.

Questions From Ms Morris KC

Ms Morris: Thank you, my Lady.

Mr Hancock, I ask questions on behalf of the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice, as you know. I’ve got two topics to ask you questions about, please.

The first, Johanna Churchill, a junior minister within the DHSC, has recalled in her written statement that there was what she described as a tussle between the DHSC and the Cabinet Office at the outset of the pandemic as to who would be responsible for procurement. And specifically she says in her statement that – she said:

“There were occasions [where] I felt individuals were playing politics and there were lots of big personalities in the room during COBR meetings, rather than a complete focus …”

She said:

“… in my view, there was a lack of clarity as to who was in charge between [the Secretaries] of State in DHSC and the Cabinet Office. There was a lack of understanding of how the NHS worked in practical terms by the majority of those in COBR …”

So my question is, did a lack of clarity as to who was in charge between the DHSC and the Cabinet Office delay action to procure PPE between February and March of 2020?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Oh no. We put out the – I put out the call to get going procuring PPE in January 2020, and that’s what we did. There were some areas where procurement was moved, for instance, on ventilators. The Prime Minister did that in order to essentially take some of the huge burden off the department, and – but I thought there was – I thought there was perfect clarity on that. Some people round the COBR table may not have understood the distinction between what NHS England does and what the department does, and that would be an entirely reasonable reflection, and in terms of what in practice is done by the Cabinet Office and what in practice is done by the department – remember, the department was not a big procuring department before the crisis. That was one of the things we had to invent, as I discussed in the previous questions.

Ms Morris KC: So do you accept the observation about there being a tussle at the outset?

Mr Matthew Hancock: It’s not how I experienced it, but she may have been – she may have seen things that I didn’t.

Ms Morris KC: Moving on to later on in March of 2020. At that stage, were you still providing assurances that PPE supply was under control, and that you had about ten weeks’ supply left in stock, and if so, on what basis were you making those assurances?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, I was given some advice at that time saying that there was – which matches that description, but, as you know, I had been working on PPE supply from January 2020. I think the question you’re getting at comes from the evidence of Mr Cummings, but we’ve already seen that that is not reliable evidence.

Ms Morris KC: Well, the Chair has got evidence before from Module 2 from Mr Cummings. What my question is really getting at is did you attempt to downplay PPE shortages – (overspeaking) –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Absolutely – absolutely not. On the contrary, I was raising the concerns with the appropriate people. So, for instance, one of the things we’ve discussed is the need to change the Treasury rules in terms of the price at which you could buy. So I raised that at the cabinet table and the Chancellor changed the rules.

With respect to Mr Cummings, of course, I had experienced already by then, and it got much worse, some of the very difficult problems that he caused in intervening in some ways in a totally inappropriate manner and –

Ms Morris KC: Mr Hancock, I don’t need to trouble you with your view on Mr Cummings –

Mr Matthew Hancock: No, no, I’m – but –

Ms Morris KC: – it was really about whether you were downplaying anything –

Mr Matthew Hancock: That’s what I’m answering –

Ms Morris KC: – or creating a comms package, I think is the word we’ve seen from other emails, about the state of PPE at the end of March 2020.

Mr Matthew Hancock: No, I’m – I was answering the question, actually, because in that particular concern I was concerned to ensure that that particular individual, because of his malign influence, was not heavily engaged in this subject area.

Ms Morris: Thank you.

Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: That’s very kind. Thank you, Ms Morris.

Who is next? Mr Thomas.

Questions From Professor Thomas KC

Professor Thomas: Good afternoon, Mr Hancock.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Nice to see you again.

Professor Thomas KC: Yeah, likewise.

Mr Hancock, you know I represent FEMHO, the Federation of Ethnic Minority Healthcare Organisations. I’ve only got one topic to discuss with you this afternoon and I’ll be quick.

When we’ve previously met at this Inquiry, you’ve previously acknowledged the existence of and your awareness of institutional racism within the NHS.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Professor Thomas KC: So here’s the question: reflecting on PPE procurement and the management of the PIPP stockpile during the pandemic, in the light of the previous knowledge and acknowledgement of institutional racism, question: can you help the Inquiry with this: what key lessons were learned regarding ensuring equitable access to suitable PPE for all healthcare workers? And more specifically, how were the strategies and actions tailored to address the differential needs and challenges faced by ethnic minority healthcare workers? Could you help us with that, please.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, it’s an incredibly important question and I think that it is – it would have – it would have been far, far better if it had been properly addressed before the pandemic, because we did find that the stockpile did not include nearly enough PPE that specifically could be fit tested to non – essentially non-white features, if you will forgive me for phrasing it that way. And in particular, those from a black ethnic group. This was true, for instance, with face masks. I remember going on a visit to a fit test unit and seeing for myself the – the pure and straightforward physical differences that need to be taken into account. They were not taken into account enough in the stockpile that we inherited, and that must be addressed.

Professor Thomas KC: That’s very helpful, Mr Hancock.

I want to be forward looking to assist the Inquiry.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Professor Thomas KC: I know you’re not Health Secretary now, but, having been in that role, what would you – what advice would you say to deal with this in the future?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, I think the first thing to do is to recognise that the proportion of people who work in the NHS and in social care who are from ethnic minority backgrounds is much higher than in the population as a whole. The service given in those two professions is incredible from people either who didn’t – and whether – wherever they were born, the proportion who have ethnic minority backgrounds are much, much higher, and that was not reflected in the stockpile. So the future PPE stockpile must – must – be appropriate for the workforce that it is primarily intended for.

Professor Thomas: Thank you, Mr Hancock.

My Lady, those are my questions.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Mr Thomas.

Mr Stanton. Mr Stanton is right over there.

Questions From Mr Stanton

Mr Stanton: Thank you, my Lady.

Good afternoon, Mr Hancock.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Good afternoon.

Mr Stanton: I ask questions on behalf of the British Medical Association.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Mm-hm.

Mr Stanton: I’d like to ask you about PPE supply and demand modelling, please.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Okay.

Mr Stanton: And to refer you to a document which I hope you will have some familiarity with.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Uh-huh.

Mr Stanton: By – authored by McKinsey and Company together with DHSC colleagues. It’s dated 29 March, and the reference is INQ000339131, page 3.

I hope you have that before you.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Mr Stanton: And on the top line you’ll see it deals with the issue of FFP3 respirator shortages.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Mr Stanton: The second column makes a couple of observations about how demand will burn down existing stock, and also that forecasted supply would be inconsequential against demand. And then in the final column under “Actions” it suggests three options or –

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Mr Stanton: – increase acquisition, reduce demand with policy, and approve FFP2 masks as a substitute. And it’s the second bullet that I’d like to particularly refer you to, the reduction of demand through policy.

I’d like to ask, please, whether you were aware of this proposal to manage the demand for FFP3 masks through policy, and whether you could provide any insight into how this reduction in demand was achieved.

