Dominic Cummings lobbied for ‘friends’ to be handed lucrative contract for COVID focus groups
‘Appalling’ that the government dismissed concerns of bias raised in wake of openDemocracy investigation into Public First contract, says shadow cabinet office minister
Dominic Cummings pushed for a government contract to be awarded without tender to a company run by his "friends", according to court documents published today.
PR firm Public First was paid £564,393 to research public opinion about the government's response to the pandemic, as revealed in July last year by openDemocracy and the Guardian.
At the time, the Cabinet Office said it was "nonsense" that Public First's long-running connections to Cummings, then Boris Johnson’s special adviser, and cabinet office minister Michael Gove influenced the decision to award the firm the contract.
Cummings's comments have prompted shadow cabinet office minister Rachel Reeves to write to Gove asking why claims of favouritism were brushed off.
“It is appalling that the government not only dismissed these very credible claims of connections influencing this contract as 'nonsense' – but also that it took a judicial review to bring to light what should be publicly available information on how taxpayer money is being spent," she said.
Public First is run by James Frayne – whose work with Cummings stretches back 20 years – and Rachel Wolf, a former adviser to Gove who co-wrote the Conservative Party’s 2019 election manifesto.
The company is one of many to have been awarded a government contract without a competitive tendering process, which would have enabled other firms to bid for the work, during the pandemic. Emergency regulations have allowed the government to directly commission services.
‘Unlawful’ The contract is being challenged in court by the campaign group Good Law Project, which alleges that the lack of a tendering process was "unlawful" and that "apparent bias" led to Public First being given the work.
In a witness statement submitted to the high court on Monday as part of the judicial review, Cummings said he was the "driving decision-maker” behind the government's decision to hire Public First.
Cummings described Frayne and Wolf as his “friends”, but added: “Obviously I did not request Public First be brought in because they were my friends. I would never do such a thing.”
He said his personal connections with Public First's owners were "a bonus, not a problem" because "in such a high pressure environment trust is very important, as well as technical competence”.
“I am a special adviser and as such I am not allowed to direct civil servants,” he added. “However, as a result of my suggestion I expected people to hire Public First. The nature of my role is that sometimes people take what I say as an instruction and that is a reasonable inference as people assume I am often speaking for the prime minister.”
Cummings, who worked with Frayne on a precursor to the Vote Leave campaign, said the pair have not met since 2016.
The court documents also revealed that a senior staffer at the Cabinet Office described Public First as "mates" of Cummings and of Boris Johnson’s then head of communications, Lee Cain, “hence getting all our work with no contract”.
Catherine Hunt, the head of insight and evaluation at the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s Office said the email to colleagues was intended as a joke and that it "was not true" that the firm was awarded the contract because of relationships with Cain and Cummings.
Hunt also referred to Public First as the "Tory party research agency test[ing] Tory party narrative on public money” in a separate email from January 2020. She goes on to write, “but actually, it will be very interesting and very good”.
Jason Coppel QC, representing the Good Law Project, said that the email showed senior civil servants had "deep misgivings" about the contract.
The government defended the decision to award Public First the contract, arguing that Gove and Cummings’s relationships with the Public First partners meant they knew the quality of their work.
“On the contrary, past professional connection simply enabled a better judgment to be reached about whether Public First were indeed the best/only suitable body to perform the services as needed,” its defence states.
Frayne said that Public First was "the obvious choice" for the work because it was “one of a tiny number of agencies that could meet this demand” to run focus groups at short notice.
There is no evidence to suggest Gove was involved in the process to award the contract.
Public First was awarded a fresh contract without tender in August by the exams regulator Ofqual to provide “urgent communications support” in the midst of the summer’s exams results crisis.
In total, the firm won more than £1m of public contracts without tender under emergency COVID-19 provisions. The Ofqual deal involved £46,000 for less than a month’s work.
“This government’s contracting has been plagued by cronyism and waste," said Rachel Reeves. "They must take urgent steps to address this now – by urgently winding down emergency procurement, releasing details of the VIP fast lane, and publishing all outstanding contracts by the end of the month. This cronyism must stop.”
The health department was a "smoking ruin" in the early days of the COVID pandemic, the prime minister's former chief aide has told MPs.
Dominic Cummings revealed how the UK's vaccine programme was moved out of Matt Hancock's Department of Health and Social Care following the problems health officials had in buying protective equipment for NHS staff.
He made the comments in explosive evidence to the House of Commons' science and technology committee, in his first public remarks since his dramatic departure from Number 10 last year.
