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Science and Technology Committee Health and Social Care Committee Oral evidence: Coronavirus: Lessons learnt, HC 95 Thursday 10 June 2021 Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 10 June 2021. Watch the meeting Science and Technology Committee: Greg Clark (Chair); Aaron Bell; Dawn Butler; Katherine Fletcher; Rebecca Long Bailey; Carol Monaghan; Graham Stringer; Zarah Sultana. Health and Social Care Committee: Jeremy Hunt (Chair); Paul Bristow; Rosie Cooper; Dr James Davies; Dr Luke Evans; Barbara Keeley; Taiwo Owatemi; Sarah Owen; Anum Qaisar-Javed; Dean Russell; Laura Trott. Questions 1241 - 1508 Witness I: Rt Hon Matt Hancock MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Department of Health and Social Care. Examination of witness Witness: Rt Hon Matt Hancock MP. Greg Clark took the Chair Q1241 Chair: The Science and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee are conducting a joint inquiry into the lessons that can be learnt from the response to the Covid pandemic, and, in particular, lessons that can inform further decisions yet to come. We conclude our oral evidence sessions today with the Secretary of State for Health, Matt Hancock. We are pleased to welcome the Secretary of State. As in our last hearing, Jeremy Hunt and I will alternate in the Chair, covering four themes. The first is the initial response to the pandemic. The second is the lockdown measures, the non-pharmaceutical interventions as they are called, and the Test and Trace system. The third is the development of vaccines. The fourth is the decisions taken in the autumn and winter 2020-21 and current policy issues. We will pause briefly between sessions to change over in the Chair. We took oral evidence from the Prime Minister’s former adviser, Dominic Cummings, on 26 May. Mr Cummings agreed at the hearing to provide written evidence to substantiate various verbal claims that were made at that hearing. Mr Cummings was asked to provide this evidence to the Committee by Friday 4 June in good time to inform our questions today to the Secretary of State. We have not received that evidence, nor any explanation as to why it has not been available. As Jeremy Hunt and I both said in our last hearing, it is important that, if serious allegations are made against an individual, they should be corroborated with evidence, and must be counted as unproven without it. Most of this hearing will be about learning lessons, but I think it is only fair to the Secretary of State for him to be able to have his say about the allegations that have been made against him. I am going to begin with some questions drawing on the accusations that have been made. I want to stress that these are suggestions and allegations that Dominic Cummings has made; they are not the Committee’s charges to investigate. The first is, did you ever say anything to the Prime Minister that you knew not to be true? Matt Hancock: No. Q1242 Chair: Thank you. Specifically, in terms of the particular points that Dominic Cummings raised, first, did you say that everyone who needed treatment got the treatment that they required, when you had been told by the chief scientific adviser and the chief medical officer that people did not get the treatment they deserved? Matt Hancock: I did absolutely say both in private and in public that everybody got the Covid treatment that they needed. I am very proud of the fact that, with the NHS, we delivered on that during the pandemic, because it was critical. There was no point at which I was advised—I have taken the trouble to check with the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser—that people were not getting the treatment they needed. On the contrary, one of the things that we succeeded in doing through the entire response to this pandemic has been to protect the NHS, so that people have always had access to treatment for Covid. Q1243 Chair: Thank you. The second allegation that was made was on PPE— personal protective equipment. In April, did you ever say or brief that the shortages, such as they were, were “the fault of Simon Stevens; it is the fault of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is not my fault—they blocked approvals”? That is what Mr Cummings told the Committee. Is that true? Matt Hancock: No, that is not a fair recollection of the situation. Getting hold of PPE was always a huge challenge and, as the National Audit Office has shown in their report into this when they went through all of the details, there was never a point at which NHS providers could not get access to PPE. But there were huge challenges. We first opened the stockpile of PPE that we had in the event of a pandemic in January. We started buying new PPE in February. In March, China brought in export restrictions. You will remember that at the time there was a huge global demand for PPE. Aeroplanes were being turned around mid-flight. The European Union put out calls for PPE that went entirely unanswered. We had to remove a piece of bureaucracy that was in the way that put a limit on the price that could be paid for PPE. We took a policy decision that we should pay at the top of the market. That required the Treasury to make that change. The Chancellor was incredibly helpful in driving that through, and we managed to get to the position where, despite the local challenges, and I do not deny at all there were challenges in individual areas, there was never a national shortage of PPE because of the action that we took. Q1244 Chair: Thank you. We will come to more detail on that. Let me just check that I have understood correctly what you are saying. You are saying that there were blockages to the procurement of PPE. You objected to them, you requested that they should be removed, and they were removed as a result of that. Matt Hancock: That is correct. Also I will say this: I take and took, and have taken throughout, full responsibility for all of the areas that I am responsible for. The Chancellor played his part in resolving those blockages and getting them out of the way so that we could buy PPE, and Sir Simon Stevens has worked incredibly hard throughout this crisis. My whole approach has been that this is a team effort. You can’t respond to a pandemic just by pointing fingers. You have to respond to a pandemic by bringing people together, trying to provide leadership, and by having a positive attitude to teamwork, because that is the only way through it. Q1245 Chair: Were you aware that Mr Cummings then said that there was an investigation into whether there were blockages, and he alleges that that investigation by the Cabinet Secretary concluded that there were not? Matt Hancock: I can’t recall that, but what I can recall, and I know for a fact, is that there was a cap on the price paid for PPE. Because the global price had shot up, we had to remove that cap. I requested its removal. It was removed and after that, combined with bringing in Lord Deighton, who did a brilliant job in this area, we could buy PPE more easily. We are now in the happy position where we have got huge amounts of PPE and 70% of it—other than gloves—is made on shore here in the UK. Q1246 Chair: Who was responsible for that cap? Matt Hancock: You will have to go through the records, but that was a condition on the budget that we had for PPE. It was set somewhere within the machine. I think it was a Treasury condition, which is why I went to the Chancellor. I am pretty sure that the Chancellor was not aware of it until I raised it with him, because the moment I raised it with him, with the Prime Minister, he got into action, and got it removed. Q1247 Chair: It was a Treasury condition or Treasury block on your Department, so you did not have the unilateral authority to procure in the way you wanted. Matt Hancock: No, but I am not blaming the Treasury. It is absolutely standard practice that the Treasury puts in place conditions when you have been given a big budget, when you are given a multibillion-pound budget for buying PPE. On 11 April, one of the conditions of that budget was that there was a cap put on the price that we paid. The problem is that the cap was set in terms of the market price, but the market moved upwards massively, so we had to remove that particular piece of bureaucracy. I asked the Chancellor to remove it, and he did very rapidly and then we could buy at the top of the market, which was one of the reasons that we managed to resolve the challenges of getting PPE into the country. Q1248 Chair: Absolutely. To be clear, I am just trying to establish the facts, given the allegation that was made. Given that this is a lessons learnt inquiry, it may be that the fact that you had to change procurement policy may be a lesson for our response in an emergency, so it is important. The third charge that Dominic Cummings specifically made orally against you was around testing in care homes. Specifically, did you tell the Prime Minister in March that people in hospitals would be tested before they went back into care homes? Matt Hancock: We set out a policy that people would be tested when tests were available, and then I set about building the testing capacity to be able to deliver on that.

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