Mr Matthew Hancock: I’m afraid I don’t recollect anything in this space. I mean, it is obviously – what is written there is obvious, and you have to deal with the art of the possible when you’re in a pandemic, as your members will know. But I’ve no recollection. And I wouldn’t really have been involved at this level of detail.

Mr Stanton: Given what you’ve said around your priority to save lives, which is entirely accepted by the British Medical Association, would the fact that demands management of this nature was taking place cause you – have caused you any concerns, or does becoming aware of it now, cause you concern?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, obviously, action 1 is the best, isn’t it? I mean, you don’t want to have to move people down from FFP3 to FFP2 if you can avoid it. You don’t want to constrain demand by reducing the recommendations in terms of usage, for instance by saying that masks should be used for a longer period than previously. You don’t want to do that, but you could – but it may – if – if acquisition improvement is not possible, then the second and third bullets may be better than running out. But nobody would want to do that.

Mr Stanton: Thank you.

One final question, on a different topic. You explain at paragraph 217 why the UK did not join the EU procurement programme for ventilators. There was some issue with emails having been sent to the wrong email address, but actually, ultimately, your conclusion was that the UK programme was better and more effective.

Can I ask you, though, whether any consideration was given to joining the EU procurement programme for PPE.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Mr Stanton: And why that wasn’t done?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, I was entirely pragmatic on this question, and we, in the end, didn’t join these procurement schemes because they would have – because we thought that we could procure quicker ourselves because of the mutualisation of supplies, and we were – remember, for all the problems, we were in a better position than many of our EU counterparts, much of this time. So we would – we made a judgement on that basis. There was the problem with ventilators when the EU sent the invitation to the wrong email address.

We also looked, for instance, at joining the procurement with – for vaccines, with the EU. And I’m very glad that we didn’t, because their procurement was slower than ours, and we would have had to give up our supplies into their system in order to be able to access it. So I was entirely pragmatic on this question.

Lady Hallett: Sorry, can I ask what do you mean by “mutualisation” of supplies?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, there was – part of any agreement was about making sure that the supplies that were bought in were then spread equally across the different participants in the schemes as opposed to going to who bought them, and we felt that our firepower was more, was stronger than the average EU position would have been.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Mr Stanton: Thank you, Mr Hancock.

Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Mr Stanton.

Right, I think we have – is it – no, it’s Ms Parsons.

Questions From Ms Parsons

Ms Parsons: Thank you, my Lady.

Good afternoon, Mr Hancock. I ask questions on behalf of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru. My questions are on just one topic, and that is pandemic stockpiles. I want to ask you about a meeting that you had on 11 February 2020, so at the start of the pandemic, with Steve Oldfield, the department’s Chief Commercial Officer.

It’s described in your witness statement at paragraph 60. So that’s page 13 of the witness statement, INQ000536350. I’ll just read it out, it forms the basis of the questions that follow:

“At the meeting Steve commented that the devolved administrations had asked to access PHE’s stockpiles, which were for England. I commented that the stockpiles should be open to the Devolved Administrations but that we should ask them to also plan to stockpile. While not a formal responsibility of the UK Government in normal times, I was very concerned to ensure adequate supplies across the whole UK, despite lower stockpiles in the devoted nations.”

Firstly, is it right, Mr Hancock, that Wales had its own stockpile, and it was the Welsh Government that was responsible for that stockpile?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes, that was entirely reasonable, given that the NHS is run by the Welsh Government in Cardiff.

Ms Parsons: And we know that there were shortages across all four nations of PPE. Are you able to help with why it was necessary for the Welsh Government to ask for access to England’s stockpiles?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Well, because there were – there’s a whole series of different things that add up to PPE as a group description, you know, gloves, masks, gowns, and one country within the UK may have been short of one at one point and the other one – and another be able to help, and as the four health ministers worked well together, and we helped each other out in this way. So just because the formal delineation of responsibility for the NHS in Wales fell to Cardiff, doesn’t mean that if they were short of masks in Wrexham Hospital and we had some spare ones in Chester, we wouldn’t send them down the A534. I mean, that’s how you – that’s – it’s another example of how we worked together to try to mitigate the enormous challenges that we faced.

Ms Parsons: And were you aware of any particular problems faced by the Welsh Government in respect of its stockpiles?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah. They were short as well. We all had the same problem.

Ms Parsons: Thank you, those are my questions.

Thank you, Mr Hancock.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Ms Parsons.

Now it’s Ms Mitchell. That way.

Questions From Dr Mitchell KC

Dr Mitchell: I appear as instructed by Aamer Anwar & Company on behalf of the Scottish Covid Bereaved. I’d like, first, to ask you about PPE supply. A document, I don’t need it to be brought up, but for the purposes of the Inquiry, the reference is INQ000551263.

This document notes that in relation to PPE supply, that consistent, proactive and clear communication with stakeholders, including devolved administrations, have been vital to the success of the continuity of the supply programme.

When reading the documents that have come in to the Inquiry and have been disclosed to Core Participants, there have been a number of instances where it’s been said, against that background, that because the UK Government and devolved governments and different bodies may have all been bidding for PPE, that they may have been cannibalising their own supply in that process. Given that there are number of bodies that can buy PPE, do you think it would be better to try and streamline the process rather than relying on communication methods between all the buyers?

Mr Matthew Hancock: No, it absolutely would not be better to narrow down who could buy PPE by doing it centrally. It was far better to have many buyers in the global market. I don’t accept that there was any cannibalisation. Many hospital trusts went out and bought PPE directly for themselves. It’s totally understandable that the devolveds did as well. If you had Jeane Freeman sitting here and you told her that she had to buy through the UK system, she would have given you short shrift because she was responsible for the NHS in Scotland, and wanted to get PPE.

So we collaborated, as described in the answers to the previous questions, but it was absolutely right that everybody went out and bought – lots of people went out and bought on behalf of the nation. The idea of centralisation, which would require cutting off some options of supply, I think would be a mistake.

Dr Mitchell KC: Yeah, I perhaps didn’t, in my question, mean you to consider that I was saying that there should be one purchaser.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Okay.

Dr Mitchell KC: I simply asked whether or not streamlining a process would be helpful, and if so, what that might look like.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Oh. Well, as per the discussions about – in the main evidence session, the – of course it can be streamlined. Of course we can use better data. Absolutely you should. But that wasn’t the reality that we faced at that moment.

Dr Mitchell KC: Well, this takes me neatly right on to my next question, which is about the issue of data.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yeah.

Dr Mitchell KC: I note that when you gave evidence you explained that all the data at the early stages would be good as much as possible, and you said, “And knowing the progress of any particular offer is updated accurately in the system so someone could just go into it and say, ‘Well, this is where we’re up to’.”

In relation to independent sourcing, do you think it would make sense in the future to have a centralised system of data? Now, this question, I am asking about centralisation.