Mr Cummings also claimed:
• The government's procurement system before 2020 was an "expensive disaster zone" and when the coronavirus pandemic hit it "completely fell over" • Parliament should hold an "urgent" inquiry into the COVID crisis and MPs should take a "very, very hard look" into "what went wrong and why in 2020" • He made four demands of Prime Minister Boris Johnson prior to joining his Number 10 staff, including sorting out the "disaster zone" of Whitehall • He did not ask for a pay rise from the prime minister before leaving Downing Street and had previously taken a pay cut • He did not watch this month's budget, adding: "I don't really have any idea what was in it"
Commenting on the UK's vaccination programme, Mr Cummings told MPs that Number 10 "took it out of the Department of Health" when they decided to create a separate taskforce.
"It's not coincidental the vaccine programme worked the way that it did," he said.
"It's not coincidental that to do that we had to take it out of the Department of Health, we had to have it authorised very directly by the prime minister and say 'strip away all the normal nonsense that we can see is holding back funding in therapeutics'."
Mr Cummings added: "In spring 2020 you had a situation where the Department of Health was just a smoking ruin in terms of procurement and PPE and all of that.
"You had serious problems with the funding bureaucracy for therapeutics, that was the kind of context for it.
"Patrick Vallance (the government's chief scientific adviser) then came to Number 10 and says 'this shouldn't be run out of the Department for Health, we should create a separate taskforce'.
"We also had the EU proposal which looked like an absolute guaranteed programme to fail debacle.
"Therefore Patrick Vallance, the cabinet secretary, me, and some others said 'obviously we should take this out of the Department of Health, obviously we should create a separate taskforce and obviously we have to empower that taskforce directly with the authority of the prime minister'."
Following Mr Cummings's evidence to the committee, a Department of Health source stressed that Mr Hancock's officials worked to get the vaccine taskforce established as part of a "massive team effort".
"Everyone in DHSC was and is spending their time focused on saving lives, expanding the world leading vaccine rollout and getting through this pandemic," they added.
Mr Cummings, who masterminded the Vote Leave campaign during the EU referendum, has also told the committee that "one of the most obvious lessons" of the COVID crisis was the government should "go to extreme lengths to try to de-bureaucratise the normal system".
"In February, March, April last year, there was no entity in the British state - zero entities, including the prime minister himself - who could make rapid decisions on science funding minus horrific EU procurement, state aid etc, etc laws," he said.
"No entity in the British state that could operate at scale and at pace and that was obviously disastrous."
Mr Cummings was also quizzed about the government's plans for a new "high-risk, high-reward" scientific agency he had spearheaded while in Downing Street.
The £800m Advanced Research & Invention Agency (ARIA) is modelled on America's long-running Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
Answering questions on how he got Mr Johnson to agree to ARIA's creation, Mr Cummings told the committee: "Essentially what happened was the prime minister came to speak to me the Sunday before he became prime minister and said 'would I come into Downing Street to try and help sort out the huge Brexit nightmare'.
"I said 'yes, if - first of all - you're deadly serious about actually getting Brexit done and avoiding a second referendum'.
"'Second, double the science budget, third, create some ARPA-like entity and, fourth, support me in trying to change how Whitehall works and the Cabinet Office work because it's a disaster zone'.
"And he said 'deal'."
Mr Cummings added the July 2019 meeting between himself and Mr Johnson was attended by only the two of them, and took place in his living room.
After he left Downing Street in November last year amid a bitter power struggle between Number 10 staff, it was revealed he had received a pay rise of at least £40,000 while working for the prime minister.
But Mr Cummings told MPs that "media reports about me getting a pay rise after COVID are wrong".
"It is true I interfered with the pay system regarding my own pay," he added. "That was in summer 2019 - when I arrived I was put on the normal pay band for my position of 140-something thousand.
"I said that I didn't want that and I only wanted to be paid what I was paid at Vote Leave. I figured that I should be paid the same for trying to sort out the Brexit mess as I'd been paid for doing Vote Leave.
"So I asked for a pay cut, which is what happend in summer 2019."
But Mr Cummings added when he was rehired by Number 10 after the general election in December 2019, he "moved back onto the normal pay grade for my position".
Responding to Mr Cummings's evidence to the committee, Labour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: "This is a scathing intervention from Boris Johnson's former right hand man and most trusted aide.
"To describe the Department of Health and Social Care as a 'smoking ruin' is a clear admission of fundamental mistakes that have contributed to us tragically experiencing one of the highest death rates in the world."
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