Mr Matthew Hancock: Yes.

Dr Mitchell KC: A centralised data system to show if and when different PPE buying boards, Scotland, the UK Government and individual NHS trusts, are pursuing their own sourcing to avoid conflict with other buyers?

Mr Matthew Hancock: Intelligent use of data is at the centre of any high-performing system, increasingly so in the modern world. And so centralising data exchange whilst decentralising activity, including, for instance, procurement activity, is, in principle, usually the best approach. You know, it’s certainly the best approach, I think, to fixing the NHS now, decentralised decision making, but have a national data system.

So the proposal you make, I entirely concur with, yes.

Dr Mitchell: My Lady, those are my questions.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Ms Mitchell.

May I thank everybody for all the efforts they’ve made to reduce their questioning. It’s been extremely effective and I’m very grateful. I’m sure Mr Losty will when we come to him.

Mr Hancock, that completes the questions that we have for you.

Can I just say this: you’re not the first and I’m sure you won’t be the last witness to think that this Inquiry is all about criticising people, with the considerable benefit of hindsight and without understanding the pressures that people like you were under. Please may I assure you that that was not my aim. My aim is to investigate what happened, to explore with witnesses matters of public concern and to get people’s answers on those areas, and to try to come up with recommendations, if I can, that will save lives, something that you were obviously trying to do throughout your time, reduce the human and economic cost of any future pandemic, and maybe reduce the pressure that people like you were under when you had no proper systems in place to respond in an emergency.

So please don’t take from the questions any kind of pre-determined conclusion from me. I am still exploring all different options and I am not in the business of criticising with the huge benefits, as I say, of hindsight.

So thank you for your help.

Right, Mr Losty, who I’m sure will be very grateful to everybody.

Mr Losty, I hope you heard that I asked everybody to restrict their questions so we could keep our guarantee to you that you would make your flight, and they’ve all been good at doing that.

The Witness: Thank you, my Lady. Really appreciate that. Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Now you’ve got to hope the airline meets its obligations.

Ms Gardiner: My Lady, the next witness is Tim Losty.

Mr Tim Losty

MR TIM LOSTY (affirmed).

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Ms Gardiner: Could you please state your full name for the Inquiry.

Mr Tim Losty: Timothy Gregory Losty.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Losty, you’ve provided a witness statement to the Inquiry for which we’re grateful. That’s at INQ000541535, and it’s 28 pages, signed on 12 February 2025.

Is that statement true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Mr Tim Losty: There is one correction I just want to draw your attention to in terms of time. It says that I returned to Belfast after finishing my post in February 2020. It’s actually August 2020, when I finished the post in China.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. Is that at paragraph 90 of your –

Mr Tim Losty: Paragraph 90, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes. So that’s – the bottom of paragraph 90 notes you left the laptop and iPad in China when you returned to Northern Ireland in February 2020, but that should – where it says “February” that should read “August”?

Mr Tim Losty: August, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. Is the statement otherwise true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Mr Tim Losty: It is, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Losty, I’m going to go through your rather unique professional background in some detail. But a question at the outset, because you are the first witness that this module of the Inquiry is hearing from in relation to Northern Ireland, from 2012 to 2021, you were the Director for International Relations within The Executive Office in Northern Ireland; to what extent is international relations a devolved matter for Northern Ireland?

Mr Tim Losty: International relations as an issue and as a sector is an accepted matter. But in recognition that there are international activities that have impact on areas that are devolved to local government, or to the local devolved administrations, they would have responsibility in those areas, so things like economic development, inward investment, attracting students and things like that, so there’s an international dimension there.

The Northern Ireland Executive also had particular interests at that time in relationships with United States. We had an office in Washington. We had an office in Brussels, given our relationship with the European Union, and then we had the office in Beijing.

Counsel Inquiry: And it was while you were the director of International Relations that you were posted to Beijing as the director of The Northern Ireland Bureau?

Mr Tim Losty: That’s correct, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And that was between 2014 until mid-February 2020 when you were evacuated along with a number of other staff?

Mr Tim Losty: Yes. I continued in my role as director for International Relations. I went over to Beijing September 2014 to set up the office. Initially, I was to be there for six months. It was extended to a year and then extended to two years, and then to four years, and I ended up staying there for six years. And I was evacuated out in February 2020. It was on a temporary basis so I still maintained the role of director of the Northern Ireland Bureau, China, and director for International Relations.

Counsel Inquiry: And in addition to those two roles, you also took up an additional role from 23 March to 16 June as acting principal private secretary for the deputy First Minister?

Mr Tim Losty: That’s correct. And I returned to Belfast after the evacuation. I volunteered to help out when staff who had underlying health conditions were no longer able to come into work. I volunteered to help out and I was asked to help out in the deputy First Minister’s office. So that role, as PPS, principal private secretary, was as well as my other responsibilities.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. So throughout the period of time we are going to discuss, you were wearing all three of those hats –

Mr Tim Losty: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – I believe, and you returned to China on 17 June 2020, and it may provide additional context to know that you returned in September 2020 from China. And what role did you take up at that point?

Mr Tim Losty: When I returned, I took up the role as joint secretary for the North South Ministerial Council, which is round two of the machinery of government in Northern Ireland.

Counsel Inquiry: And throughout the period of time that you were working on the procurement that we’re here to discuss today, you were aware you were going to take up that role at some point in the future or you became aware?

Mr Tim Losty: I was meant to take up that role in 2018 but, because of some problems in getting a replacement for me, I ended up staying in China a bit longer than expected.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. So it’s important to clarify at the outset that you, in any of those three roles, would not usually have any significant role in procurement of healthcare equipment; is that correct?

Mr Tim Losty: That’s correct, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And The Executive Office, does it usually have any role in procurement, to your knowledge?

Mr Tim Losty: No, The Executive Office wouldn’t have a responsibility with regard to procurement. It may have an interest in some issues but it’s not their responsibility. It would normally be the responsibility of the appropriate department and their arm’s length bodies. So Department of Finance, and they would have had their procurement body and Health also had theirs.

Counsel Inquiry: And we’ll be hearing from witnesses from the Department of Finance and the Department of Health later on in this module.

So in the corporate witness statement of The Executive Office, which has been made by Karen Pearson, I believe you’ve seen it, we don’t need to get it up at this point, but she describes the Executive Office, and your role as:

“… borne more from circumstance/opportunity in that [The Executive Office] had, and still has, operational responsibility for the Northern Ireland Bureau in China … and therefore, had members of staff who are more knowledgeable with regards to operations in that country and were able to avail of existing contracts …”

I presume that’s a reference to you.

Mr Tim Losty: It is, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And would you agree with her characterisation of how you became involved as “borne more from circumstance/ opportunity”?

Mr Tim Losty: Yes, we didn’t have a formal role in procurement as either TEO or as the Northern Ireland Bureau and I did not have a formal role in procurement, so it was the fact that PPE was required and people were looking for someone who had contacts in China that I got involved in the exercise.

Counsel Inquiry: And do you have any background in procurement in your wider career history?

Mr Tim Losty: Not in a professional way. My involvement in procurement would have been to work with responsible procurement bodies in terms of meeting our needs either in the department or in another role in Civil Service.

Counsel Inquiry: And how did you first become aware of the need to source PPE for the health and social care bodies in Northern Ireland?

Mr Tim Losty: Well, at that time, mid to late March, I still would have been going into the office, and I would have had meetings with people. I was aware from discussions around the office that there were concerns about sourcing PPE. It was also a major issue for frontline staff, and the media picked it up, so we were all aware that PPE was becoming a big issue.

Counsel Inquiry: And how were you identified as being someone who could be involved in the procurement of PPE?

Mr Tim Losty: I suppose describing it as, at that time, there was a recognition by the ministers and senior officials we needed to get PPE into Northern Ireland. There were concerns about the traditional supply routes. It was identified that China was a possible source, and, I suppose, to paraphrase, the question went out: do we know anybody with contacts in China who could maybe help us? I was aware of those discussions and I met with people and said, “Let me see if I can help.”

Counsel Inquiry: And in those discussions, did you discuss any other official within the Department of Health, the Department of Finance or anywhere else who had a similar level of contact or insight into procurement in China?

Mr Tim Losty: I don’t believe any other senior official at that time would have had the knowledge or the contacts in China.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

So, turning to the point where you become involved, I believe you contacted colleagues in the British Embassy around 23 March, 24 March, and I want to get up a document that you provided to the Inquiry.

INQ000505603. If we can look at the bottom of that document at page 2. Sorry, at page 2, the bottom of page 2. Thank you.

So this is an email that you sent to John Edwards at the FCO, as it was then. And you ask him whether the devolved administrations are to receive an allocation of supplies that the Embassy has secured of PPE equipment. And you also say that you’d be grateful for contact information for any suppliers that they have.

So at this point you’re scoping out what the situation is in China in regards to general UK Government procurement, and also looking for suppliers. And John Edwards’ reply is just above.

On page 1. Thank you.

And he draws your attention to the ministerial implementation groups, specifically the Healthcare Ministerial Implementation Group, which he says:

“… should be speaking to your colleagues in the DAs directly. But this may not yet be happening.”

Was this the first that you had heard of the existence of this body?

Mr Tim Losty: Yes, it is. As you say, at that time I was trying to scope out or trying to find out more information as to what was happening, and help provide some clarity to colleagues. So I contacted people that I knew in the embassy and – (overspeaking) –

Counsel Inquiry: And your colleagues in Northern Ireland, did they at that point know what was going on from contact with the UK Government?

Mr Tim Losty: I’m not sure if they would have had the same information as to what was happening via the embassy in China. So I contacted people that knew there to get that information and I passed it back into the system. I think, I suppose, at that time there was a lot of information and a lot of uncertainty around a lot of the organisations and departments at the time.

Counsel Inquiry: If we can now get up INQ000505601.

This is an update that you provide to some of your colleagues at the Department of Finance, Department of Health – we can see you include the Chief Medical Officer – reporting on what Mr Edwards has said regarding the healthcare ministerial groups. You also say you “have a list of suppliers in China, recommended by contacts there, and will send this on.”

Is that what you describe in your witness statement as the “White List”?

Mr Tim Losty: It is, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And what is the “White List”?

Mr Tim Losty: It’s – it was a list of companies that was prepared by the Chinese authorities at the time of companies who would be allowed to export PPE because they were able to meet the necessary quality standards.

Counsel Inquiry: So is it quality assurance point?

Mr Tim Losty: Quality and ability, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And did you or anyone else contact any of those companies?

Mr Tim Losty: No, I looked through the list of the companies on that list and I didn’t recognise any of them. I spoke with some of my Invest NI colleagues in China and they didn’t recognise any of them either. I passed the list on to the people who were then involved in procurement of PPE. They may have been aware of the companies at that time, or I thought whenever I sent it on to them, and that wasn’t the case. So we weren’t aware of anybody on that list.

Counsel Inquiry: And so it was on that basis that you decided not to contact any of those companies, and instead contact a company that you were aware of, called China Resources; is that correct?

Mr Tim Losty: Yes, so at that time we – I didn’t know any of the companies on that list. We didn’t know anybody else who knew companies on that list. And again, sort of the question that might have went out would have been: can we find somebody over there who knows any of these companies or who can help us?

So my role at that time was to try to identify a competent and reliable company who could help us with our PPE needs and persuade them to help us. So I knew one company in China that had been involved in managing hospitals and healthcare, and I contacted them. Initially, in my mind, I was contacting them to see if they knew any of those companies and if they could help us with introductions or help us get supplies. So I contacted China Resources, the health people. They said that they got their PPE supplies from China Resources Pharmaceutical, and that –

Counsel Inquiry: And was that a subsidiary body of the same company?

Mr Tim Losty: Of China Resources, yes. And that they would have worked with a lot of the companies on the list.

Counsel Inquiry: So yes, you say in your witness statement that China Resources Pharmaceutical confirmed that they sourced PPE products from approved manufacturers on the white list. So does that mean China Resources Pharmaceutical is essentially a middleman between the Northern Ireland Executive on the one hand and a white list company on the other?

Mr Tim Losty: I’m not sure if “middleman” would be a fully accurate description, but my information was that they were already sourcing PPE supplies from these manufacturers on a regular basis, ie, not just during the Covid outbreak.

I’m not sure whether the companies manufactured solely for China Resources, but I was aware that they were using companies that were on that list.

Counsel Inquiry: It was around about that time that you heard from the Chinese Consulate in Belfast that you would require a note verbale, or a letter of authorisation in order to procure this PPE. Can you explain what that is?

Mr Tim Losty: Yeah, these things didn’t happen in a linear fashion, you know, all these things were happening at the same time, so to try and identify a competent, credible organisation, going through China Resources to get the introduction, I was also in contact with the consulate in Belfast to get their help, again to see if they knew any of the organisations or companies on the list.

I mentioned China Resources, they confirmed that China Resources was a credible company that would have been on the government’s list to export. They advised that the best way of moving forward was to provide the company with that note verbale, which is a note from a government body to another organisation or to another government body for another organisation, which basically clarified that we were a government, we were buying the PPE for humanitarian reasons and it wasn’t going to be going to any other organisation.

Counsel Inquiry: And do you understand that to be a kind of standard measure or was this because you were specifically a devolved administration or was this something out of the ordinary?

Mr Tim Losty: I think, given my time working with colleagues in the embassies, I think a note verbale would have been a regular diplomatic tool that was used. We had used it couple of times in the Northern Ireland Bureau but this, in the circumstances around Covid and getting an introduction to a company, certainly it was the first time we were involved in doing something like that.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay.

You go on to explain in your witness statement that you provided a submission to ministers, both the Health Minister, the Finance Minister, and ultimately to the First and deputy First Ministers, and that that was approved on 12 April.

I want to go to INQ000505635, and page 2.

This is a query sent on 11 April, so the day before the letter was ultimately signed by the First and deputy First Ministers and they have two questions – or the First Minister has two questions.

The first is that:

“[The] consignment will have no detrimental impact on the [Northern Ireland] share of the UK wide consignment …”

And we’ll come back to that.

And the second:

“That [the] contract provides reasonable value for money.”

Now, if we can go up to page 1 to see the response. We’ll look first at paragraph 2 … I appreciate that this email doesn’t come from you, Mr Losty, but it says:

“Given the global demand for PPE and the shortages of supply of some items, it is inevitable that unit prices will be higher. However given these conditions the price is reasonable. Appropriate checks and balances have been undertaken in this regard.”

Were you involved at all in the assessment of value for money?

Mr Tim Losty: No, that would have been the procurement professionals who would’ve been looking at that, and I think in that case it was the body working for the Department of Health.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. But considering what you’ve said about the lack of alternative contacts within China, did Northern Ireland have another option than to sign this contract?

Mr Tim Losty: I think at that time, given the need for PPE, given the uncertainty about the future, and the fact that we had an option where we could buy the PPE that was needed by the frontline staff, to the right quality, that was the only option we had at that time.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. I’m looking at paragraph 1. This is a response to the query from the First Minister that the consignment will have no detrimental impact on Northern Ireland’s share of the UK-wide consignment.

The reply notes that DHSC and the Cabinet Office Complex Transactions Team have been supportive of the approach, but that from the next week, the Northern Ireland team in Beijing will be integrated with the British Embassy team, and that will manage the potential conflicts. And that you’re going to manage the relationship at a senior level.

Prior to the pandemic, what was your understanding of where Northern Ireland got most of its PPE?

Mr Tim Losty: Again, it wouldn’t have been an area that I would have been involved in at that time, but my understanding from later getting involved in that is that they would have been sourced centrally.

Counsel Inquiry: So it would have come from UK Government central supply?

Mr Tim Losty: I believe so but the relevant professionals in those bodies will be in a better position to answer.

Counsel Inquiry: Yes, and we’ll address that with them next week.

So we have a situation in late March, early April, where Northern Ireland, and potentially other devolved administrations, have been relying entirely on UK Government supply for their procurement of PPE, that supply has dried up, and now Northern Ireland, including yourself, have gone to carry out a direct procurement with a company that ordinarily you wouldn’t have been involved in. And the First Minister, quite reasonably one might say, is concerned that that might have an impact on any allocation of PPE that might later come through the government central supply.

Mr Tim Losty: Mm.

Counsel Inquiry: So we’ve seen the email which says that this particular procurement had been supported by DHSC and the Complex Transactions Unit. I want to look now at a letter that came from Chris Wormald, the permanent secretary of DHSC at the time, it’s dated 16 April. It’s at INQ000505641. And you’ve provided this as part of your witness statement.

If we can look at the bottom two paragraphs, he writes that:

“To enable maximum focus on procurement of supplies to be distributed … the Joint Action Coordination Team …”

And we heard from witnesses last week that this was basically the team that was in the British Embassy in Beijing.

“… have, on the advice of Ministers, advised the overseas network not to undertake any additional work to support any new procurement ‘asks’. However, they stand ready to support any existing orders that have already been placed.”

And it goes on to say later in the letter that future procurement will be on the basis of a four nations approach.

So is the situation at this point that the devolved administrations are being discouraged or perhaps we can put it even stronger than that: an embargo is being placed on any future direct procurement by the devolved administrations?

Mr Tim Losty: Those discussions would have taken place with the people who would normally have been involved in procuring the PPE and working with the UK Government on it. My understanding of what I was doing working with people in the Department of Finance and Department of Health was to procure PPE to meet that immediate need that we had, and I think there was an understanding amongst people that eventually or hopefully matters would return to normal processes. I think the letter – and again, other people will be in a better position to answer more accurately, but I think the letter and us putting our team into the embassy was to make sure that we were coordinating all our work. We weren’t competing against each other. And that eventually there would be kind of a normalisation of the procurement practices.

Counsel Inquiry: And you go on to say in your witness statement that it was indeed confirmed to central UK Government that following completion of that particular order, PPE would be procured on a four nations basis. And we’ll discuss that with other witnesses later in this module.

Finally, you provide a helpful chronology in your witness statement which we don’t need to bring up, I don’t think, but we can see from that, that the contract was concluded in mid-May, that the first shipment arrived in June.

Mr Tim Losty: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: As an outside observer, one might say, not a procurement professional yourself, do you have insight into why it took a month from your first contact with China Resources on 3 April, or more then a month, for the contract to be concluded, and why it then took a further month for the PPE to be delivered when I believe it was delivered by air?

Mr Tim Losty: I remember being slightly frustrated at the time because of the delay that it was taking, but there was a lot of discussion to make sure that we were getting the right products with the right quality. We also had to look at how best we could get the PPE products back into Northern Ireland and looking at the various logistic routes. So the team that was involved in this procurement exercise at that time, some of us were talking to logistics people from the UK Government to see if we could get the PPE on to flights as opposed to trains, which would have taken longer.

So we worked through a lot of that.

There was also the issue of going through the approval process and then determine how best to manage risk, and I think the ministers in Health and Finance made the decision to procure the PPE in a number of batches. So there were discussions around that.

I think, at the end of the day, we got the products from China Resources from their warehouse in Tianjin to Beijing and then back into the UK very, very quickly and I know it took an extra few days to get from London to Belfast, as the various consignments were unloaded and had to be packed up.

Counsel Inquiry: I want to turn to two issues that you raise in relation to this procurement. The first is one of media reporting. On 10 April, so at a very early stage in your discussions with China Resources, the Stephen Nolan Show on the BBC Northern Ireland broadcast a programme questioning if PPE provided from China met UK standards, and it referenced a memo dated 6 April from Sharon Gallagher. It might first be helpful for the Inquiry for those of us who aren’t aware, if you explain a little bit the tone of the Stephen Nolan Show in reporting this event.

Mr Tim Losty: Tone in general, or tone for that particular …

Counsel Inquiry: For this particular procurement.

Mr Tim Losty: Okay. Well, PPE and the scarcity of PPE was a big issue of concern for frontline staff or for people who were experiencing Covid, for the families and the politicians, so everybody was concerned about it. The media was also concerned, quite rightly, and I think it was an (unclear) media interest.

When this particular show came on, this issue, it was a leaked memo, so we didn’t know it was going to be covered. The name of the company we were dealing with was mentioned by one of the people who’d called in to the show, and that wasn’t helpful. I think attempts to try to have a balanced discussion around it on the show, you know, where the presenter may that have put forward options, “Oh well, PPE is needed, we need to get it as quickly as possible”, I think there was a balance, but the fact that the memo was leaked at that time when we were still in the early stages of negotiation and getting the necessary PPE items confirmed and the right quality standard, it wasn’t helpful.

Counsel Inquiry: And just to clarify, the memo that was leaked, did it cast any aspersions on the products that were likely to be provided by China Resources?

Mr Tim Losty: I don’t think the memo that was leaked cast aspersions. But I think one of the people who rang in raised what they considered to be concerns about PPE that were received elsewhere.

Counsel Inquiry: So it was simply the fact that Northern Ireland was involved in discussions with a Chinese company for the supply of PPE, and that there had been reports elsewhere in the media that the PPE from China was of poor quality; those two things were linked?

Mr Tim Losty: There were issues in the media, across a number of media outlets, about quality of PPE that was coming in. None of those queries related to the company that we were dealing with.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay.

Mr Tim Losty: PPE was coming in from China in a variety of different ways. The PPE that we got met all the standards. We received some donated PPE from organisations we were in partnership with, as well as expat groups. Some of that PPE, because it didn’t come with the necessary quality certification, we were not able to use in frontline services.

Counsel Inquiry: But ultimately, the PPE that was provided as a result of this procurement was of good quality and was used?

Mr Tim Losty: It all met the necessary standards. That was confirmed by the health professionals and by the ministers who then confirmed that to China Resources.

Counsel Inquiry: Finally on this point, are you aware of any investigations that were carried out into the source of the leak?

Mr Tim Losty: I was told there was an investigation, but I never heard anything from that investigation. I wasn’t contacted, and I’m not aware of anything that ever came of it.

Ms Gardiner: Okay. Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Leaking is something about which I’ve heard before in relation to in relation to Northern Ireland, I fear.

Shall we break there? Is that a convenient moment?

Ms Gardiner: Yes, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Very well, I shall return at 3.20.

(3.05 pm)

(A short break)

(3.20 pm)

Lady Hallett: Ms Gardiner.

Ms Gardiner: Thank you, my Lady.

Mr Losty, I just want to turn briefly to the other main risk that you identified in your witness statement that you encountered in the course of the procurement from China Resources Pharmaceutical. You describe various measures that the Department of Health, the Department of Finance and the company itself had in place to prevent fraud, due diligence checks, and you’ve already mentioned the decision to split the order into two batches to mitigate any risk.

But you say that there was still some clumsy attempts of – at fraud. The first in April 2020. Could you describe what happened on that occasion?

Mr Tim Losty: Yeah, when I say clumsy, it was basically somebody who found out that we were dealing with China Resources, sent in an email to say that they were now looking after the order, and could we send the money to a different bank account.

Counsel Inquiry: Perhaps we could get that email up. It’s INQ000505650, thank you. And if we go to the next page, page 2, thank you.

We can see the email that you describe, asking for a change to contract payment accounts and saying that they’ve lost a copy of the contract and asking for a copy of that.

As you’ve described, not the most sophisticated attempt.

Mr Tim Losty: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And we can see from later on in that email chain that it was forwarded to – within the Executive and also then to China Resources, who presumably confirmed that this didn’t come from them.

Mr Tim Losty: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: The question I have to ask about that is how would this impersonator have been aware that the negotiations were going on?

Mr Tim Losty: I don’t know, I suppose in this day and age we’re all very familiar with how scammers operate. They can be very clever. But I don’t know how people picked up on that information but I know at that time, with everything else happening in the world, that there were some people who were up to very unscrupulous activities.

Counsel Inquiry: Then the second example you’ve given was in August. You’ve mentioned that the order with China Resources was split into two parts. And I recognise, Mr Losty, this was towards the end of your time with the Executive, so perhaps your involvement would have been limited at that time, but you say that on that occasion, the impersonation was of the Executive.

Mr Tim Losty: Mm.

Counsel Inquiry: And a contact was made with China Resources trying to confirm the second shipment of gloves, I believe. Is that correct?

Mr Tim Losty: I believe that second episode was basically contact made with the companies that were working with China Resources to supply us with PPE. Contact was made with one of them to say that this new company was working on behalf of the Northern Ireland Executive, and to provide them with the products. And this was a shell company, in other words it hadn’t existed before. It had just been set up in a couple of days before we made that contact. And no names, no company history, nothing.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. But they were aware that the order had been split in two and there was going to be some further batch that was going to make its way to Northern Ireland?

Mr Tim Losty: Yeah, I can’t say if they were aware the order was split in two. I think they were aware of an order of gloves that the Northern Ireland Executive was expecting to get from, or via China Resources.

Counsel Inquiry: And can you say how they could have become aware of that?

Mr Tim Losty: Again, I don’t know. Could be a variety of ways that these people operate. But again, it was a clumsy attempt. And would never have happened; one, because of China Resources, their practices. Also we had at that stage an exclusivity agreement with China Resources and also the shell company wouldn’t have been on the China Government’s list to have been able to export PPE.

Counsel Inquiry: Was there ever any investigation into whether the source of the leaks we discussed earlier could have also passed on information to these potential fraudsters?

Mr Tim Losty: Not that I’m aware of, sorry.

Counsel Inquiry: That connection was not made at any point?

Mr Tim Losty: No.

Counsel Inquiry: No. I want to move on to talk briefly about the proposed joint procurement, you mention in your statement, with the Republic of Ireland. This was not successful ultimately, but it did receive some media coverage at the time. I’m aware from your statement that you say you were not involved in early discussions – and we’ll explore that with other witnesses later in this module, but when and how did you become involved in these discussions with the Republic of Ireland?

Mr Tim Losty: Around that – if I’m right in the area that you’re looking at, I was contacted by someone in the Department of Finance who had been talking to colleagues in the counterpart departments in the Irish Republic and I think the offer had been made that if we procure PPE potentially we could do it on a joint basis.

The question I think I was asked was, if we are going to do something with the south, would I be willing to help? And I said that I would be willing to help, but after that, I think it never went any further. The south had their systems, procedures, and operation and we continued on with ours.

Counsel Inquiry: You say in your witness statement that it became apparent very quickly that the Republic of Ireland was doubtful they would be able to receive a supply that would allow some of that to be syphoned off for Northern Ireland?

Mr Tim Losty: Sorry, in relation to that, my contact then was in the early stages when we were trying to find out if we could source PPE. There had been discussions with their Minister of Finance, with the Irish Government, and there was hope that they would have been able to meet the PPE needs in the Northern Ireland Executive.

I suppose there was some uncertainty started to develop. Because I was hoping to go to the North South Ministerial Council, I would have been in contact with the other joint secretary there, had the opportunity of a telephone call and we discussed the matter, and I was made aware that there were concerns within their system, whether they would be able to secure enough PPE that would have helped us out.

I became aware that they were trying to source them via China. I worked very well and very closely with the Irish Embassy in Beijing, and I said, “Well, look, I’ll try to contact the embassy, and see what they say.”

So I was in contact with the ambassador at the time, we set up a Zoom or a Skype call, and they confirmed to me that they had been talking to PPE suppliers, and that they had basically exhausted all the amount that they were able to get at that time.

They had met the quota – or if they’d been given the quota, they couldn’t go beyond that.

Counsel Inquiry: And I’m asking you this question partly with your hat on as joint secretary of the – as you were later, but do you think that there were opportunities that were missed in terms of collaboration with the Republic of Ireland over procurement?

Mr Tim Losty: If I go back to that time, I don’t think there were opportunities missed. And I – I spoke to both the joint secretary and people in the embassy in Beijing. The agreement was: look, you know, we keep the communications going. If we can identify areas where we can help the Northern Ireland Executive, we will. And also, if there’s issues that the Northern Ireland Executive has, or if I had, to contact them and see if they could help.

At various times there was talk about maybe trying to get PPE products back using their logistics chain. Possible introductions, things like that. But by that stage we’d already initiated the negotiations with China Resources.

Counsel Inquiry: Okay. I want to look, finally, at two recommendations or lessons learned that you highlight in your witness statement. The first is at paragraph 104 of your witness statement. Thank you.

You highlight the variety of organisations that were involved here, nine departments, each headed by a permanent secretary reporting to ministers from five different parties, as is the nature of the Northern Ireland Executive.

Mr Tim Losty: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: You say that this worked well because the two ministers agreed on the priority of securing PPE, and the officials worked well.

But you do also say:

“The operation of senior officials within departmental silos did not always facilitate the cooperation required to face a crisis and highlighted the weakness of the chain of command between the Head of the Civil Services … and the Permanent Secretaries.”

You note that the Head of Civil Service does not have an accounting officer role and the permanent secretaries each report to a different minister.

Could you just expand or perhaps give us an example of what you mean by that cooperation or lack of cooperation highlighting the weakness of the chain of command.

Mr Tim Losty: I don’t think it was an unwillingness to cooperate but given the chain of the command, you know, senior officials and permanent secretaries would, first of all, have to go to their minister to agree on lines to take or actions that might be taken, and then they would come together.

So the system of government works for us and it’s been successful, but in some issues were – I suppose decisions needed to be taken very quickly and problems solved very quickly. There was this additional layer of approval and authority to go through. And also, the reality of the situation is you had political parties with different ideological perspectives on some issues, and sometimes they may have been factored in.

Counsel Inquiry: So were there occasions where you felt that decisions weren’t made as quickly as perhaps they ought to have been because of political differences between the ministers leading their respective apartments (sic)?

Mr Tim Losty: I think any political differences may have already been discussed by previous witnesses. I wouldn’t be aware of an issue that would stop because of political differences. There was a lot of reporting and also things going on at the time. The officials operated or tried to operate in a non-political environment to get things done but when you have the reporting structures that you have, you have to work through those.

As I say, there was an additional layer of people who had to be persuaded to do things.

Counsel Inquiry: And if we can just go to paragraph 106 on the same page. You note that:

“On a number of occasions [you] also felt that the UK Government came across as disinterested in working with, or hearing the concerns of the devolved administrations, and this was sometimes reflected in the attitudes of some of the UK officials.”

Do you have examples of where you got that impression?

Mr Tim Losty: First of all, when I was acting PPPS for the deputy First Minister I would have either sat in on calls with the four nations with the UK Government ministers, or I would have been party to or listened in. And I felt at the time, I was kind of – the call came in, the Scottish Government would go, Welsh Government would go, Northern Irish government would go, say their concerns, and at the end it would have been “Well, thanks very much, we’ll arrange a call next week.” And I felt some of the issues were more deserving of discussion and debate.

So that’s very much a personal reflection of mine at the time.

In relation to working with officials from the UK Government, first of all, I would pay respects to the people in the UK Government who did help us, and the people that I talked to on a personal basis that helped. But I was frustrated that I never really got to talk to senior decision makers, perhaps people more of my grade within the embassy network, where – you know, when you’re talking to the decision makers, you can be – you can be talking about the problems, you can be talking about the possible solutions, you can find out what is happening in terms of instructions or policy or practice and things like that, and I felt a bit of frustration at times when we were trying to work through the early days of getting this sorted.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Do you think that was an impression that was generally shared by your colleagues?

Mr Tim Losty: I don’t think I’m the only one with that perspective, and also I think it may be shared in other devolved administrations.

Ms Gardiner: Thank you.

That was all my questions for Mr Losty.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, just a few more questions, from Mr Wilcock, who may be trying to get the same flight, I don’t know.

Questions From Mr Wilcock KC

Mr Wilcock: Mr Losty, I’m asking you questions on behalf of the Northern Ireland Covid Bereaved Families for Justice Campaign, and my question is just going to cover your role in relation to the Northern Ireland procurement exercise with China Resources Pharmaceutical and also a few questions in relation to the failed north-south attempt to buy the PPE from China in March 2020.

So you’ve probably maximised your chances of getting your plane, which I can guarantee you will do in any event, but you’ll maximise those if you answer as many of the questions I ask you “yes” or “no”.

And let’s start in this way. You’ve told us about the circumstances in which you got in contact with China Resources Pharmaceutical Limited and how that was a mixture of circumstances and opportunity. Had you experience of working with China Resources Pharmaceutical Limited prior to Northern Ireland’s post-Covid procurement exercise with them?

Mr Tim Losty: No. And if you don’t mind, I’ll expand on that. I had experience of working with the China Resources organisation across a number of their sectors, in agriculture and in trade and market access, and then also with their health division, where they were managing hospitals. So I was familiar with the company there and I’d met the company – or many representatives of the corporation at many events involved in – or thorough my role in economic diplomacy.

Mr Wilcock KC: And to be clear, you make clear in your statement that you’d had experience of working with them but you didn’t have any personal business interest in either the resources or the pharmaceutical company; is that correct?

Mr Tim Losty: That’s correct, yes.

Mr Wilcock KC: Now, you also made it clear in your statement that you declared your prior working with the China Resources Corporation in verbal briefings with the head of the Civil Service, the First Minister, and the Minister of Finance after you made first contact.

Did you, in doing so, make clear the link between the China Resources Corporation you did have prior contact with, and the China Resources Pharmaceutical Limited who were to become the main, I think the word was used, go-between in relation to the procurement exercise?

Mr Tim Losty: My recollection would be that: I know a company in China, I’ve had dealings with them in the past, I know they are involved in this sector, I think they can help us. So I would have made the politicians and the senior officials aware of how I knew the company.

Mr Wilcock KC: But would you have made them aware of the link between the company you were just floating a past link to, and the company that Northern Ireland was about to try and deal with?

Mr Tim Losty: I think that I would have declared that after our – or after my initial contact with the organisation where I contacted the people that I knew and they said, “We don’t provide this but one of our other family companies, they provide it.”

So I would have said to senior officials that we were going to get an introduction to this other part of the organisation.

Mr Wilcock KC: Thank you. Different topic. I’m right, am I not, that the Inquiry doesn’t have any of the phone messages or emails from any of the devices that you were using at the time of your dealings with China Resources Pharmaceuticals?

Mr Tim Losty: I believe it has emails. The majority of the – in fact all of the negotiations with China Resources were conducted by the procurement professionals in Finance and Health. My job was as the facilitator and adviser on doing business with the Chinese company.

Emails that I had from that time I kept and they were provided to our TEO Inquiry team before I retired. I did have a very frustrating experience in that the phone that I was using to communicate with my colleagues in China and also China Resources, that broke around 20 April. It caused me a lot of problems because we were at a very important stage of the negotiations, so I had to get reconnected back on to the WeChat platform to maintain communications.

So it was a frustrating and difficult time, there were no WeChat messages from that early period up until about 21, 22 April.

Mr Wilcock KC: I think in relation to the emails, we do, and we saw one when you were answering questions of Ms Gardiner, we do have some of the emails that you were sent, but we don’t have them for your email account, do we? We have them from other parties to the exchanges. Am I wrong about that?

Mr Tim Losty: My email account at that time was not a Northern Ireland Civil Service email account; it was a standalone account that was set up for me. When I came back to Belfast I still had access to that account, and knowing that I was retiring and knowing also that we needed to provide relevant documents to the Inquiry, our internal Inquiry team, I then made those available.

Mr Wilcock KC: And can I make it clear I’m not suggesting there’s anything suspicious in the fact your phone was broken and someone else cleared the emails; my question is really this: did it not occur to you to ensure that all of your communications on your phone and your email accounts were backed up and would therefore be available should those devices be broken or closed down, as happened?

Mr Tim Losty: First of all, with the emails, it was my understanding that they were still available after I retired, and I was still able to access that email account. It was deleted without contacting me and I wasn’t aware of it until we started to get involved in this.

The back-up of the WeChat messages – and I know people back up onto this thing, the Cloud, and all the rest of it – I didn’t get around to doing that because the phone I was using at that time was my personal phone, which I had purchased on the understanding that I was coming back to Belfast at that time and that I wasn’t going to have my period in China extended. It was, so I continued to use that phone. It broke. If I had had that phone in working order, those messages would have been backed up.

But I would want to assure any of the people who were involved in the frontline services, any of the relatives of the people who were victims of Covid and anybody else, certainly there was nothing untoward or irregular –

Mr Wilcock KC: And I want to make it clear that I’m not suggesting there was.

Mr Tim Losty: Yeah. The messages also, in WeChat, tended to be more administrative, and I think we’ve provided examples of – or not examples, we’ve provided all those messages post 22 April, but all those messages or the majority of those messages would be admin-type messages following up on meetings that we would have had or trying to arrange times for Zoom calls or WeChat calls, things like that. So I don’t believe there would have been anything in those earlier messages that we’re missing information on.

Mr Wilcock KC: Do you think, with the benefit of hindsight in an ideal world, it would have been better to have backed up both of those devices?

Mr Tim Losty: It would have been better to have backed up the phone, but it wasn’t my intention that it broke at the time. In hindsight also, I would have preferred not to have had to use my own phone, but I was in a peculiar situation where I thought I was returning home, and sitting in the airport I get a call to say, “No, we need you to stay on for a while.”

Mr Wilcock KC: Just for the benefit of those listening for those who don’t know, WeChat is the Chinese equivalent of WhatsApp; is that right?

Mr Tim Losty: WhatsApp, Facebook, all those things, yes. Yes.

Mr Wilcock KC: Last topic. The joint procurement exercise with the Irish Government. In your statement, and if you have it in front of you – you don’t need it, but if you do have it in front of you it’s at paragraph 82, you describe your brief involvement in the proposed joint procurement in late March, and you describe a Zoom call at that time with the Irish Embassy, including the ambassador. And you say it was explained to you that they had utilised all of their resources in terms of the PPE supplies, and that, due to the international demand, they were unable to add any more to their allocation at that time.

Now, one interpretation of this explanation was that by the time the Northern Ireland Executive approached Dublin, the Irish Government had already agreed a quota that they couldn’t then go beyond to bring the north

into their approaches. Is that interpretation correct?

Mr Tim Losty: I don’t think I can fully answer that question. I think

that’s something the Irish Government could answer.

In my role, and because I knew people, I was trying

to find out what the situation was, and it was described

to me in that meeting, you know, we’ve got everything

that we’re going to get.

I don’t think there was maybe a quota negotiated at

the start, but it was an extremely competitive and

challenging environment, and it was certainly a seller’s

market, and the view from those officials was: we’re

getting everything we’re going to get.

Now, it wasn’t their decision as to whether or not

the south would be able to help. That would have been

taken at a senior level and a political level. But

I was able to get from that information that, you know,

from my view, it was unlikely that this was going to

happen.

Mr Wilcock KC: Did you get any impression as to whether the reason the

exercise didn’t succeed was not because of any

fundamental obstacle with the two governments putting in

a joint bid but because the Northern Ireland Executive

hadn’t contacted the Irish authorities early enough?

Mr Tim Losty: I don’t know if I can fully answer that. I don’t think

it was a matter of timing. And again, you know, when we were looking back at these things, it looks like everything was happening in a linear way, all these things that were happening at the same time. And information on what was happening on the PPE procurement market, we were getting that on a live basis.

So I don’t think I would say that the problem was the timing of the request going in, because we now know, you know, there was still discussions with the UK Four Nations Network and hopefully that that would have been able to provide, and I think at that time we were looking at all options. We knew there was pressure on the frontline staff, we knew there was pressure there, and the Executive, the ministers and the officials all wanted to try to get this stuff in as quickly as possible.

Mr Wilcock KC: I’m just – so everyone knows, we’re now talking about late March by the time of this joint approach between the two governments.

Mr Tim Losty: When I would have been – yes.

Mr Wilcock: Yes. Thank you very much.

My Lady, they are all the questions I have to ask.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Mr Wilcock.

That completes all the questions we have for you, thank you very much for your help to the Inquiry and safe journey back to Belfast.

The Witness: Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Very well. Tomorrow I shall be sitting at

10.00, but as everyone here knows, I will be in closed

session at least until the afternoon when I think

there’s part of a witness who can be heard in open, but

otherwise closed tomorrow morning. Thank you.

(3.49 pm)

(The hearing adjourned until 10.00 am the following day)